00:00 It sounds like what you're saying then is that consumers can expect more empty shelves
00:07 as we've seen in the past going forward unless this changes.
00:11 I would say almost certainly, yeah. Unless we see a radical change in supermarket behaviour
00:16 and clearly well thought out and well implemented government policy, the future for British
00:22 farming is pretty bleak.
00:24 49% of British fruit and vegetable farmers say it's likely they'll go out of business
00:29 over the course of the next year and many say supermarkets and their buyers are to blame.
00:34 They stand accused of not paying on time, pursuing cheaper food alternatives from overseas
00:39 and cancelling or changing orders at the last minute, with farmers also criticising fruit
00:44 and veg specifications for being too hard and too complex.
00:48 Typically when I started back in the 80s, 1980s about 38 pence in the pound went back
00:53 to a fruit or vegetable grower. Today that's fallen to about 25% and actually the amount
00:59 of money spent on food has also fallen. Yeah, our prices keep increasing and the result
01:05 is that we have an industry on its knees. I mean I'm 63, none of my five children want
01:11 to come back to the farm. I mean that is very, very typical of British farming today and
01:17 you know at a time when we've never needed farmers more.
01:21 Now many farmers have banded together to send an open letter to some of the chief execs
01:25 of the biggest brands in the UK, like Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, Asda, Aldi and Lidl,
01:31 calling for fairer treatments across the board.
01:33 Things we're asking for is that supermarkets pay what they agreed to pay, that they pay
01:39 on time, that they buy what they said they'd buy, that they have reasonable specifications,
01:45 preferably agreed with their suppliers rather than just imposed on their suppliers and a
01:50 more general but equally important point is that we try and get away from this annual
01:56 tendering purely on price so that farmers are supported by their customers to invest
02:01 in the future, that they have that sort of confidence which they most definitely don't
02:05 have at the moment.
02:07 And are supermarkets seemingly willing to work with you on this? Have you had any sort
02:11 of reply? Is there any pushback?
02:13 I think they're just hoping that we'll go away. Well up to a point, there will come
02:18 a point, and we've already seen this with eggs, where actually there is nothing more
02:23 to squeeze out. I think it's true of most of the industry, they cannot squeeze them
02:26 any more and at that point they probably will start looking at sort of longer term relationships.
02:31 We've seen a little bit with eggs, a little bit with dairy, it's still a long way away
02:37 in the fruit and vegetable business, the industry that I know best.
02:41 Andrew Opie, the British Retail Consortium's Director of Food and Sustainability said,
02:46 "Food retailers source and will continue to source the vast majority of their food from
02:50 the UK and work hard to pay a sustainable price to farmers. Retailers value their relationships
02:56 with British farmers and are supporting them by paying more for their produce. However,
03:01 retailers are also facing many additional costs."
03:03 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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