In October 2024, Fairebel, the pioneering Belgian Fair Milk brand, celebrates a decade and a half of striving for local and fair agriculture. Founded in 2009 by a group of farmers, Fairebel has become more than just a milk brand: it symbolises resilience and solidarity within the Belgian agricultural sector. Today, Fairebel continues to grow, representing over 500 producers who have come together to offer quality products while, at the same time, guaranteeing that each and every one of them is fairly remunerated. This ensures future prospects for the young farmers who are members of the cooperative.

For the next few years, Christophe Hansen from Luxembourg is set to hold the reins of agricultural policy in the EU. The EPP politician (European People’s Party), who was already an MEP, is an environmental and geoscientist and comes from a farming family.

In an open letter sent on 7 October 2024 to the President of the European Commission, the President of the Agrifish Council and the President of the European Parliament, European farmer and agri-food worker organisations have demanded a fast-track procedure be initiated by the end of the year to add purchasing agricultural and food products under the cost of production to the Unfair Trading Practices Directive black list.

Farmers For Action UK NI have connections with EMB that date back to its origins. We are very grateful for this opportunity to connect with EMB members and everything EMB is trying to achieve, which is an extremely difficult process, against bureaucracy and the corporate food industry. Over recent years, we have worked on a legislative bill to ensure cost-covering farm-gate prices for farmers. In 2013, we set about bringing farm organisations in Northern Ireland together under Northern Ireland Farm Groups to work on a legislation bill on farm-gate prices to return to farmers a minimum of the true and inflation-adjusted cost of production plus a margin.

Up to this point, FFA like EMB had done the lobbying and the protests and concluded that legislation was at the end of the day the only way to prevent family farmers being constantly abused at the farm gate with poor prices. By 2016 our legislation bill known as the “Northern Ireland Farm Welfare Bill” was ready to go. Only our Stormont Government collapsed in January 2017 when the two biggest parties – the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and nationalist party Sinn Féin – split in a bitter row over the DUP’s handling of a green energy scandal. Talks aimed at finding a solution failed, leaving Northern Ireland without a devolved government for three years as Stormont didn’t re-sit until 2020.

In the intervening years, the consequences of climate change erupted across the world and we modified the Bill to protect farmers from unneeded imports causing excess food miles. Then in 2020, our Government re-sat and the Bill was scrutinised by the Agriculture Committee at Stormont by 2021. However, everything had been put on hold in the meantime due to the Covid-19 pandemic. When the world came out of the Covid-19 crisis, Stormont fell again in February 2022, when the institutions were collapsed by the Democratic Unionist Party in protest against post-Brexit trade agreements for Northern Ireland, and only re-sat in February 2023.

On 30 April 2024, Farmers for Action / Northern Ireland Farm Groups launched the Gosling Report at Stormont by kind permission of the Chair of the Agriculture Committee who is a suckler beef farmer from County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland. This report by well-known economist Paul Gosling entitled “Farming On Life Support” highlights the plight of family farms in Northern Ireland and the need for legislation on farm-gate prices. This was followed by a meeting with the Agriculture Committee where the question was asked: “Will you take the bill forward?”.

The Committee has moved in recent days to request further information from us, which we are attending to. After this, they want to consult with the English Department for Agriculture which we hope will find a response before Christmas. We expect to get that all important answer from the Agriculture Committee to move forward with the bill towards being enacted. 

William Taylor, Farmers for Action UK NI and Northern Ireland Farm Groups Co-ordinator

You couldn’t miss it: on 12 September, the BDM rolled up at the Agricultural Ministers’ Conference with a 650-tonne mobile crane with an axle load of 12 tonnes, proclaiming its message for all to see: we must tackle the big issues! To give the ministers and their chiefs of staff attending the conference an idea of what these big issues are, we invited them to get a “bird’s-eye rather than frog’s-eye view for the urgently needed realignment of agricultural policy” from a height of 60 metres in the basket – for a symbolic and real overview with an opportunity for political discussions at the same time.