Apr
17
The Tragic Waste of a Great Asset
April 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
July 2005
by Ashley Mote
In years gone by, the few weeks of high summer and early autumn were filled with harvesting. First it was the cereal crops, then sugar beet.
All the smells and sounds of frantic activity assaulted the senses from almost every field you passed. Huge combines and farm trailers clogged the country lanes, straw littered the hedgerows and mud was strewn everywhere after a rainstorm.
Farmers engaged in a race against time as they secured their incomes for the next twelve months.
Our green and pleasant land had slowly changed from green to golden over the spring and summer. It was now about to turn from golden to brown as autumn approached. These familiar seasonal patterns felt comfortable and right. This was the way things should be.
Not any more.
The sugar beet industry has almost disappeared, completely in many places. Late spring now sees our lattice-work of small fields turned into large areas of what look like mustard farms. By mid-summer they have become nightmarish purple Gauguin landscapes as farmers harvest unlimited quantities of oil-seed rape far beyond our needs, and much of which is wasted.
Meanwhile, 14 million acres of prime farmland – an areas the size of the West Midlands – is ‘set aside’, uncultivated and unused. Over a thousand people a week are leaving agriculture and related food production industries. Most farmers are diversifying just to survive. One a week commits suicide.
Why has all this happened?
You don’t really need me to tell you, do you? No, I thought not.
The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy has wiped out swathes of our farming and imposed rules and regulations that are destroying a once thriving industry.
Do you suppose the farmers of southern Europe are observing the rules that have closed down our small abattoirs, and now require us to identify precisely which hens laid which eggs?
The BBC Food Programme asked a Spanish butcher what would happen if an official told him to observe EU rules on food hygiene and slaughter. The interviewer was laughed off the premises.
We pay £15 billion every year into the CAP, which extends its largesse to olive growers and tobacco farmers who claim for so much acreage that it must extend far into the seas around their coasts.
Food prices are 44% higher in the EU than they would be without the CAP. Because of tariffs and quotas, milk costs 70% more than it should, beef 221% more and sugar 94 % more, according to OECD figures.
* * *
Brussels has decided that agricultural production should be concentrated elsewhere across the EU. The British Isles must focus on protecting the rural environment. For us, food production is now a sideshow. What matters is protecting the countryside.
For those with a mind for the detail, let me briefly explain that this change has been imposed on farmers by gradually disconnecting farm subsidies for food production. The final steps are being taken now.
In the past, and even after we joined the EU, farmers received subsidies for certain types of food production. This ensured that we produced enough of the key basic foodstuffs for our needs.
In future, farmers will receive a single farm payment and what they do after that is largely up to them. But the emphasis is not on food. Instead, it is on what is now known – in politically correct terms – as ‘sustainable rural development’.
Water efficiency awards, woodland management schemes, environmental sensitivity programmes, rural diversification schemes are springing up everywhere – and much else of similar ilk. Worthy though some of these schemes and ideas might be, they are going to change our landscape as much as weeds and new housing ever did.
The despairing rhyming letter (below) from a Midlands farmer says it all.
_________________________________________________________
Generations of my family have worked the land I farm
The landscape hasn’t changed a bit, and no-one comes to harm.
But suddenly it seems I have now become inept
At working in the countryside and knowing how it’s kept.
Will complying with the regulations mean I have to work much harder
Keeping things all spick and span, till we’ve an empty Euro larder?
Farming’s produce and commitment are proven two to none
Yet the increase in bureaucracy will one day see them gone.
The countryside was working well, and the case for my defence
Is that, unlike politicians, we blend work with common sense.
Ian Stafford, Derbyshire
__________________________________________________________
* * *
Four-fifths of all the land in England and Wales is rural. The figure is even higher in Scotland. Nearly three-quarters of it is actively farmed – or at least it was until recently. British agriculture is the corner-stone of the food industry – a statement so blisteringly obvious it seems almost pointless to mention it.
But in this context I must. Consider this…
Suppose we lived on an island with a climate and landscape that did not support farming? Suppose all our food came from a foreign country? What would that do to our ability to ensure we were properly fed, had access to a balance diet, kept food costs within reach of even the poorest in society? Not a lot.
But that is the direction in which we are going. One day, now in the foreseeable future, we will have become largely dependent on food imports.
Yet we have some of the best farmland to be found anywhere in the world. It includes some of the best wet grassland in Western Europe, ideal for the production of cattle and sheep. We have some of the most hard-working, knowledgeable farmers, and some of the best agricultural research facilities. Our crops and livestock are as good as any produced anywhere, and we sell breeding stock all over the world.
Yet we find ourselves in the astounding situation of no longer being self-sufficient in the production of milk and dairy products. We are permitted to produce only some 80% of the dairy produce we require. Our meat industry has been crucified on the altar of foot-and-mouth disease of a few years ago and still struggles to recover. And to add to this insanity, thousands of tons of good food are thrown away every year. They are not even given to the Third World.
Any organisation which has in the recent past paid farmers up to £360 a year for every 2.5 acres they leave fallow, that issued more than 26,000 words on the production and distribution of duck eggs, or 2,000 words on the permitted length, circumference, curvature and crookedness of cucumbers, seriously needs its collective head examined.
Is it any wonder the drive towards an environmentally friendly countryside has been something of a disaster? Past government policy has also encouraged the grubbing of hedgerows, the drainage of marshlands, and the wholesale destruction of wild-life habitats. It has changed the British landscape.
Intensive, fertiliser-based methods of farming were positively encouraged by the CAP because that’s what suited the rest of the EU. But the consequences here of pouring chemicals onto our already productive and fertile land have been counter-productive.
Now, having done so much environmental damage, the policy has changed. Today, water purity is everything. In future farmers will be paid for maintaining their land in good agricultural and environmental condition. Exactly what that means on each farm will be determined by – again you’ve guessed it – government officials. They will have more than 20 different criteria to apply in each case – from the management of waterlogged soil and grass clearance, to the maintenance of rights of way and monuments.
Take the simple business of hedge-cutting. Between March and July it will be banned to protect nesting birds. A protection zone must be created around hedges, ditches and watercourses just under two yards from the mid-point of the feature. Instead of being good for wildlife, experts predict that such protection zones could wipe out some of Britain’s most endangered wild flowers.
Even worse is the exception clause. These zones do not apply where hedges have been removed. So the law of unintended consequences will kick in and more hedgerows disappear.
If a farmer fails any of these tests he loses his subsidy support. He can appeal, of course, but only to the government department that made the decision against him in the first place.
Meanwhile, the public’s right to roam and enjoy the countryside has become statute law, although little mention was made of the infringement of privacy involved, nor how the proper use of pathways was to be policed.
Yet this concern for enjoyment of the countryside does not apparently extend to the people who live there. Farmers and others can no longer enjoy clearing vermin from the land by hunting with dogs.
* * *
Our farmers are – quite literally – the salt of the earth. Left to their own devices, they do not need anyone to tell them what they may produce, nor in what quantities, nor to what standard, nor at what price, and all without regard for the needs of the marketplace. Such interference has already led to catastrophe. No one but politicians could have ruined so much for so many so quickly.
British farmers deserve the right to use their land to grow what they want, how they want, where they want – as they see fit and without interference. They are good at it!
Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 5 November 1940: “Every endeavour must be made to produce the greatest volume of food of which this fertile land is capable.�
As the first shots were fired in the American War of Independence in 1775, Dr Benjamin Rush, a civic leader in Pennsylvania said: “A people dependent on foreigners for food must always be subject to them.�
They were right then, and they are right now.
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