The trouble with direct payments is that they are, by definition, at the whim of politicians. Last week, I went to a lecture by the economist Sean Rickard, who for many years was the chief economist of the English and Welsh National Farmers Union.

He then went to Cranford university.

He has always been an outspoken figure who stirred strong feeling in his listeners, but last week he told an audience mainly made up of UK farmers some uncomfortable facts.

The UK was the first to insist on abolishing tethering and sow stalls on its pig farms

The key one that I took was that if consumers want high standards, then there have to be real barriers to prevent entry from countries that do not enforce similar standards on their own farmers and processors.

The UK was the first to insist on abolishing tethering and sow stalls on its pig farms.

The result, because of a lack of similar legal obligations elsewhere, was a halving of the British sow herd.

The same dilemmas are inevitably going to surface in the trade talks between the US and the EU.

If the UK crashes out of the EU without a deal, then its agriculture, he warned, (and this similarly applies to Northern Ireland) faces “extreme pressure”.

He warned that the UK is not and will not be competitive in the production of agricultural commodities and it needs “distinct value-added products”.

We have heard that before.

He was scathing about Britain’s current Secretary of State for food and the environment leading Brexiteer, Michael Gove, whom he accused of “proposing to give handouts for hugging trees” rather than concentrating on making British agriculture more competitive so that it could take advantage of its huge home market of 60 million people while being only 60% self-sufficient in food.

Apart from Scotch whiskey and some speciality cheeses and flour to Ireland, it’s hard to see why it should look for serious export opportunities rather than try to protect its home market through legal insistence on standards which insulate it from indiscriminate commodity competition but, as with Ireland, there is no getting away from the need for continuing scientific development.

This case needs to be re-opened and the Irish government needs to be pressing for legislative change at EU level

A good example is the decision by the European Court to place gene editing in the same category as genetic modification, despite the court’s advocate general’s opinion that the process was fundamentally different.

This case needs to be re-opened and the Irish government needs to be pressing for legislative change at EU level.

There are now emerging clear benefits to the technology, such as the possibility of conferring genetic resistance to bovine TB.

Farming, the science and market conditions surrounding it, never stands still.

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