Most major supermarkets have cut milk prices in a bid to lure budget-conscious shoppers into their stores.

They suggest that the cuts won’t affect how much they pay their farmer suppliers but when supermarkets go to war on prices it is not good for farming, or indeed shoppers in the long term.

Price wars erode domestic food production, our ability to feed ourselves.

Brutal deals on price enforced by supermarkets makes us less self-sufficient because it is simply not sustainable to produce food at a loss. But maybe that’s what governments want – let farmers grow trees instead, they say, to help fight climate change, but conveniently ignore the carbon footprint of the food we must then ship in from overseas to replace what we can’t produce ourselves.

But food self-sufficiency does matter. Surely the pandemic served as a wake-up call to us on that, and the recent shortage of eggs which is ongoing. I was in a Pembrokeshire supermarket only last week and there wasn’t an egg to be found in the entire building.

It is true that 100% self-sufficiency in the UK is neither achievable nor desirable but depending on international markets to feed us could be far less reliable going forward.

Many Pembrokeshire dairy farmers received about 7-10p/litre less for their milk in March than they would have at the start of 2023. This will have caused some farm businesses to make a loss as the industry cost-of-production figures put the average cost of production at around 43-45p/litre.

While a price war might be good for consumers in the short term in the long term we could all be much the poorer.

As an island nation that is outside the Continental trading bloc, the UK needs its farmers more than ever.

And with the average farm already operating on wafer-thin margins, is now really the time to be turning the screws on them?

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