n Can the food chain bridge the chasm of society wanting one thing and UK farmers providing another? Helen Gregory reports There's a severe weather warning predicted for European agriculture. And farmers look set to be blown about in the storm. At the Congress of European Agriculture in Belfast, farmers were given stark warnings about the "gale force" of change. But they were also offered plenty of advice about dealing with it ­ by opening up their farms for tourists or training their wives to be supermarket food consultants. And although farmers were told to move with the times, they were also painted as the victims. Consumers were often portrayed as cynical, demanding, and ignorant "they say they want something but buy another", said one delegate, or "they say they want a different type of production, but don't want to pay for it". NFU president Ben Gill was blunt in his assessment: "There's a chasm between society and the rural environment. They don't understand what food production is about. If we don't get it across to them, we will all go down the spiral into oblivion." Both he and Brid Rodgers, minister of agriculture and rural development in Northern Ireland, set the tone when they stressed that nothing would stay the same. "We cannot prevent change, we probably cannot even manage change, but what we can do is manage our response to change and consider every challenge not just as a threat, but as an opportunity," said Rodgers ominously. She stressed, however, that this change mustn't cause damage to the rural way of life and had to manage to maintain consumer trust. Gill reiterated that the industry faced more change than it had since the war. "For us all the winds of change are strong ­ if not gale force. Resisting them is all but impossible." He said the foot and mouth outbreak had taught the industry just how interdependent parts of the food chain were on each other and added that everyone faced the "same desperate challenge" of extracting more income. "We all face the simple opportunity of creating and sustaining profitable businesses. For too long the word profitability has been regarded by some as a dirty word. This is nonsense. Without a profit, sustainability in every sense of the word cannot exist." Most agreed with COGECA head Mario Campli who reckoned one way of accommodating change was for the industry to make consumers aware of the processes behind the products. "We need to make consumers take food back to its origins," he said. "Production processes need to be as visible and recognisable as possible." Manufacturers took little flak from the farmers, but Birds Eye Wall's business director Chris Pomfret was surprisingly candid when he admitted: "With all the bad run of issues concerning food in the UK, is it any surprise the food chain is not trusted anymore?" Pomfret said meeting consumer needs had to take precedence over everything else. "Farmers, retailers, suppliers and consumers need to work together. It's not a conflict. Farmers can work with chains like ours successfully. Our future survival is in the hands of farmers." But Pomfret added one note of caution and said Birds Eye Wall's could not be overly compassionate. "You can't expect a major economic entity to do more than its competitors or the government." One of the retailers at the congress, Tesco, was also insistent that it fitted neatly and harmoniously into the food chain. However, one Polish delegate attacked supermarkets for destroying agriculture in Poland ­ a claim strenuously denied by Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Tesco's group director of corporate affairs. She said working with companies in different markets could be useful for farmers who could learn how to do things which would help them expand their market. "There's potential if farmers are willing to think about what consumers want to expand their range through supermarkets." Neville-Rolfe explained that the company planned its business around social changes. In the 1980s, shoppers were worried about the rain forests and Tesco shoppers were into healthy eating, while in the 1990s when job security reduced, value lines became more popular. By 2000 people were more worried about food safety and GMs, and Tesco customers were buying organics and looking to the company to produce codes of practice on animal welfare. She added: "We can't manipulate the market ­ we have to learn to follow consumer trends. By identifying them we can create markets." She said current trends showed that UK consumers were eating more of some products, such as poultry, burgers and ethnic food, but that there was a decline in consumption of joints of meat, beef and desserts. But although this might be bad news for some farmers, she insisted that other products took their place and said Tesco was working more collaboratively with suppliers. She used the example of lettuce growers having access to south east store sales in order to judge picking times. One note of caution was sounded by Robert Napier, chief executive of the World Wide Fund for Nature, who said the group feared that the next crisis in farming could come from damaging the environmental quality of soil, air or water. He told sceptical delegates: "The countryside is being both abandoned and over-used. Not enough value is added in rural areas and processing is done elsewhere. Farmers are in a weak bargaining position and get conflicting signals of what society wants." He criticised current subsidies and said farmers needed more functions than just producing food. "There are some hard deals to be struck between farmers and taxpayers about what they'll pay for and what farmers will deliver." He called on them to manage the countryside in a holistic way and suggested the future could involve local processing plants and more co-operatives. But farmers seemed to find his plea confrontational and it was obvious the fight for survival was at the forefront of their minds. European agriculture commissioner Franz Fischler agreed that every country had the right to choose its own agriculture policies, which had to be centred around the consumer. "We want a system that rewards farmers for providing what consumers want." This was echoed by DEFRA secretary of state Margaret Beckett who bullishly said she was keen for potential money saved from reducing state handouts under the CAP to be spent on rural development programmes. Her colleague, food and farming minister Lord Whitty, agreed that "slowly and irreversibly" Europe was learning to think in new ways about agriculture policy. And he spoke in grandiose terms about determining change, "so that changes move towards sustainable and environmentally beneficial forms of farming". Beckett predicted a future with more organic farming and more of a land management aspect to food production. "There'll be changes in the rural economy and a different kind of role for farming­with greater local flexibility within freer trade." She suggested new technology was a way of farmers gaining a competitive edge, along with energy crops as one of the alternatives to conventional farming. This was a conclusion reached by most ­- that farmers' position in the food chain would change, but that despite the pressure, this could be for the better. To accommodate this, farmers were encouraged to open up their farms to the public, or offer meals under the "multifunctionality" label. In Austria, farmers wives had trained to be food consultants under a government scheme, while in New Zealand, 60% of farmers were already hooked up to the net. One farm trebled its income six months after advertising itself as a bed and breakfast on the net. Belfast's meeting revealed the passion and good intentions, but it's going to take action as well as words to help farmers weather the storm. {{NEWS }}