Food security and productive agriculture should be moving up the political agenda

​This was David Cameron's plan to settle the fight in the Conservative party over Europe. I remember interviewing him on a farm visit and as the vote approached he thought there was no prospect of losing. He sought to counter the lies and half-truths from his one time allies, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and the ultimately disgraced Owen Paterson. Their promises were of a better farming life outside the CAP – productivity, competitiveness and less red tape.

Instead it is the CAP that has changed. We are stuck with the same green policies Brexit was supposed to end. Governments – Conservative and Labour – have shown no post Brexit interest in agriculture and lack of imagination to use the freedoms of Brexit to release farming's potential.Brexit was a watershed for both foreign and domestic policy in the UK.However big a change as that was, the real change has been to the world around us. That includes Covid and the difficult financial times it brought. However it is the uncertainty of the geopolitical situation that is the real change from 2016. It was two years before Brexit that Russia's membership of the G8 group of leading economies was suspended.However its invasion of Ukraine has changed the world. That invasion drove inflation in farm input costs and consumer prices, but it also changed, probably for good, food trade flows around the world. The mix of Russian aggression and the US, under Trump, walking away from 80 years of defence commitments to Europe and NATO has shifted funding priorities in the UK and EU towards defence.This is now an absolute priority and funds will be diverted to defence.Logically this should not affect agriculture, but logic is never a strong suit for politicians. In every conflict in history priorities have been defence, followed by food security. Without that a country can be held to ransom in weeks if it relies on over long food supply chains. As the threat to Europe from Russia has grown the EU has shown signs of changing its approach to agriculture. Food security is now deemed vital and crucially it is being supported and encouraged through changes to the CAP. It has not been explicitly said, but after the political collapse of the Greens in last year's European parliament elections, policy priorities have moved towards production and ensuring a future for the current and future generations in farming.Into the political mix of geopolitics can be added instability in the Middle East, the threat to the global economy from a Trump White House, reflected in his enthusiasm for tariffs and determination to distance the US from its one-time allies in Europe.

The US has swung massively to the right, but the same is happening in the EU and that will create tensions between member states. Some former Communist countries, including Hungary and now Poland, want stronger links with Russia and Putin; many are unhappy with open-ended EU support for Ukraine. There is resentment Ukraine is treated as if it were an EU member state and not a candidate country for membership. Of the founders of the original EEC, the Netherlands and Italy already have far right governing parties, opposed to many EU policies. France is well on its way to a far right president and parliament, and the onward march of Alternative for Deutschland – AFD – with its openly fascist policies threatens Germany's economic and social stability. Brexit was a massive shock to the EU, but if five of the founding members move to the far right, with others, it is questionable whether the EU can survive in its present form.Nine years on from Brexit the unstoppable growth of the far right in Europe is something those who opposed UK membership of the EU could not have imagined, let alone used as another weapon to unsettle people to secure a vote against EU membership. Now it seems ironic that with Reform surging in the polls here the party that fought for Brexit could end up finding new alliances with parties in the EU that share its beliefs and strategies. If the past nine years have been unpredictable they will be the proverbial Sunday school picnic compared to what lies ahead. That is why food security and productive agriculture should be moving up the political agenda in parallel with higher defence spending.