Welsh Conservative shadow cabinet secretary for rural affairs, Samuel Kurtz MS, said the SFS failed to prioritise food production and food security and was “not fit for purpose”.
“Even in its revised form it is projected to result in job losses, reduced livestock numbers and declining farm business incomes across Wales,” he said.
The Tories had pledged to urgently review and replace the SFS with a ‘food security first’ scheme, he said.
Plaid Cymru’s spokesperson on rural affairs Llyr Gruffydd MS said while the SFS was now “much better” than the original proposal “there’s still much work to do”.
“We have already called for a more gradual transition to the new scheme, giving the sector more time to adapt,” he said, adding that a Plaid Cymru government would also “provide multi-year funding certainty for agriculture rather than the current twelve-month commitment from Labour”.
A Reform UK Wales spokesperson said the SFS “doesn’t have the confidence of farmers and is set to deal a hammer blow to the rural economy”.
“The SFS needs to be changed to put food production and farmers at its centre, not green targets,” he said.
Welsh Liberal Democrats leader Jane Dodds MS said the SFS gave “some much needed short term guarantees” to farmers “under sustained pressure from all corners”.
But it was “not the scheme that the Welsh Lib Dems would have designed” and farmers needed “long term solutions”.
The Green Party’s leader in Wales, Anthony Slaughter, said the government “needs to do much more to properly support farmers to make the changes our country and planet needs”.
“The government and the public are asking for a lot so it can’t be done on the cheap. The scale of the transition means the scale of funding has to match – I’m not sure we’ve seen that commitment yet.”