The Cotswolds | Archive | 2003 | June | 19
From the archive, first published Thursday 19th Jun 2003.
SHEEP farmers in the Cotswolds could make mincemeat of their continental competitors if the shackles of market-skewing subsidies were removed by CAP reforms.
The claim was made by the region's NFU director Anthony Gibson when he opened the Sheep South West show on Tuesday and said: "Sheep subsidies have sustained production at unrealistically high levels, causing prices to fall to unrealistically low levels, denying efficient sheep farmers the natural advantage which should have been theirs."
He added: "I have every confidence in the ability of the sheep industry collectively to capture a larger share of a growing market, if we are freed from the malign influence of production-based subsidies."
He said he would like to think, in the wake of radical CAP reform, sheep numbers in the rest of the UK and across Europe as a whole would fall, while in the South West region they would increase.
© Newsquest Media Group 2008