The speech by Douglas Ross MP, under secretary of state for Scotland at the NFU Scotland conference last week sent a chill down my spine. The Moray MP said that through clear labelling, consumers would choose whether to buy food produced to our standards or imports produced to different standards. He did not see it as a role for Government to ban imports for food made to reduced standards. When pressed, the Minister believed that the UK and Scotland’s food production is so well liked that consumers will continue to pick domestic produce off the shelves over imports.

If this is a window into how the UK is planning to do trade deals around the world once outside the EU then we need to be worried. Getting large volumes of US pork produced in systems which can be cheaper but are banned in the UK is one example of how our farmers could be fighting with one hand tied behind their back.

The Minister believed that chlorinated chicken and hormone beef will be prevented from coming into the UK. But these are just two examples from a huge range of different standards across the globe. Stopping these two practices in our imports could be winning a couple of battles but we can still lose the war.

We must have a set of production standards for our food systems which should have equivalence with nations hoping to send produce here, and vica-versa. Our standards won’t be allowed to slip since we will continue to need access to the EU who are still the top payers for much of what we can grow and rear.

Allowing access to foreign food imports is inevitable but we can’t permit too much to flood in or domestic production will be wiped out.

Perhaps we should remind the Government if they want less red meat in people’s diets then restricting or banning their imports could be a good start.