Part of 1. 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Rural Affairs – in the Senedd at 1:47 pm on 14 December 2016.
Diolch, Lywydd. I think farmers and, indeed, small businesses in general will be very disappointed by the intransigent response that the environment secretary gave to Paul Davies’s question earlier on. The National Farmers Union has done a survey of farmers and the impact that the introduction of nitrate vulnerable zones would have upon them and their industry, and they found that 73 per cent of slurry-producing farmers in Wales currently don’t have storage facilities sufficient to meet the requirements of the NVZ proposals, and that the average cost of complying with them would be nearly £80,000. In a world where farm incomes are not only low but plummeting—farm incomes have dropped 25 per cent in the last year—an insensitive approach to this problem is simply going to mean that large numbers of farmers, particularly in the dairy industry, are going to go out of business. I certainly don’t think that that is a price worth paying for the short-term gains that the environment secretary is consulting about.