Anne Main MP has hailed Brexit as a great opportunity for the UK Government to ‘put our farmers at the forefront’ in a Westminster Hall debate on Tuesday.
Speaking about the benefits to the UK farming industry after the UK leaves the European Union, Anne highlighted a number of areas from labelling to animal welfare in which the UK can, and already does, implement higher standards than the EU. Crucially, however, UK farmers will not be disadvantaged by lower standards on the continent.
‘Brexit is a great opportunity for the UK to enforce more transparency from farm-to-fork traceability to enable British consumers to make more informed choices about what they are buying and what life an animal has had in the production of food’, said the St Albans MP.
Anne also raised the issue of live animal exports. ‘Brexit will allow us to protect endangered species from being transited through the UK, and to ban imports of wildlife trophies, body parts and extracts of bodies’, she said. ‘It will allow us to have stronger regulation of animal testing and research, banning that which is causing severe suffering.’
Drawing on the damage the spread of disease has on farming, Anne illustrated that leaving the EU will allow the UK to be able to take matters into her own hands. ‘The Schmallenberg virus, for example, is now widespread across much of the EU’, she said. ‘As a result, the US banned bovine semen exports from the EU, including from our significant UK export market, despite our stocks being less badly hit.’
‘We can stop hiding behind rules that are bent by the EU and stop cross-subsidising inefficient farmers in many EU countries that are operating at standards we would not allow in our country’, Anne said in closing. ‘We have many, many opportunities within the wildlife sector, the food production sector, the farming sector, the export sector and the labelling sector to take back control in this country and put our farmers at the forefront.’
Watch: Anne Main, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Bangladesh, talks about the Rohingya crisis and urges support for @DECappeal pic.twitter.com/FFL0lq8O0A
— DFID (@DFID_UK) October 12, 2017