§ 9. Mr. Roger EvansTo ask the Secretary of State for Wales what criteria he proposes to adopt to identify specialist cereal growers for the purposes of the cereals regime in Wales; and if he will make a statement.
§ Mr. RedwoodI announced on Friday the arrangements that I propose for 1993–94—a division into two regions based on land suitability for growing winter cereals, and cropping patterns in the 1989–91 growing years.
§ Mr. EvansI thank my right hon. Friend for that announcement, but the criteria are complex. Why could he not have approached the matter on the basis of simply identifying individual farms?
§ Mr. RedwoodThe European Community regulation does not permit us to single out individual specialist growers or farms for support. I hope that when my hon. Friend studies the detail he will see that we have endeavoured to produce the right answers on covering specialist growers in the map that we sketched. As my hon. Friend will have noticed, we are out to consultation on the thrust of the matter of the proposals, so if he has a hard case or a difficulty, I hope that he will make his representations either to me or to the Welsh divisional office, which will be only too willing to help his farmers or those in the constituencies of other hon. Members.