Ordering farmers to grow tomatoes won’t make us any richer

Should we cover Britain with greenhouses so that we can be self-sufficient in tomatoes? That seems to be the latest thrust of the government’s see-sawing farming, environment and food policy. Government advisers appear to have been looking longingly across the North Sea to the Netherlands, which has become one of Europe’s leading salad producers thanks to vast heated glasshouses. In Britain, by contrast, a lot of market gardening has gone to the wall, to the point where we grow only 23 per cent of our cucumbers and 15 per cent of our tomatoes.

It might be appealing to think that we could protect consumers from rising food prices by bringing much more food production onshore. But if we want to be a wealthy country we would be better off with a government which didn’t try to determine from Whitehall what our agriculturalists and industrialists should be doing with their time – and left it to them and the market to determine.