G’s Marketing, KG Growers and Worldwide Fruit have ranked in the top 10 of Farmer Controlled Businesses (FCBs), according to statistics released by the English Farming & Food Partnership (EFFP) on Tuesday.

International links, including growing abroad, wider marketing arrangements and variety trials were mooted as ways to integrate producers further into the supply chain.

“But overall British farming and the food industry is losing out to competition from abroad at an increasingly alarming scale,” said Siôn Roberts, EFFP ceo.

The gap between food produced in the UK and imported from abroad narrowed in the 1980s-90s, but is on course to quadruple to £20 billion by 2010, including increases in imports of vegetables, mushrooms and tomatoes.

“Much of the growth in the food market has been in value and not volume, and that value is being largely added and almost completely captured downstream from the farm gate,” he said. “Farmers must become increasingly involved in this process if they want to share the rewards from it.”

One solution discussed at the London EFFP conference was to build on the success of farmers’ markets and internet marketing to improve the connections between producers and their market.

Roberts said: “We believe new forms of working will be needed that bring the intellectual and financial capital; first to identify and then exploit strategic opportunities within the sector.”

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