The Cornish pasty has a habit of biting back at moments of political tension, and the EU referendum is no exception. When Boris Johnson launched his Vote Leave battlebus tour in Truro in May, he brandished the local meat pie and promised that Brexit would enable him to protect the best of British produce.
Cornish pasty makers were not impressed.
Although they had forced a sharp U-turn on George Osborne and his pasty tax in 2012, they now declared in favour of the chancellor’s position on Europe. “After working so hard to gain recognition for the Cornish pasty through the EU-protected food names scheme … the Cornish Pasty Association supports Britain remaining in,” they announced.
It is no coincidence that food and drink is at the heart of so much of the debate about whether we are better off in or out of the EU. Worth £80bn a year and employing 400,000 people, it is our largest manufacturing sector and a big exporter and importer. Moreover, 38% of its workers are foreign-born, placing its demand for cheap labour at the centre of arguments about immigration.
The common agriculture policy (CAP) swallows up nearly 40% of the total EU budget; it has reshaped not just farming but our landscape in the decades since Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973. The free movement of goods, people and capital – enshrined in EU treaties – and EU common policies adopted on trade, fisheries and regional development, as well as agriculture, have been the framework through which the UK has globalised.
Britain produces just more than half what it consumes and depends on Europe to provide more than a quarter of the rest, while the EU’s population of more than 500 million people provides the UK’s most significant export market for food. The referendum has therefore, perhaps not surprisingly, polarised ministers from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), and divided industry and political parties left and right.
The Conservative food and farming minister, George Eustice, disagrees with his secretary of state, Elizabeth Truss, and is campaigning for a leave vote. He describes the EU rules affecting Defra as “all pervasive” and “stifling” and believes the UK could get better value subsidising its farmers itself rather than being part of a wasteful CAP.
He said: “80% of legislation affecting Defra comes from the EU. When it comes to crucial things such as food labelling, food safety, then yes we would negotiate bilateral agreements with the EU, but there is a whole raft of other regulation – the maximum width of a gateway, the minimum width of a hedge – where frankly we could do better.”
British traditional foods such as stilton, Jersey Royal potatoes and the Cornish pasty could be protected using international trademark law as they were before Britain joined the EU.
As a former strawberry farmer who typically employed 300 workers, many of whom were migrants, Eustice nevertheless said Britain needed to “take back control of immigration by switching from freedom of movement to limited work permit visas.
“I understand the challenge of labour but it’s very easy for us to put in place a work permit scheme for one year, say, or three,” he said. “Immigration causes problems when it becomes permanent resettlement.”
Truss, on the other hand, has warned that a Brexit vote would be a “leap in the dark” that could put trade and farmers’ livelihoods at risk.
Nearly three-quarters of the food and drink industry is on her side, according to its trade body, the Food and Drink Federation.
Iain Wirght, the FDF’s director general, said: “71% of members believe the interests of their business will be best served by the UK voting to remain in the European Union
“Members identified the single market, access to raw materials and the free movement of labour among key considerations.”
The leading supermarkets, whose model depends on supply chains for fresh food stretching right across Europe and beyond, have been reluctant to express a view, no doubt for fear of alienating customers.
On the left, the divide is as great. Critics say the EU has driven through a neoliberal vision of food and farming that subsidises richer landowners and the overproduction of industrial fats and sugars. It is a system that is unhealthy, environmentally destructive and captures profits for a small number of dominant corporate interests.
For them, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently being negotiated behind closed doors between the EU and the US is just the latest alarming development in an undemocratic EU trend, they say. TTIP could result in the European market being opened to US beef produced with hormones, US poultry washed with chlorine, lower animal welfare standards and the lifting of restrictions on genetically modified organisms and threatens to allow companies to sue national governments if their policies cause a loss of profits.
Jenny Jones, the former chair of the Green party, has articulated this view and wants out. “The most profound weakness of the EU is that it is a super-sized top-down dogmatic project of endless industrial development and growth,” she said.
“It fosters the pointless carting of goods enormous distances, and it smashes local resilience. Often well-intentioned environmental policies are outweighed at every turn by the more fundamental drivers of its bid to turn the whole of Europe into a paradise for agribusiness and industry.”
Green MP and former MEP Caroline Lucas is in the other camp, however, and a passionate proponent of staying in the EU. The EU is tired, damaged and in need of reform but without it the struggle against climate change would already have been lost, she says. She agrees with those on the right who say our sovereignty has been compromised but “we surrendered it not to the EU but to an anti-democratic market cult” that rightwing Brexiters would still promote if we voted to leave.
Jeremy Corbyn’s pledge to veto TTIP may have helped win over some Labour voters who are alarmed by the trade deal but are otherwise instinctively in favour of greater international solidarity in Europe.
The shadow environment and food secretary, Kerry McCarthy, thinks those hoping a leave vote might lead to a more local sustainable food system are deluded. “Everybody thinks CAP needs reform but some of the things blamed on CAP are the consequences of the market. The Brexit camp would negotiate a far more neoliberal trade deal with US or Canada than what can be achieved in EU,” she told us.
On immigration, she insists that “migrant workers have kept the economy going”. The real issue, and a key driver of immigration in to the sector, she added is “low pay and zero hours”. Fundamentally, having lived through Labour wilderness years, she believes in staying in because “I see the EU as a more progressive force than most British governments I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
The reality, according to Kath Dalmeny, the coordinator of Sustain, the campaign group for better food and farming, is that “you could create a good food and farming system in or out of the EU – it’s a question of values and political will. But it is naive to think we could set our own rules easily – we would be facing the same powers and institutions that control the food system whether we were in or out of the EU.”
