Weedkiller decision adds to Brexit momentum for UK farmers

Many British farmers are tired of perceived cuts in financing and more mandates from Brussels.

British farmers are fed up with the meddling from their European neighbors over the best way to grow food — and it’s enough to drive some of them to want to ditch the European Union.

The latest battle is over Brussels’ impending ban on the weedkiller glyphosate, the U.K.’s most widely used pesticide, largely due to political pressure from green groups on the Continent already skeptical of pesticides and certain other new technologies in agriculture. But pulling glyphosate, better known as Roundup, from the market, would be devastating to British farmers who rely on the herbicide to treat weeds.

Many British farmers already are tired of what they say is decreasing financial support but increasing mandates from Brussels on how to run their operations. It’s turned some former supporters of the EU and the access it provides to a market of 500 million customers into poster children of the Leave campaign.

“Distance from government in the end breeds contempt or distrust,” said Michael Seals, a beef and row crop farmer in Derbyshire and spokesman for the pro-Leave group Farmers for Britain. “We feel very, very remote from Brussels.”

Brits cast their votes in the U.K. referendum on June 23, just seven days before EU’s approval of glyphosate is set to expire. The herbicide, the most widely used in the world, has long been approved for use in the EU to clear field of weeds before planting and in orchards, among other applications. While the European Commission will try again next week to get sign-off from member countries before the deadline, governments seem unlikely to change their positions.

More than 2 million hectares of land were treated with glyphosate in England and Wales in 2014. Without it, winter wheat and barley production would likely decline by about 12 percent and cut cultivation of oilseed rape — used for oil and animal feed — by about 10 percent, according to the National Farmers Union.

“Arable farmers have said that for many of them it will be a swaying factor. They really can’t conceive how they would run a farm without” glyphosate, said MEP Stuart Agnew, a member of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy Group and the U.K. Independence Party. For crop farmers in central England, especially, where the weed black grass spreads quickly through fields, “it’s a crucial part of their farming,” Agnew added.

In or out

Support for the U.K. to stay in the EU has been loud. Prime Minister David Cameron and most of his government, backed by businesses and celebrities, have argued that the uncertainty of what Britain will be like outside of the EU is too much to risk. Even U.S. President Barack Obama has put his clout behind the campaign to remain, writing in an op-ed in The Telegraph earlier this year that “now is a time for friends and allies to stick together.”

And should the U.K. choose to leave the EU, it would move to the “back of the queue” on a trade deals, Obama has said. While Brexit likely wouldn’t affect the trade of food and agricultural products with the U.S. in the short term, should the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership be finalized, American farmers may skip over the U.K. in favor of the friendlier terms for exports to the EU.

But the process for leaving the EU as laid out in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon calls for a two-year transition period for the country to make its exit. That would be plenty of time to set up policies for the U.K. on everything from pesticides to farmers supports and determine relationships with the EU, supporters say. Besides, Seals said, given the existing amount of agricultural trade between the EU and U.K. — British farmers send more than €16 billion worth of food to the Continent each year and about double that is sent back, according to the NFU — it’s in all parties’ best interest to keep existing relationships in place.

“If you have a product that is the right price at the right standard and the right amount, you will sell it to the EU tomorrow or just as you did today,” he said. “The French aren’t going to source all the sheep meat they source from the U.K. and all the beef meat they source from the U.K. from anywhere else.”

Farmers strongly supported joining the EU in the 1975 referendum to become part of the common market, but the opinion of Brussels have soured since. Agriculture is one of the few areas for which the EU can directly set policies for member countries, and in recent years U.K. farmers have bristled under what they say are overly burdensome and complicated dictates under the Common Agriculture Policy about environmental protection rules and reductions in payments to farmers.

“There is a frustration in the farming community that the CAP isn’t delivering them a profitable agriculture system and to stick with it would only appear to get worse,” said Agnew, who also owns a poultry farm in Norfolk. He adds that with more countries on the cusp of joining the EU, the system is poised to get even more complicated as it tries to also deal with their needs.

Not just glyphosate

U.K. officials have generally been less averse than the rest of the Continent to the use of chemicals and genetic modification in agriculture. It was not one of the roughly half of EU member countries who decided to ban the cultivation of GMOs, pushed back against prohibitions on the use of certain pesticides linked to bee population declines, and has consistently said it would vote in favor of reauthorizing glyphosate, among other things, according to Adam Speed, a spokesman for the U.K. Crop Protection Association.

“The British government has tended to take a more kind of balanced scientific approach … than what we’ve seen from the EU,” Speed said.

The fight over glyphosate is just the most recent example of the EU ignoring science and putting at risk farmers’ access to new technology, including genetically modified crops, Seals said.

“GM technology, the fact that it’s outlawed in the EU, is a complete anachronism — we need that to go forward,” Seals said. Crop production is about as efficient as it will get without the help of biotechnology, but “there is no limit on what we could achieve if we were given the freedom” to use GM crops, he added.

According to a Farmers Weekly online poll from late April, 58 percent of U.K. farmers support leaving. Of the 577 who participated in the mid-April survey, just 31 percent said they wanted to stay in the EU. In a separate poll of 656 members of the National Federation of Young Farmers’ Clubs released in May, the publication found 62 percent support a Brexit.

To be sure, farmers alone are unlikely to sway the election. Of the 64.6 million people in the U.K., only about 294,000 are farmers, and just half that farm full time. All told, only about 20 percent of the U.K.’s population lives in rural areas. But that block does show up to vote — rural areas and farmers skew older than the rest of the population, a stalwart demographic at the ballot box — and when they do, they tend to support more conservative causes.

However, many key agriculture officials are encouraging Britons to vote to stay in the union. The U.K. Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Elizabeth Truss told POLITICO in April that leaving the EU common market “would hit us very hard.” European Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan, meanwhile, has been crisscrossing the U.K. in recent weeks warning that there is no guarantee that supports to farmers would be any better under the as-yet-to-be determined British agriculture policy.

Even Britain’s biggest farming lobby, the National Farmers Union, is calling for a vote to remain in the EU. The group, in a poll of some of its members last fall, found that 52 percent support staying, while just 26 percent want to leave, and 22 percent were undecided.

“We see the future of agriculture much more sustainable inside Europe than outside Europe,” said Glyn Roberts, president of the Farmers Union of Wales.

While the NFU’s stance will likely carry weight with some, rural areas have also been a base of support in recent elections for UKIP, which supports Britain leaving the EU. The party picked up 11 European Parliament seats in the 2014 election, giving it 24 total, more than any other party on the ballot in the U.K. It also nabbed 3.9 million of the 30.7 million votes cast in the 2015 parliamentary election, putting the party in third behind the Conservatives and Labour — though due to voting rules, UKIP only has one seat in parliament.

And the threat to glyphosate is just the type of thing that UKIP wants to avoid by leaving the EU, Agnew said, adding that it’s likely harbinger of things to come if Britain stays in.

“[Farmers] also know that if glyphosate is banned, it is one of the more gentle pesticides … if they are going to ban that, there will be a whole raft of materials that are going to be banned,” Agnew said.

An earlier version of this story misstated the group Glyn Roberts leads. He is president of the Farmers Union of Wales.

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