Trade with other countries gives us choice and flexibility.

Those foods that we can’t grow or produce in Wales we can import – we don’t have the climate or other conditions to grow everything so it is better that we import from countries that specialise in those things.

Trade also means that we can offset risk if our own production fails.

But as the UK negotiates to secure trade deals post-Brexit, we mustn’t hand over more power to the markets to drive down costs and join the race to the bottom.

The Agriculture Bill should have created conditions to deliver a compelling vision for the future of British farming.

The defeat of a Lords amendments aimed at protecting standards is a blow to many who believed we could be a world leader in sustainable farming.

Many Welsh MPs voted against the expressed concerns of their farming constituencies and in so doing they undermined the people who work the land.

We mustn’t forget that modern food regulations were introduced to combat appalling practices in food production.

Admittedly it was many years ago in ‘The Expedition of Humphry Clinker’ (1771), that Tobias Smollett wrote: “The bread I eat in London is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.

“The good people are not ignorant of this adulteration; but they prefer it to wholesome bread, because it is whiter than the meal of corn. Thus they sacrifice their taste and their health . . . to a most absurd gratification of a misjudged eye; and the miller or the baker is obliged to poison them and their families, in order to live by his profession.’’

According to historians, 75 per cent of food sold in Victorian England was adulterated.

We have come a long way since then and farming minister Victoria Prentis has pledged that the Government will uphold UK standards in any future trade deals.

She argues that amendments were not needed since the government had already promised to uphold UK standards in future trade deals.

On that promise she will be held to account.