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The ICMSA has strongly stated that rigorous on-farm climate mitigation demands mean farmers can no longer carry the cost of cheap food policies.
Speaking after a meeting of primary producer organisations in Belfast with the UK Competition and Markets Authority, the organisation’s deputy president Lorcan McCabe said the “overwhelming and destructive dominance of the corporate retailers” would have to be faced up to.
“It’s more obvious than ever that the new environment within which farming and food production will happen must mean – has to mean – the end of the cheap food policy that has been operated by the EU and the EEC before that,” he said.
Consumer grasp
“ICMSA suspects that many consumers have not yet grasped this fact and both they and the corporate retailers seem to believe that all the changes will be happening ‘behind them’ in the supply chain. In other words, at farm level.
“If the corporate retailers imagine that they’re going to be allowed to remain untouched by the changes then they’ve another thing coming. And it’s going to have to be governments that break the news to them,” said McCabe.
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