Thank you, Llywydd. It's always a pleasure to be called by you.

I hope it'll bring joy to the heart of the Cabinet Secretary when I say I could have written this statement myself, because I agree with every single word of it. I think it's a practical, forward-looking and optimistic statement. Of course, I recognise that, at this early stage, she can't give a great deal of detail about how agricultural policy is going to be reformed in Wales, but I was very pleased to hear her say that it gives us an opportunity to reconsider the whole corpus of regulation that we've inherited from predecessor generations. That must be the right policy—to look at everything that is currently in place, as we have the opportunity to change it, if that's beneficial to farmers and, indeed, to the public at large. Hopefully, she'll agree with me that we should base our regulation in the future securely on a science base and that we shouldn't impose huge costs upon the agricultural industry for any marginal benefits to society generally. So, I think, in detail, that we'll be able to make many significant changes that will not imperil environmental interests, for example, on the one hand, by improving the economic circumstances of farmers.

I was very pleased to see also that she says the basic payment scheme is not the best tool for providing farm security. It's certainly true that the impact of the basic payment scheme has been to substantially increase the price of land, rather than to improve the incomes of farmers. Farm incomes, generally, are still very, very low, and we need to do as much as we can to make farmers' incomes more secure and, indeed, higher in future. It must be right to say that future support for agriculture will centre on the provision of public goods that deliver for all the people of Wales.

I personally think, from what I've read and what Michael Gove and George Eustice have been saying, that there isn't a great deal of disagreement between the Cabinet Secretary and the Welsh Government and what the UK Government wants to achieve. It's a great opportunity for us to have a British and, indeed, a Welsh agricultural policy that is more attuned to the peculiar circumstances of our own country. She is absolutely right to point out the almost unique combination of circumstances that we have to devise an agricultural policy for in Wales, with a high proportion of upland farms, for example, a greater dependence upon sheep farming, and so on and so forth. So, I do hope that she will be able to come back to us, at an early date, with a little more flesh on the bones of this agricultural policy, but in general terms I welcome the principles upon which it's going to be based.

One of the opportunities that we've had, even within the current scheme of regulation, is to show that we can have a different policy in Wales. I've quoted before the habitats directive and the fact that we can cut hedges in Wales in August, whereas they can't in England; they've got to wait until September. I believe that our policy is a better one than we have in England, and there may be other ways in which Wales can lead the rest of the United Kingdom by example in the way that our agricultural policy for the future is devised.

Marketing is going to be at the heart, I think, of future prosperity for farmers in Wales, and I wonder if she can give us any further information on what the Welsh Government will do to promote a brand for Wales's agricultural sector as a means of securing the food and drink industry's interests, as well as farmers' interests, post Brexit. It must be sensible for a developed western country like the United Kingdom to concentrate upon the production not just of raw materials but the high-value products that richer consumers around the world want to buy. There is nothing to be gained from a race to the bottom in terms of price competition. It's improvement of quality that's going to be the best way forward, in my view.

I was pleased to see her mention New Zealand, as well—a country that I know quite well. I remember very well talking to Labour Ministers in New Zealand in the 1980s, who introduced the overnight abolition of agricultural protection, subsidies and the whole regulatory regime. It's one of the paradoxes of the 1980s that it was the New Zealand Government, under the Labour Party, that was more Thatcherite than the Thatcher Government in the United Kingdom. And it's true that, during the transitional period, there were very severe difficulties, although the New Zealand Government did actually soften the blow by having funding for restructuring of farms, and also for social welfare payments and so on in the interim, but it's true there were massive changes in the industry. But land prices fell 60 per cent, and the use of fertiliser fell by 50 per cent, so there were significant improvements in biodiversity as a result of those rather dramatic reforms, and now agriculture is actually bigger, as a proportion of a larger economy today, than it was 30 years ago.

So, there are opportunities for us in deregulation and, indeed, I believe, by controlling and maybe even cutting subsidies, if we can ensure that farm incomes, which is the key factor here, can improve. There's no point in subsidising for no reason. What we want is a prosperous farming industry and prosperous farmers. If that can be done at a lesser cost to the taxpayer, that must be in everybody's interest.