Hansard

It would be unfair to blame Mr Lochhead for the rain, and nor could he in any way be blamed for global weather. However, if the sun had been shining all summer, I wonder whether the Government would perhaps have tried to take the credit.

It is important to concentrate on the aspects of agricultural policy and the changes that we need that are the responsibility of the Scottish Government and its agencies. As the cabinet secretary rightly recognised, Scottish farmers and crofters are under pressure. Dairy farmers have told many of us that they are being paid less than the cost of production; the cabinet secretary recognised that implicitly in his speech.

Lamb prices are at a seven-year low and the wet summer has created higher costs for bought-in fodder, notably in the far-flung areas such as Orkney. Last night, Jamie Leslie, who is a farming pal of mine from Shetland, phoned to tell me about the price of straw. The cabinet secretary will know well from his constituency that straw costs £20 a bale in Aberdeenshire. Once it is trucked to Aberdeen and then to the farm in Shetland, another £20 is added to the cost. NorthLink’s freight rate adds £28.20 for shipping alone. Therefore, it costs £68.20 to bring essential fodder to a Shetland farm. The farmer would not normally need to buy that, but he has to because of the summer that we have had. The Orkney weekend freight rate per bale is around £15, so that is certainly helping.

The local NFU and I have been pressing the Government to assist Shetland producers. I have raised the matter with the cabinet secretary previously and I ask him to consider their needs again. That is a practical example of how different parts of our agricultural industry could be assisted at this time. Alan Bowie, the president of the NFUS, made the argument to me last night about the need to help different parts of Scotland in recognition of the challenges that we face.

The Government’s statistics show that agriculture is contracting. Its “State of the Economy” report, which was published last month, shows annual growth in agriculture falling by 5.3 per cent. In addition, cattle numbers fell by 11 per cent between 2004 and 2014, and there has been an 18 per cent fall in breeding ewe numbers over the same period. If we want to grow the food and drink industry—or the food industry in particular, given Sarah Boyack’s accurate observation about whisky—we need the trend in primary livestock production, far from falling, to go the other way. There is a significant challenge for the Government, as much as for the industry, in recognising the reality of livestock numbers across Scotland.

As Scottish Environment LINK mentioned in its briefing for the debate, the Government environmental adviser, Scottish Natural Heritage, says that more priority farmland habitats are deteriorating than improving. The UK national ecosystem assessment says that 44 per cent of Scottish habitats are in decline. Therefore, from a production and an environmental perspective, the trends are in the wrong direction.

How are we to meet the growth targets for the Scottish food industry that we all aspire to meet when there are fewer cattle and sheep? Scotland’s environment is being impaired, but environmental change cannot be happening as a result of farming when our farming is becoming less intensive. Scotland’s natural beauty, which is at the core of our tourism product, is under some challenge.

What can the Government do? I listened carefully to what the cabinet secretary said about CAP payments. If I got him right, I think that he said that they would be paid by the end of December; I do not know whether that means by the week beginning Monday 28 December. The industry will be disappointed by that, because it has argued very strongly—as Allan Bowie said to me last night—that the payments need to be made in the first two weeks of December. I will not rehearse all the arguments on why that is the case, because Richard Lochhead knows them very well—he has heard them for eight years; in fact, the arguments on the payment timescale have been made since long before then.

At this morning’s meeting of the Public Audit Committee, the cabinet secretary’s officials were commendably fair about all this. They explained the challenges, but at no time did they say that it was impossible for the payments to be made in the first two weeks of December, so I hope that the Government will listen carefully to the industry and to Parliament and ensure that the payments are paid out to a great extent if not in full—we understand how the system works; payments are made in instalments—in the early part of December rather than after Christmas day.

The cabinet secretary will share my concern about the fact that Scotland is having to spend £178 million on an information technology system to allocate £400 million every year to 21,000 farmers. That cannot be a good use of Mr Richard Lochhead’s budget; it is certainly not a good use of public money. An IT system that is 111 per cent over budget, as Audit Scotland has said, must be questioned from first principles. The Government has no choice, in that it must implement a system that is EU-compliant, but we are in a world of madness when it is necessary to spend that amount of public money on a clever computer to properly allocate money to agriculture across Scotland.