JAMES REBANKS: When World War One broke out, Britain had six weeks of food reserves and the government was terrified. Now it’s just six days…

For years, British farmers have warned the nation’s food system is broken.

The Government insists there is no need for a fuss, accusing farmers of being tax dodgers, out of touch or, worse, Conservatives.

Yet if you listen to people from rural communities, you’ll know the truth is grim.

The Government has made farming so difficult and unprofitable that the UK is losing farms at an incredible rate, making us dangerously food insecure.

Just about the only attempt Labour has made to engage with farmers was to appoint Baroness Batters, the former president of the National Farmers’ Union, to review profitability.

She handed her report in to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) last month, and then… well, nothing.

Earlier this month, sources reported it had been ‘buried’ by the Treasury until after the Budget on Wednesday.

This is outrageous. Surely the Treasury needs to know what the issues are to shape the Budget accordingly? Surely they should be working with farmers, not burying the facts?

The apparently ‘locked away’ review is expected to call for an urgent reset of the relationship. My guess is that it highlights what an appalling situation the Government has created for farmers, leaving them unsupported, exploited and barely able to provide the food we need.

Concealing all this avoids further embarrassment to Rachel Reeves, who seems to have chosen farmers as her sacrificial victim.

The scale of the problem was revealed in a separate report earlier this month by McCain Foods, which found that one third of British farmers made no profit in the past year and 92 per cent think the greatest threat to the long-term growth of British farming is the Government.

You might think these awful statistics would trouble our political leaders – but we’ve seen no sign of any soul-searching yet.

We’re told in soundbites that the Government cares about farming – but their policies suggest otherwise.

It is worth acknowledging at this point that no one thinks the problems with our food system began with Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government.

But all serious commentators agree that this Government and the last have screwed up massively – and worse, our current leaders are actively choosing to double down on previous stupidity.

Let’s remind ourselves how we got into this mess.

Before Brexit, Britain was part of an EU system – the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP – which, though far from perfect, at least attempted to protect farmers.

CAP was often a rip-off: it asked farmers to sell products below the real cost of production but bailed them out each year with subsidies.

That meant my dad scraped a living working long hours on our little farm in Cumbria, with nonsensical subsidised accounts that barely got above break-even. Still, it kept his farm afloat.

The British Left hated this system. In their view, farmers seemed ‘rich’ – so why would anyone give them money? – and they certainly didn’t vote Labour.

The old-school Tory toffs supported it but when the last of these ‘wets’ was pushed out of government post-Brexit and replaced by free-marketeers who opposed subsidies, sympathy for farmers died in British politics.

The UK then scrapped the CAP and decided to implement a system that promised farmers the same amount of money, though instead of subsidies to produce bacon, milk and bread, they would be paid to deliver good ‘environmental stewardship’. The new mantra was ‘public payments for public goods’.

The Left’s distaste for farmers was assuaged with promises of more trees planted, wildflower meadows and ponds, and the Right’s by the fact farmers would no longer be paid a ‘subsidy’ but instead the market rate – by the State – for public goods. It sounded promising, but the Conservatives failed to pay for it properly, breaking their promise that every farmer could receive the same amount of money as before.

And then, when it was just about functioning and starting to look quite good, the Tories lost the general election in 2024.

Since then, the whole damn thing has gone into freefall.

The Treasury, under Reeves, pleaded ignorance that any such ‘public payments for public goods’ contract existed.

Labour didn’t even attempt to make the new environmental schemes available to all farmers. The ones that did exist were either paused due to over-subscription, or their payments have already fallen way behind inflation nations.

The other half are being paid by the Government to take land out of food production for nature restoration.

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone at the Treasury that this might make food scarcer or more expensive, or force farmers out of business. The argument here is not that we don’t need more nature – we do – but that we also need to produce enough food to ensure our farmers make a decent return.

Barely any British politicians, and apparently no one at the Treasury, understands the dire position British agriculture is now in.

Our politics merely magnify that illiteracy, with rooms of people who don’t even understand the basics making decisions with massive implications for our food system.

One person who clearly has no clue is Reeves, who last autumn delivered her coup de grace: reforming inheritance tax so that farmers lost one of their remaining sops in a lifetime of being ripped off. In the past, farmland was exempt from the tax, but from April next year, farmers will have to start paying.

But farmland isn’t cash, nor does it generate much revenue – so farms will inevitably have to sell land, making them less likely to survive in the future.

One response to all this might be: Who cares? These farmers are always whingeing and are just another vested interest group that wants more handouts.

And yet if we abandon our farmers, everyone will ultimately suffer. They are the basis of our food system: if they withdraw their labour and capital because they can’t afford to keep farming, then who will feed the nation?

We’re already beginning to see the inevitable consequences of this misguided agricultural policy. Inflation is exceeding government targets, especially in food price inflation, running just below 5 per cent – way in excess of the overall inflation target of 2 per cent.

And it is disproportionately hitting the poorest in our society, who spend a greater part of their weekly budget on food.

This inflation is partly due to what’s happening on our farms. Since it has become very expensive to produce certain products, some farmers are simply producing less. And so prices are going up. Cattle prices have almost doubled since 2020 as farmland has gone out of production. And the number of dairy farmers has dropped by 56 per cent in the past 20 years. Some estimate that one dairy farmer a day goes out of business.

Then there’s the question of food security. Get support for farmers wrong and you’re taking a gamble that there won’t be enough food to feed the nation.

Currently, according to Professor Tim Lang, the UK’s leading expert on food security, Britain’s food system is over-reliant on foreign imports and highly vulnerable to shocks and crises, such as disease outbreaks or geopolitical instability.

When the First World War broke out, Britain only had six weeks of food reserves and the government was terrified. Now, that is down to about six days.

People blithely assume that we have food stores somewhere for a moment of crisis, but we don’t.

At the rate we’re going, the situation will only worsen. Earlier this month, a report from the All Party Group on Science and Technology warned that if the UK continues to prioritise housing, Net Zero, tree planting and nature restoration, it could lose around a quarter of its productive farmland by 2050.

This would see domestic food production reduced by a third, as the population grows, leaving the UK far more reliant on imports. Free-market ideologues say we can just import more food, but we’re living in La La Land if we think that’s a good idea in today’s unstable world.

Meanwhile, once-reliable exporting nations are now erecting trade barriers because of Trump-like protectionism.

Farmers understand all this, but it appears the Labour Government does not. And now, at a time when we need an expert’s insights and analysis to inform a Budget, it has buried its own farming review. It is shameful.

Publish the review right now. And act upon it.

■ James Rebanks is a fell farmer and the bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life. His latest book is The Place Of Tides. A version of this article first appeared on unherd.com