Is bankrupting small farmers, booting them off the land, really the best way to protect food security in Wales?

Business secretary Steve Reed is right when he states that food security is national security. But evidently he and the Chancellor haven’t properly thought through the consequences of their new inheritance tax policy that would drive our family farmers here in Pembrokeshire and beyond, people who feed us day in day out, off the land.

You only need to look at the fallout from the devastating floods in Spain, where many high value crops were submerged and destroyed, to understand how relying on imported food to keep us fed could have major consequences for supply and prices when there is a disaster on this scale.

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Imposing inheritance tax on farmland, making it more expensive to produce food, will jeopardise our food security or penalise consumers, on indeed both.

We are nowhere near self-sufficient in food and taxing the next generation of farmers and burdening them with debt will only result in less food production.

This punitive and ill thought-out measure will raise little for Treasury coffers but risks forcing family farmers to sell up, tearing at the very fabric of rural Wales.

The family farming model that has existed for centuries faces destruction in a single generation.

Rather than land being handed down within a family, a farm may have to be sold off and swallowed up by faceless agri-businesses who have bought so much land around the world.

If farmers do pass the land on to their children, the tax bill could eat up most of the income made by the farm.

A fairer and more lucrative approach from government would be to start by taxing and better regulating the bigger players in the supply chain, where the real profits are made.

Or to close the loophole whereby hedge fund managers and those who have no intention of working the land buy it solely to avoid tax, which inflates land prices so genuine farmers are priced out.

Without family farmers, these time-honoured custodians of the countryside, there would be no green and pleasant land, it would more likely be covered in solar panels as this is an easy option for investors. Is this the Wales that we want?

Agriculture is providing a necessary end-product for us: food. Don’t tax the hand that feeds you Chancellor.