Farm-to-fork watchdog could tackle ‘unfairnesses’ which farmers face, says MP

A farm-to-fork food watchdog could help growers make more money when retailers sell their produce, an MP has suggested.

Alistair Carmichael has said “behemoth” supermarkets should face a tougher regulator in a bid to ease “unfairnesses” in the supply chain without passing costs onto shoppers.

On Wednesday, he will seek to table his proposed Food Products (Market Regulation and Public Procurement) Bill, which aims to lay the groundwork for a new watchdog covering farmers, suppliers and shops.

National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president Tom Bradshaw has called for a “trading environment that remains competitive and innovative” and said he “fully supports” the Bill being tabled.

Mr Carmichael, the Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee chairman, described the existing framework as “a bit of regulation at one end and a bit of regulation at the other and no wiring between the two and nothing actually even to join together the two bits of regulation”.

He told the PA news agency: “Experience has been that we really need to have something that goes from the farm gate to the supermarket shelf.

“And there are lots of different unfairnesses that have been allowed to be hardwired into the system.”

The Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland added: “It has to look at the market as a whole because it’s a very unusual market.

“You’ve got tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of primary producers and what?

“Six, 10 behemoth supermarkets at the top and all sorts of bits and pieces in between?”

Supermarkets backtrack on past commitments without a reason and say “we don’t want your product anymore”, Mr Carmichael claimed, adding: “That farmer or processor will probably have gone to some expense to market and batch and package their product in such a way that the supermarket demands but they’ll pull the rug out from underneath you.”

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He also said that if supermarkets decide to cut milk prices “everybody then passes that on down the line to the family farmer, and the farmer essentially at the end of the day is left having to shrug his shoulders and just take the hit”.

The Groceries Supply Code of Practice (GSCOP) promotes “fair dealing” and discourages supermarkets from demanding changes to their supply chains without “reasonable notice”.

Mr Carmichael said farmers “take it” because complaining to the Groceries Code Adjudicator, who is supposed to enforce the code, could mean they struggle to “get back in” with the supermarkets and suffer “bad long-term consequences”.

A new regulator could have built-in protections, including the power and resources to proactively investigate suspected breaches without the need for farmers to complain.

Asked whether shoppers will face higher prices amid efforts to pass a bigger share of sales to farmers, Mr Carmichael said: “I don’t think the people who can afford to be impacted by this are the consumers.

“I think that the people who are doing rather nicely out of this are the supermarkets and indeed some of the processors and distributors as well.

“So, if you’re going to find a way of improving the lot of the farmer, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t actually work to the detriment of the consumer, and that’s why you’ve got to have a regulator that is big enough and has sufficient resource to be taken seriously by supermarkets.”

Mr Carmichael criticised “tacit consensus amongst policymakers that we didn’t need farmers, we could import all our food”, calling instead for a strengthened domestic industry following international shocks such as the outbreak of war in Ukraine followed by US president Donald Trump “playing fast and loose with trade”.

Mr Bradshaw called for a “policy which doesn’t undermine” farmers, adding: “Strengthening farmers’ position means making our food system more resilient and provides a trading environment that remains competitive and innovative.”

Andrew Opie, director of food and sustainability at the British Retail Consortium (BRC), said: “We support appropriate regulation to strengthen the resilience of UK food producers.

“The Groceries Code Adjudicator has been operating for more than a decade, overseeing a legal code between retailers and their suppliers, and retailers have developed strong internal processes to ensure compliance.

“Given the success of this model, the BRC has been lobbying for more intervention for suppliers, such as farmers, further up the supply chain who are not currently covered by GSCOP and would need different regulation and support to help them.

“We believe that is best delivered by the Agricultural Adjudicator, which is already active in the dairy chain and could be replicated across all farming supply chains.”