Article
Walk into any decent supermarket in Tokyo this spring, and you will find Scottish smoked salmon, Welsh lamb and good Cheddar sold at prices that would make a Lincolnshire arable farmer weep into his porridge. The point is not that British food is fashionable in Asia, though it is. The point is that the same farmer cannot, in his own country, plant a precision-bred wheat variety that would lift his yields by fifteen per cent without filing a regulatory dossier of the kind invented in Brussels and apparently still beloved in Whitehall.
This is the curious shape of British agriculture in 2026: triumphant abroad, throttled at home, and now being quietly recoupled to the very rulebook the country voted to leave. The new UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary Agreement, currently in legislative drafting and pencilled in for mid-2027, commits Great Britain to "dynamic alignment" with EU food and animal-health law. In English, that means every future regulation dreamed up in a Belgian committee room becomes British law without troubling Parliament. We are to be rule-takers, in perpetuity, in exchange for slightly fewer lorries idling at Dover.
It would be easier to bear if the rules being imported were any good. The Common Agricultural Policy, after six decades and a budget the size of small empires, has produced a European farming sector that the European Commission itself now concedes is uncompetitive, environmentally underwhelming and politically combustible. The 2024 farmer protests, with their tractors and manure heaps in front of the Berlaymont, were a public referendum on CAP. The Commission responded by slashing agricultural spending by a fifth in its post-2027 proposal and renationalising the bits it could not defend. This is the model we are now being eased back into, with British farmers absorbing the costs and EU farmers retaining the subsidies.
Meanwhile, the freedoms that did survive Brexit have been used with the brio of a vicar at a wine tasting. The Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Act came into force in November 2025 and is, on paper, a serious piece of legislation; the first commercial crops are due on shelves before Christmas. But the Act's application to livestock has been deferred, and Defra has been notably reluctant to diverge on pesticides, fertilisers or any other question where divergence might produce a tabloid headline. Caution has become the operating doctrine.
Caution is not what one votes to leave the European Union for. The numbers tell the story without much help. Farm input costs are up forty-four per cent on 2019. Total factor productivity in UK agriculture fell five per cent in the most recent year measured, and has lagged the global average for a decade. Domestic food production covers sixty-five per cent of total supply.
Food and drink imports hit a record sixty-seven billion pounds last year. Export volumes to the EU remain roughly a third below their 2019 baseline. We have, with admirable thoroughness, made ourselves more import-dependent, less productive and more exposed to Continental shocks than at any point in living memory, and we are about to make ourselves more so by signing up to a regulatory regime we have no vote in.
The defenders of dynamic alignment will tell you it is pragmatic. So is paying a man with a baseball bat for protection. Pragmatism without strategy is just slow surrender. The real question, the one nobody at Defra seems willing to ask aloud, is whether British food and farming would be better off as the European Union's most quietly compliant province, or as a serious agri-food power with a coherent productivity policy, an export bias towards Asia and a rulebook tailored to British soils, British farmers and British science.
Brexit was, among other things, a wager that the answer was the second. Almost a decade on, the wager has been hedged so heavily that it might as well not have been placed. If Parliament cannot recover the original idea, by refusing open-ended alignment, freeing precision breeding into livestock, redesigning support around food output, and using CPTPP and the Gulf as platforms rather than ornaments, then we should at least have the dignity to admit what we are doing: paying full fare for a Brexit we are too timid to actually take.
