Evaluating Brexit’s impact on the social contributions made by agriculture

There is concern among part of the UK policy community that Brexit may damage the contribution that the farming industry makes to social networks, social capacity, community resilience and other aspects of social and cultural capital in rural areas. There is a perception that the current contributions may be particularly significant in the more remote and least densely populated parts of the UK. A lack of hard evidence could result in possible under- or over-estimates of the importance of agriculture’s social contributions to rural communities and thus inappropriate policy responses (over- or under-reacting) to mitigating any likely damage from Brexit. The Welsh Government commissioned a study2, the genesis of this paper, to examine the available evidence and to propose ways of filling gaps. The paper discusses the issued involved in identifying and evaluating evidence of agriculture’s social contributions and the proposals for further research to fill evidence gaps, with specific reference to Wales.