NFU Presidents New Year message

We can say one thing for certain about 2008: it will be a year in which British farming becomes even more important to the nation as a whole.

The world's food supply is balanced on a knife edge between sufficiency and shortage. According to the latest "Crop Prospects" report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the 2007 world harvest produced a record 2.1 billion tonnes of cereals. Yet despite that, wheat stocks have fallen again, to just 65 days' supply, the lowest level since 1983. If you couple that with the impact of climate change on harvests around the world, and a remorseless increase in demand, you have a situation in which supplies are less secure, and market prices more volatile, than probably ever before.

No country can afford to neglect the productivity of its own farming sector against that daunting background; least of all a country like the UK, which has allowed its self-sufficiency in indigenous foods to fall by 15 per cent in the last ten years.

This is not a plea for Government intervention in the market. Britain's farmers and growers are more than capable of rising to the challenge of increasing their productivity, given fair markets and proportionate regulation. But after the crises of 2007, and in the wake of years of falling incomes, confidence is low, particularly in the livestock sectors, where higher grain prices have not yet been reflected in higher output prices.