Economy, Trade, and Rural Affairs Committee

“[Speaker: Lesley Griffiths] What we've made very clear, and you're from the farming community and I think the majority of farmers would say that the common agricultural policy hasn't done what it should have done for the Welsh agricultural sector—it's not made it as competitive as it should be or as productive as it should be. And I think the sustainable farming scheme, in the beginning when we started proposing it, people perhaps understood what we were trying to do around environmental goods and clearly food production—food is not a public good. It’s got a market, and therefore, public goods have to be things that don’t have markets: so, your soil quality, your air quality, your water quality.”