Like other key areas of our economy, the fruit and vegetable trade will suffer if we vote to leave the European Union on 23 June.
In fact it will be hit by a triple whammy. On the general economy – it will be undermined by a likely stalling of our economic engine. GDP will shrink, customers will be poorer, investment will recede. On the single market, the European supply chain in fresh produce will be broken. We can only guess whether any of the damage could be fixed. On farm subsidies, if EU grant aid to our farmers is cut we will face turmoil in our domestic supply.
When it comes to the broad economic consequences of a Leave vote, the evidence could hardly be clearer. Economic authority after economic authority has spelt out the dire impact we would see on our economy.
From the Treasury to the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund, the message is identical. Leaving would be the economic equivalent of self-harm.
The trade deals that the EU enjoys with the rest of the world would no longer be available to us. Future deals would have to be negotiated on our own and we would be weaker. On our own, our leverage would be so much diminished that terms would be worse.
Secondly, ejecting ourselves from the single market would be a disaster. Foreign businesses would be less likely to invest here. Some would surely up sticks to keep their access to 500 million customers.
Some say we could leave and still be in the single market. Yet if we attempted to negotiate such a deal like Norway, we would end up still paying billions into the EU without any say in the trade rules we would have to play by.
Thirdly, despite its shortcomings, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) provides stability to our agricultural sector. Without the subsidy farms would fail, supplies would be in shortage and prices would spiral.
Some farmers seem happy to abandon the safety net of CAP without any kind of guarantee of a replacement. They seem to assume that the Whitehall government would provide exactly the same level of support. In fact, there can be no guarantee of everlasting friendliness in Whitehall to farmers or the countryside.
I would add a further cautionary tale for agriculture. In California, a farmer has just watched a quarter of his cabbages rot as 37 immigrant labourers – who were due to harvest them under a farm worker visa programme – were delayed by bureaucratic paperwork. We do not want such problems here. For these reasons I will vote to Remain and I hope you do too. Otherwise we will be inviting chaos, uncertainty and contraction in your sector and others.
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