Recently, the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board has come under criticism. Originally set up to help improve farming, it is now simply maintaining the reputation of the industries and marketing their products - at great odds with the new government's objectives, Research Director Aveek Bhattacharya explains.
Last month, I published a piece observing the panoply of hypothecated taxes the government imposes, even as it appears to object to the principle of hypothecation. These taxes beget winners and institutions that can develop a direction of their own, relatively insulated from Treasury scrutiny. One example I gave was of the Agricultural and Horticultural Development Board (AHDB). The AHDB has received additional criticism in recent days, in the shape of an open letter objecting to its promotion of meat. It is worth discussing in more detail.
The AHDB was set up in 2008 with four statutory purposes: a) increasing farmers’ efficiency; b) improving their marketing efforts; c) improving their services to the community’ d) helping them contribute to sustainable development. The AHBD is funded through a statutory levy, with farmers paying a contribution proportionate to their farm size. The levy raises over £40 million a year.
Particularly since winding down its activities in horticulture and potato in 2021, the AHDB has been increasingly dominated by meat and dairy farming, which account for three-quarters of its remaining funding. Its leading priorities – or at least the priorities it attributes to levy payers within the sector – are maintaining the reputation of the industries and marketing their products, with the specific objective of “protecting long-term demand”.
This month, the AHDB is running a marketing campaign in order to promote “the exceptional taste, flavours and nutritional benefits of lean meat and dairy”. It also provides teaching resources for schools, so that children can learn that “sheep are an essential part of the rural scene”, that livestock have been reared for thousands of years, and be reassured that artificial insemination is not painful. Its media and PR team work to “challenge misinformation”, which seems to mostly involve lodging complaints about adverts for plant-based products, but also last July intervening to defeat a motion in North Devon Council proposing switching council catering to plant-based food.
It’s easy to see how this state of affairs has come about – path dependency (a levy-funded body to promote farming has existed since 1967), plus a political imperative to avoid upsetting farmers. But the government levying a quasi-tax to fund an arms length body to cheerlead for meat and dairy producers is odd for a couple of reasons.
First, because encouraging people to eat more animal products is in tension with other government objectives. The Climate Change Committee is clear that meat and dairy consumption needs to go down, not up, and by a lot – it says a 20% reduction is needed by the end of the decade to stay on track to hit our environmental targets. From a health perspective, it’s hard to argue that we need to up our intake. British people eat 27.5kg of beef, pork and lamb a year per capita, working out to a little more than the NHS guideline of no more than 70g per day.
But second, because the AHDB’s funding and accountability to farmers seems to block it from what would actually be a useful function: modernising and streamlining farming techniques. There’s a world in which the AHDB could be an effective ‘what works’ centre for farming. Indeed, it is apparently in the process of piloting the Evidence for Farming Initiative envisaged by the 2021 National Food Strategy. In our own research, we have described the value of ‘knowledge exchange’ institutions in other countries in promoting good practice. The AHDB clearly does a fair amount of this: it spends £14 million a year on this. But spending a comparable amount – £11 million – on marketing would seem to be at cross purposes with this aim, undermining critical distance. It would be nice if supporting British farming only involved shouting about its successes. But given our weak agricultural productivity performance, the AHDB would be better served addressing the fundamentals, and leaving consumers to make their own decisions.
