IT may be cheaper and easier long-term to revert to a European-style system of direct support for UK farmers, says Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger.

He claims as long as the regime included an element of capping for larger estates it would help maintain and improve the country’s food security.

Before Brexit UK farmers received more than £3billion annually in EU support under an acreage-based system.

The Government is phasing out these payments and intends to reward farmers for environmental improvements, although Defra has still failed to produce all the details of a comprehensive farming policy.

Farmers were already warning they would be significantly worse off than they were under the EU scheme even before the energy crisis sent input costs soaring.

They now say continuing uncertainty over the small print of the Government’s plans was leading them to hold back on investing in potentially growth-boosting technologies.

Mr Liddell-Grainger says it is time to bin the new green farming policy and revert to a support system that would enable farmers to stay in business profitably.

He said: “Events in Ukraine together with the increasingly evident effects of climate change have thrown the whole question of our food supplies into very sharp focus.

“We can no longer rely on imports for 45 per cent of our food when we are seeing harvests of grain, edible oils, fruit and vegetables drastically reduced everywhere by drought and freak weather events.

“If you factor in the disruption caused by the war in Ukraine we are in a highly precarious situation and more reliant on UK farmers than we have been at any time since World War Two.

“The massive hike in input costs has not fully worked through into the UK’s farming economy but there seems little doubt that once it has we are going to see producers quitting the sector in droves because they will simply be unable to remain profitable.

“That makes it abundantly clear to me that instead of pandering to the environmentalists with policies which may or may not deliver incomes upon which farmers can survive we must absolutely ensure that farmers are going to be there producing our food in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time.

“That means bringing back the kind of safety net that has been underwriting European farming for more than half a century - and doing so pretty successfully."