Minister Rebecca Evans says leaving the EU would be disastrous for farmers – and also the food supply. But since the 1960s Labour has been anti farmer – obsessed with the idea that food must always be very cheap regardless of production costs always raising.

In the 1970s they abused it and used it to get big subsidies for imports from the rest of the EU – devastating farmers incomes here – the reason for the Fishguard/Holyhead Port blockades in 1974. In 1997 they used the BSE scare as an excuse to criminalise us, with a mass of totally unjustified vicious regulations that are making it uneconomical and too much worry to carry on, and deliberately break every principal of the EU human rights laws and UK laws. In Wales they have made the biggest cut allowed by EU rules in the single farm subsidy, and have now used change to a new system to make further cuts to the majority of farmers, and have made claiming even more complicated obviously to deter claims. Some farmers have not been claiming because of this, and because they cannot comply with the hundreds of conditions – that are all enforced by vicious penalties and some also by criminal prosecution. Mrs Evans welcomed a recommendation that more milk processing capacity would help stop the milk crisis.

This is nonsense – if farmers are not paid enough to cover their costs and make a profit, they cannot carry on – so the milk will not be there to process. Several new processes did start and all have been forced to close, and First Milk into making a big loss – by supermarkets using their near monopoly of food sales to only pay a very low price to boost their profits.To stop this same ruthless exploitation a milk marketing board had been imposed in 1933.

The Tories scrapped it in the early 1990s to let their big business pals restart exploitation and profiteering – this is the main cause of the crisis, which will never end unless a new MMB is imposed – to force supermarkets to pay an economic price to farmers.

C H Cateaux

Goodwick