Regional funding has helped Yorkshire; now can the EU help our rhubarb farmers?

I spent this morning in Sheffield, which looks more impressive each time I visit, at the launch of the EU Regional Funding for Yorkshire up to 2013, with Commissionor Daunta Hübner and John Healey MP giving the key note speeches. South Yorkshire has benefitted the most due to its Objective One status over several years now and it has been key reason behind the area’s impressive economic regeneration. The level of funding Yorkshire will receive will now drop because of enlargement, but the region will still receive a substantial amount of money to help ensure its growth.

Following that I drove to Janet Oldroyd’s farm in Carlton to learn more about how Yorkshire rhubarb is produced. Huge, dark sheds contain thousands of stems of forced rhubarb, with the eerie silence inside only punctured by the popping of the stems through their pods.

As I have mentioned before, Janet and the other rhubarb growers are applying for Protected Designation of Origin status, which requires products to have features and characteristics which must be due to the geographical area.

Yorkshire rhubarb is so renown because the frost, soil and rainfall combine to create the perfect conditions for forced rhubarb, while the special techniques accrued by generations of growers ensure that it cannot be replicated.

Rising temperatures mean that it is becoming increasingly costly for growers to produce consistently large harvests, which makes it all the more important that Yorkshire rhubarb is awarded PDO status, so that growers can charge the price their product deserves and consumers can buy it, confident they are getting the real thing.

Rhubarb and chickens

After Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver’s investigations into chicken farming, there is much controversey about the goings on in some farm sheds but there has been no such concerns for the rhubarb growers in Yorkshire.

Grown in dark sheds, the first crop of Yorkshire forced rhubarb is currently being harvested and some of it will no doubt be in a crumble by this Sunday.

This time next year, Yorkshire rhubarb could well be afforded the same status as Parma ham and champagne if the European Commission decides to award it Protected Designation of Origin status.

As I have previously mentioned, Swaledale cheese currently has Yorkshire’s only PDO, something which will hopefully change during this year or the next, with Wensleydale cheese also seeking such status. In the meantime, best wishes to the farmers and hopefully this year’s rhubarb will be a better crop than last year’s, which suffered because of unusually warm temperatures.

Returning to the subject of chickens, the EU has now confirmed that it will be asking all member states to stick to their agreement to end the battery farming of chickens by 2012, despite calls from the industry for a delay.

The directive which will ban the use of caged chickens was formally adopted in 1999, giving the industry 12 years of preparation, so they cannot claim they have not been warned. As Channel Four’s series of programmes highlighted, for many people there are still serious ethical questions about the farming of some chickens but by 2012, the EU will have at least eradicated the very cruellest method, battery farming.

Two famous Yorkshire food products are closer to being recognised in the same light as champagne and Parma ham.

Defra has approved Yorkshire rhubarb growers’ application for Protected Designation of Origin status while Wensleydale Cheese is due to present its application to the Commission in a couple of weeks barring any last minute objections.

The Yorkshire rhubarb application is already in the hands of the European Commission who have a year to consider the case. Should it be approved then the next stage is six-month period for objections to come in from other rhubarb growers across Europe.

Janet Oldroyd, who is organising the campaign, expects some objections to come in from the Netherlands but the name they have applied to protect - Traditional Indoor
Grown Yorkshire Rhubarb – is hopefully specific enough to avoid too much contention.

Having given the application a brief read the intricacies, attention to detail and sheer effort the growers go to produce their rhubarb is astonishing; even the local wool manufactures have a part to play!

Currently just one Yorkshire product boasts a PDO (Swaledale cheese near Richmond) which is pretty dismal considering the rich culture of food the region boasts but if the rhubarb growers and Wensleydale makers are successful lets hope others will be encouraged to apply for the prestigious status.

The EU’s Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) scheme appears to have finally caught the imaginination in the UK.

Last year, Yorkshire’s Wensleydale cheese began a campaign for the recognition the likes of champagne, parma ham, roquefort and Gorgonzola have already won.

Earlier this month Wensleydale progressed to the next stage of their campaign by taking 14,000 signatures of support (including mine) to the House of Commons in a bid to win the backing it needs from Defra before taking its case to Europe.

Now Yorkshire’s famous rhubarb triangle is aiming for PDO status. The area between Leeds, Pontefract and Wakefield was once responsible for over 90% of the world's rhubarb, which is renown for its forced growth in the dark and its subsequent sweeter, longer stalks (for more on how the rhubarb is grown click here and here).

Both rhubarb and Wensleydale cheese fully deserve to be recognised with a PDO, as they are unique products that only specific parts of Yorkshire can produce and should be protected from poor quality imitators.

Readers with a good memory might remember that the manafacturers of Yorkshire Feta, had to change their name after Greek feta was awarded a PDO. Shepherds Purse have settled on a new name, Fine Fettle Yorkshire, which will be available again from May.

The Yorkshire Post has launched a campaign to have Wensleydale cheese given Protected Designation of Origin status by the EU. If awarded a PDO, Wensleydale will be afforded the same protection that the likes of champagne, parma ham and feta cheese currently enjoy. This means imitations would not be able to call themselves by the same name, indeed only cheese produced in Wensleydale could call itself Wensleydale.

You can read more about the benefits of a PDO and what it would do for Wensleydale cheese by reading the Yorkshire Post’s articles here.

As a country, and in particular a county, we have been slow to catch on to the benefits that the PDO offers, with France and Italy having hundreds more products protected than Britian. This is a very worthwhile campaign and one you can show your support of by signing the Yorkshire Post’s online petition here.

A letter to the Lancashire Evening Telegraph on the Yorkshire feta court case from my colleague, Gary Titley MEP:

Judy Bell lost her case in the European Court of Justice to call her Yorkshire cheese "feta" but she was fighting on the same premise as the Lincolnshire sausage campaign, which came to Brussels last month asking for their name to be safeguarded by European law.

Commentators have said that Europe's restriction on "Yorkshire feta" was unnecessary and "Europe gone mad" but I guarantee they would feel the same outrage if Spanish and German butchers branded their chorizo and bratwurst "Lincolnshire sausages."

The rule to protect the origin of food works just as effectively to safeguard our British produce as it does for other European countries.

There's been some coverage in our regional papers (both the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post) of a debate about whether feta cheese has to come from Greece in order to be called 'feta'. But there's precious little information provided in the articles in order for readers to get a handle on the story - so here's some background.

The ‘Protected Designation of Origin’ scheme is an agreement among all EU countries to identify and protect certain unique local foods across the European common market. As with all EU decisions, the scheme was agreed by elected governments and elected MEPs – not by the Commission, whose job is only to carry out the agreement.

Many UK products are protected in this way – including West Country farmhouse cheddar, Jersey Royal potatoes, and Cornish clotted cream. You can buy a bottle of Newcastle Brown anywhere in Europe and be confident that it really was brewed in Newcastle. The same goes for Normandy camembert, Black Forest ham and so on.

There's currently a debate about whether Greek ‘feta’ cheese should be added to the list of specialities. Britain isn't the only country which thinks ‘feta’ is more of a generic term these days: both Germany and Denmark have also asked the courts to adjudicate, and a judgement is expected later this year. So it's not a feta-ccompli.