How climate change and red tape could be jeopardising UK access to affordable food

Published

4 months ago

December 13, 2024

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It might be tempting, given how much coverage has focused on it recently, to assume the forthcoming changes to inheritance tax regime are the single biggest issue facing farmers these days.

But the reality is these tax changes come at a moment of extraordinary pressure, with farmers having to contend with a swathe of unsettling issues, many of which could prove existential for their livelihoods.

Put them all together and you realise that for many of those marching in the streets in London, inheritance tax isn’t the only problem – it’s more like the last straw.

Why does this matter for the rest of us? In part because there’s a deeper story here.

For decades, this country’s level of food security has been more or less constant. This country has produced roughly 60 per cent of our own food for two decades (the figure was even higher in the 1980s). But farmers warn that given all the pressures they’re facing, that critical buffer could be about to be removed, with domestic production falling and dependence on imported food rising.

Whether that eventuates remains to be seen. As of 2023 the amount of food supplied domestically was still 62 per cent of everything we consumed. But now let’s consider the challenges facing farmers (even before we get to inheritance tax).

The first of them comes back to Brexit.

Following Britain’s departure from the EU, the government is making dramatic and far reaching changes to the way it supports farmers. For years, those payments, part of the EU-wide Common Agricultural Policy, were based on the amount of land farmed by each recipient.

Alongside these main farm payments there were other bolt-on schemes – Environmental Land Management schemes, to give them their category name – designed to encourage farmers to do more to look after local wildlife. But these schemes were always small in comparison to the main land-based farm payments.

There were problems aplenty with this old scheme. For one thing, all told, it amounted to a subsidy for land ownership rather than food production. Nonetheless, for many farmers it was an essential support, without which they would have had to sell up and stop producing food.

Under Michael Gove, Defra committed to far-reaching changes to these subsidies. Farms across the UK would get the same total amounts, he said, but instead of the majority being based on how much land they were farming, a growing portion would be environmental subsidies.

When Labour came into government it committed to accelerating this process, with the result that by 2027, fully 100 per cent of farm payments will be for environmental schemes.

Whether this is the right or wrong move is a matter of keen debate within the farming community. Many farmers argue that the net impact of environmental schemes is to reduce the amount of land being farmed for food, and that the schemes serve to reduce their crop yields rather than increasing them. Defra, and environmental advocates, argue that unless the soil and local habitats are preserved and improved, Britain faces ever diminishing harvests in future.

Speaking of harvests, that brings us to another issue farmers are having to contend with at the moment – poor crop yields. The past winter was exceptionally wet, with the upshot that the latest figures just released by Defra show 2024 was the second lowest wheat harvest since comparable records began in the early 1980s.

Now, the whole point of farming is that it’s weather dependent – no two years are alike. It’s quite conceivable that 2025’s harvest bounces back from this year’s. But one projection made by climate scientists is that the coming decades could be wetter and more volatile, spelling more trouble for farmers.

On top of this is another challenge: trade competition. Following Brexit, the UK has signed two trade deals with Australia and New Zealand, which raise the quotas of how much food each country can export to the UK. Look at trade data and you see a sharp increase in beef and dairy imports from Australia and New Zealand.

In other words, UK farmers are having to contend with more competition even as they contend with worse weather and drastic changes to their funding model.

Nor is this where the challenges end. Because we might also be in the midst of something else: a secular slowdown in farming productivity.

Look at a very, very long-range historic chart of crop yields in the UK. You see a few interesting features. For most of our history, from the Middle Ages through to today, the amount of wheat we could grow in a given hectare of land was pretty low and pretty constant.

Now look at what happened in the second half of the 20th century. Thanks to a combination of artificial fertilisers, combine harvesters and other technological leaps, yields leapt by 200 per cent.

This extraordinary leap is the story of British farming for the parents and grandparents of those family farms tending the land today: ever increasing yields even as the government provided large subsidies for farmers. It was, in terms of pure yields, the golden age for farms – fuelled in part by chemicals.

But now look at the far right hand side of the chart – the past 20 years or so. The line is no longer rising so fast. Farm productivity – at least based on this measure – has slowed quite markedly. Yields are no longer leaping in the way they once were.

Or, to put it another way, it’s getting tougher to generate a return for each hour of work and each pound of investment.

This might all seem miles away from the day-to-day debates on farming today. But each of these factors matters. Together, they help explain why things are getting tougher for farmers.

But there’s a broader issue at hand here. Despite having left the EU and implemented far reaching policies such as these, this country hasn’t really had a proper debate about food.

Do we prefer to subsidise farmers in an effort to maintain our domestic food supplies at 60 per cent of our consumption? Would we rather ditch those subsidies and rely on imports instead? Should we favour the long-term health of the environment over short term food production?

These are chewy questions – and ones we really ought to be debating a little more. This isn’t just about inheritance tax…

Politics

Kraken taps Mastercard to launch crypto debit cards in Europe, UK

Published

1 hour ago

April 9, 2025

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Kraken taps Mastercard to launch crypto debit cards in Europe, UK

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken has partnered with Mastercard to issue crypto debit cards across the United Kingdom and Europe, the company announced on April 8.

The partnership will enable the crypto exchange to expand its payment offerings by launching physical crypto debit cards.

The partnership comes as Kraken continues to pursue a license under the European Union’s regulatory framework, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA).

The debit card will allow users to spend cryptocurrencies and stablecoins directly. Kraken said the rollout will begin in the coming weeks, with a waitlist now open to customers.

This partnership builds on Kraken Pay’s growth

Kraken said its partnership with Mastercard builds on the rapid growth of Kraken Pay, a new tool that enables customers to send money from their Kraken account.

Launched in January 2025, Kraken Pay allows users to send more than 300 crypto assets to multiple countries worldwide. It also introduces a paylink feature that enables users to send payments through a simple URL.

Since launching the service, Kraken has seen more than 200,000 customers out of its 15 million user base activate Kraktag, a unique user identifier allowing owners to receive money without exposing full bank account details.

Crypto payments on the rise

“Crypto is evolving the payments industry, and we see a future where global commerce and everyday payments are underpinned by crypto,” Kraken co-CEO David Ripley said in a statement shared with Cointelegraph.

“Our clients want to be able to seamlessly pay for real-world goods and services with their crypto or stablecoins,” he said, adding:

“Partnering with Mastercard is a major step toward us bringing that vision to life. Together, we will unlock crypto’s true everyday utility, ensuring it remains undeniably relevant and usable long-term.”

This is a developing story, and further information will be added as it becomes available.

Magazine: 3 reasons Ethereum could turn a corner: Kain Warwick, X Hall of Flame

Politics

US gov’t actions give clue about upcoming crypto regulation

Published

2 hours ago

April 9, 2025

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US gov’t actions give clue about upcoming crypto regulation

The early days of the Trump administration saw a flurry of activity that could give the crypto industry an idea of forthcoming crypto regulations, namely that they may not be regulated as securities.

Practitioners have decried a lack of concrete change in the form of new rules and guidance. The skeptics have their reasons. The formation of the crypto task force, Trump’s crypto executive order, crypto czar David Sacks’ lone press conference, and the digital asset reserve has been criticized as mere theater.

The real work of regulating comes not in press conferences but in the guidance, enforcement, and rulemaking that support the structure of rules-based systems.

A faithful account of all of the cryptocurrency decisions from the Trump administration reveals a new approach to enforcement and regulation that could meaningfully affect the rights of operators in the United States.

Trump’s regulatory approach opens up banking to crypto

In the dog days of the Biden administration, a policy known as “Operation Chokepoint 2.0” became a major scandal in certain crypto media channels. The allegations were that, during the Obama administration, the Justice Department developed a program called Operation Choke Point that it used to surveil and curtail certain disfavored businesses like payday lenders and firearms dealers.

Some speculated that the Biden administration adopted the same policies for cryptocurrency companies. There was a lot of back and forth over this issue — some denied it ever happened, but many cryptocurrency firms and individuals lost access to banking services.

Whether this was a directive or simply an unforeseen consequence of other policies, many in the industry were incensed; the issue became politically charged.

As a result, one of the first steps the Trump administration took regarding crypto was to fix the industry’s debanking problem. This began only two days after Trump took office with Staff Accounting Bulletin 122 (SAB 122), a directive that repealed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) SAB 121 — which had effectively prohibited banks from holding cryptocurrencies by making it difficult and inefficient to do so.

On March 7, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released its own interpretive guidance, Letter 1183, itself undoing Letter 1179. The latter required banks to ask OCC’s permission to participate in certain crypto-native activities like custodying cryptocurrency, holding stablecoin reserve deposits and functioning as validation nodes.

On March 28, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) followed up with its own guidance. It rescinded the Biden era FIL-16-2022, which required FDIC-supervised institutions to notify the FDIC of their intent to dabble in crypto and provide information on possible risks.

Acting FDIC Chair Travis Hill also signaled that “banking regulators should not use reputational risk as a basis for supervisory criticisms” at all.

It may be difficult to separate the effects of these policies so early in the administration because banks are large institutions and move slowly. But across three agencies the rules have changed substantially and dramatically, which could have major effects on cryptocurrency access to banking services in the medium to long term.

Fully dismissed crypto cases

Virtually every pending SEC matter with a cryptocurrency defendant has been dropped. While nice for the targets, it doesn’t create much precedent that anyone can build off of. That said, the result does suggest that the underlying activities in those dropped cases won’t be pursued for enforcement, at least for the immediate future.

It’s helpful, then, to consider what activities have received implied license through this campaign of dropped enforcement.

There are a number of cases in which the SEC filed a complaint and litigated to varying degrees of resolution, which the commission either fully dropped or settled without admissions of wrongdoing on the part of the targets:

Feb. 27, 2025 — Coinbase Inc.
March 3, 2025 — Payward, Inc. (Kraken)
March 25, 2025 — Ripple Labs, Inc.
March 27, 2025 — Cumberland DRW LLC
March 27, 2025 — Consensys Software, Inc.

These cases revolved around the unregistered sale and offer of securities under the Securities Act of 1933, and acting unregistered as a broker, dealer, clearing agency and exchange. While the allegations and actors are different, the common thread between them is that none would be subject to the laws in question if the underlying assets were not themselves securities.

The sole exception is Consensys, which was accused of providing staking as a service without first registering it as a security. While the texture of this claim is familiar, the activity is somewhat different than the pure offer and sale of securities.

This dismissal, along with the related guidance concerning mining pools, suggests that the current SEC does not consider most token-generating activities to be investment contracts, either.

Stayed pending resolution

Other cases have been filed in court and halted through joint motions to pause the suits. This is presumably in anticipation of eventually dismissing them, but since they have not yet been dismissed, it is hard to say for sure.

Feb. 11, 2025 — Binance and Changpeng Zhao (CZ)
Feb. 25, 2025 — Tron Foundation and Justin Sun
April 2, 2025 — Gemini Trust Company, LLC

These cases mostly differ from the ones that have already been dropped in that, in the case of Binance and Tron, the government brought allegations not just of unregistered operation but of actual fraud as well. The pause indicates the government may be conciliatory, but the aggravating nature of these allegations is stalling resolution.

Gemini fits more naturally into the category above, and it is not clear why that case has not yet been dropped.

SEC drops investigations into crypto firms

There are other cases where the SEC opened investigations and even issued Wells notices indicating potential enforcement. However, the commission has reportedly ceased investigations after Trump’s inauguration.

Feb. 21, 2025 — Robinhood Crypto, LLC
Feb. 21, 2025 — Ozone Networks, Inc. (OpenSea)
Feb. 25, 2025 — Universal Navigation Inc. (Uniswap Labs)
March 3, 2025 — Yuga Labs

The investigations were focused around allegations that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were securities, or that intermediaries like Robinhood or Uniswap were operating as unregistered brokers.

While little has come of these actions, on balance they match the trend suggested above.

What the dismissals say quietly

None of the dismissals could be considered an SEC edict that certain crypto activities are legal. But taken together, these dismissals, pauses and dropped investigations paint a clear picture of how the current SEC thinks about cryptocurrency’s place in securities regimes.

The SEC dropped charges where allegations revolved around operating as a broker, dealer, clearing house or exchange. This is consistent with the position that the underlying assets themselves are not securities.

The same is true about cases of issuance. The commission dropped charges alleging that an entity issued securities in the form of cryptocurrency tokens.

Still, claims of fraud and market manipulation have not yet been dropped. This might indicate a reticence among commission attorneys to let these claims go. Still, if the assets at hand are not securities, the SEC will not be the correct agency to bring those claims, and so, if the SEC is consistent, then it will likely drop these cases too.

Furthermore, in three official statements, the SEC notified the public that traditional memecoins, proof-of-work mining, including pooled mining, and traditional “covered” or asset-backed stablecoins denominated in dollars are not subject to securities laws.

This, alongside the chain of dismissals, suggests that secondary market sales of fungible cryptocurrency tokens, NFTs, and staking-as-a-service products are also outside of the scope of traditional securities law.

Some might argue that this is more confusing than clarifying, but applying the principle of Occam’s Razor would suggest the SEC simply does not consider cryptocurrency assets to be subject to securities laws as currently construed.

But what does it all mean?

“Flood the Zone” is a tactic that Trump strategist Steve Bannon made famous during the president’s first term, and it might now apply to the manic flurry of policy and dismissals over the past few months.

Take any one at face value and it would be easy to discount the project as insubstantial, but together they arguably represent a sea change in the crypto policy of the United States government.

Banks, once effectively prohibited from holding cryptocurrencies, are now unrestrained. Companies once bogged down in litigation are now free. They may well be followed by new entrants comforted by their survival.

At a biweekly clip, the SEC is releasing new guidance as to which products exist outside its remit. And Trump nominee Paul Atkins isn’t even in the door yet.

This is a dramatically improved regulatory environment, and there are now affirmatively legal paths through which industry participants can do business onchain.

Magazine: 3 reasons Ethereum could turn a corner: Kain Warwick, X Hall of Flame

Politics

Thailand targets foreign crypto P2P services in new anti-crime laws

Published

2 hours ago

April 9, 2025

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Thailand targets foreign crypto P2P services in new anti-crime laws

Thailand is beefing up measures to combat online crimes involving digital assets by passing new amendments to several national laws.

Thailand’s cabinet on April 8 passed a resolution approving amendments to emergency decrees on digital asset businesses and on measures for cybercrime prevention, the Thai Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced.

As part of the new laws, Thai regulators aim to strengthen measures for combating digital asset mule accounts in banks, restrict foreign cryptocurrency peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms and introduce strict financial penalties of as much as $8,700 and imprisonment of up to three years.

The new laws are expected to be enforced in the near future, and will take effect after being published in the Royal Thai Government Gazette, the announcement stated.

Key measures to combat mule accounts and money laundering

The new regulations include stringent measures for crypto asset service providers (CASPs), requiring them to collect and report information on transactions linked to online scams and suspend them.

The amendments also empower Thai authorities to block foreign CASPs from providing services to local users, further tightening controls against money laundering activities.

The new laws also have significant implications for non-crypto businesses in Thailand, imposing additional joint responsibilities on commercial banks, telecom providers and social media service providers. The SEC stated:

“Requiring commercial banks, telephone and telecommunications network providers, social media service providers and digital asset business operators to take joint responsibilities for damages caused by cybercrimes if they fail to comply with the standards or measures for preventing cybercrimes as specified by regulatory authorities.”

Restrictions for foreign crypto P2P services

The new laws explicitly aim to “deter and prevent” foreign crypto P2P service providers, which are “qualified as digital asset exchanges under the Digital Asset Business Law,” according to the SEC.

Additionally, the laws intended to restrict other types of foreign CASPs from providing services to investors in Thailand, the announcement said.

Thailand’s latest regulatory developments apparently aim to restrict crypto P2P transactions to only local P2P providers in an effort to avoid additional risks potentially stemming from foreign CASPs.

Cointelegraph approached the Thai SEC and crypto exchange Binance for comments regarding the restrictions but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Meanwhile, local regulators have expressed interest in growing cryptocurrency adoption by approving crypto payment trials in certain cities like Phuket and considering approvals of crypto exchange-traded funds.

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