A member of the parliamentary select committee for environment, food and rural affairs an former horticulture minister, Jack was speaking at the annual dinner of the British Tomato Growers Association (BTGA) which preceded its conference held in Coventry. He claimed that the industry has lived under the shadow of agriculture for too long.

Organisations such as the BTGA, which he praised as being the best in the sector, were ideally placed with other similar representative bodies to achieve this. Horticulture was still a vague term in the consumers' mind, he claimed, and more associated with flowers and plants than a specialist vibrant industry - yet because of the growth of farmers markets and healthy eating they were far more interested to know how crops were grown.

'The National Farmers Union has found it hard to keep horticulture in the limelight although they have been desperately trying to find a way to flag the way,' he said. 'But at the same time they have been faced with larger issues dealing with the massive problems of BSE, GM foods, foot and mouth and the massive drop in farmers' incomes.' NFU horticulture adviser David Brown agrees with Jack that horticulture is one of the most dynamic sectors of farming but clearly is keen to keep horticulture within the NFU fold. 'We are continuing to introduce changes following our recent review of services and our horticulture summit at the end of May,' said Brown. 'These include working more closely with other horticultural bodies to cut down on duplication of effort and the greater use of IT to connect members with the information they need and to consult more widely on key issues.' Support for any new way of representing horticulture interests from within the sector itself will depend on its efficiency and effectiveness in an industry which is under pressure from external factors such as legislation and exchange rate issues as well world-wide market factors and internal competition. 'You could say that horticulture has not had a fair crack at the whip and has always been the poor relation,' said Northcourt Group chairman Robert Baliciki. 'But I am not sure if being outside the NFU is the way to go. If people put the effort in to what the NFU is proposing, which sounds reasonable, and it works then it will represent horticulture better. What we don't want is a plethora of groups.' The NFU's plan following a horticulture summit in May at which leaders of many of the major stakeholder groups were present, is to set up a strategic council early next year and to avoid duplication of effort in horticulture by revamping the group's committee structure. Speaking in May, union president Ben Gill warned against too many associations. 'Let's not keep creating all these new organisation but have a single focus.' Jack concluded: 'A collective voice could also help stem the tide of the pressures on growers, by helping inject some sense of the need for food security into the minds of powerful buyers, some of whom gave indications that they were abandoning the industry,' he added.