Bad Brexit leading to salad vegetable shortages

 A major cause of the shortage of tomatoes and green vegetables in our supermarkets is that, faced with escalating energy costs and market uncertainty, farmers and horticulturists in the UK did not see the point in investing in producing early salad vegetables. Agriculture ministers post-Brexit seem to have been more concerned about the appearance of rural Britain than its productivity. It is clearly time to repeat the advice of a Tory exile, a former land agent, of years ago:

CAP [the EU's common agricultural policy] led to tariff bars and cunning regulatory controls imposed to discourage free world trade in agricultural produce. Pre CAP, UK farmers negotiated guaranteed prices with MAFF annually. World trade in ag produce was free and if market prices fell below the agreed guaranteed price, UK farmers sent their receipts to MAFF and received a cheque for the difference. If world prices rose above the guaranteed price, no handouts were forthcoming. 

The system had the merit of being cheap to administer and did not involve the massive amounts of admin, the high costs to farmers in satellite pix, inspection fees and paperwork when they time would have been better spent farming.

This is surely the sort of support which farmers were expecting when they voted to revert to pre-common market conditions. They form just another group misled and let down by this government's rhetoric.