The policy is currently out for consultation, allowing interested parties to give their views.<\/p>\n
The idea is that the big supermarkets would be the ones carrying the financial burden of the policy.<\/p>\n
Speaking on his East Lothian farm, Wyllie said that – in reality – that’s probably not how things will play out. He fears the big retailers will pass any losses down to producers like him.<\/p>\n
He said: “I struggle to see how, or why, they would swallow that cost”<\/p>\n
“They’ll pass it down to us. We see it all the time”.<\/p>\n
And he worries that when the supply chain dust settles, it will be him that picks up the bill.<\/p>\n
“I’m the bottom of the food chain. I can’t pass my costs on to anybody else,” he added.<\/p>\n
He runs a number of farms, specialising in pigs, sheep and crops for bread and cereal production and his costs have increased in recent years.<\/p>\n
There’s been a UK government national insurance hike and there’s a looming UK-wide tax on fertiliser that will affect a farm of his size.<\/p>\n
On top of this, his energy costs have doubled in recent years, with a standing charge of \u00a31,500 per month before he’s even used a single unit of electricity.<\/p>\n
Jamie worries that a food price cap could prove to be another burden that “might make producers think twice about what they’re doing”.<\/p>\n
When asked what he means by that, he points out that farmers have other potential options: from switching to non-food crops, to selling their land so that AI data centres can be built on them.<\/p>\n
He said that independent farmers are already spread thinly, doing every job from bookkeeping, to HR, to tractor driving.<\/p>\n
He said: “Every time other items get thrown in, like this price cap, it does affect you. It does keep you up at night”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The policy is currently out for consultation, allowing interested parties to give their views. The idea is that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":763559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-763558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}