permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Farmed Out - monbiot.com <https://www.monbiot.com>
------------------------------

Farmed Out <https://www.monbiot.com/2018/10/12/farmed-out/>

Posted: 12 Oct 2018 02:39 AM PDT

The government’s Agriculture Bill seeks to replace regulation with public
money. Who will contest this new protection racket?

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 10th October 2018



I’m a Remainer, but there’s one result of Brexit I can’t wait to see:
leaving the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. This is the farm subsidy
system that spends €50 billion a year
<https://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/sites/agriculture/files/cap-post-2013/graphs/graph1_en.pdf>
on achieving none of its objectives.

It is among the most powerful drivers of environmental destruction in the
northern hemisphere. Because payments are made only for land that’s in
“agricultural condition”, the system creates a perverse incentive to clear
wildlife habitats, even in places unsuitable for farming, to produce the
empty ground that qualifies for public money. These payments have led to
the destruction of hundreds of thousands of hectares of magnificent wild
places
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/21/waste-cash-leavers-in-out-land-subsidie>
across the EU.

It is also, arguably, the most regressive transfer of public money in the
modern world. Farmers are paid by the hectare for owning or using land, so
the more you have, the more you get. While in the UK, benefits for the poor
are capped at £20,000 <https://www.gov.uk/benefit-cap/benefit-cap-amounts>
(outside London), these benefits for the rich are uncapped. Some
landowners receive
£1 million or more
<https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2017/06/30/rich-list-billionaires-scoop-millions-farm-subsidy-payments/>.
You don’t even have to live in the EU to take this money: you just have to
own land here. Among the benefit tourists sucking up public funds in the
age of austerity are Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes and Texas oil barons.

It is hard to discern any just principle behind an occupational
qualification for receiving public money. Some farmers are poor, but seldom
as poor as rural people who have no land, no buildings and no jobs. Why
should one profession be supported when others are not?

Yet even farmers have been hurt by these payments. European subsidies have
helped turn farmland into a speculative honeypot, making it highly
attractive to City financiers. The price of land has more than doubled
<https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/228020-0> since
payments by the hectare were introduced, pushing it out of reach of most
genuine farmers. By reinforcing economies of scale, these subsidies have
driven out small farmers and accelerated the consolidation of land ownership
<https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Small_and_large_farms_in_the_EU_-_statistics_from_the_farm_structure_survey>
.

Though we have paid enough money to have bought all the farmland in this
country several times over, we have not acquired any direct democratic
control over the land: farming, however it might alter landscape features,
remains outside the planning system. The system amounts to taxation without
representation.

So you might have hoped that this would be a hot topic, surrounded by
fierce debates about what should best replace this outrageous boondoggle.
But, as the Agriculture Bill
<https://services.parliament.uk/bills/2017-19/agriculture.html> receives
its second reading in the House of Commons today (Wednesday), there is
scarcely a murmur of either enthusiasm or dissent from the main opposition
parties.

The government’s proposals are a major improvement on the current system.
It intends that farmers should be paid for protecting wildlife and
ecosystems
<https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/684003/future-farming-environment-consult-document.pdf>,
rather than for owning land. It wants to use subsidies to improve the
health of the nation’s soils, the quality of its water and the character of
its landscape. It encourages collaboration between different land managers
– woefully lacking in our incoherent approach to environmental protection.
But there is plenty that should be challenged.

The first problem is that the government proposes to use public money as a
substitute for regulation. Much of its new system amounts to payments for
not mugging old ladies
<https://www.monbiot.com/2018/05/05/payments-for-not-mugging-old-ladies/>:
rewarding people for not doing things they shouldn’t be doing anyway.
Strong regulations, with proper monitoring and enforcement, would keep the
soil on the land and nitrates out of the water without the need for this
protection racket. Yet, even as the government proposes to splash our money
around, its regulatory agencies are collapsing. Natural England, like Natural
Resources Wales
<https://naturalresources.wales/about-us/strategies-and-plans/people-survey-2016/?lang=en>,
is in total meltdown
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/04/britain-wildlife-cuts-brexit>.
A leaked document reveals
<https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/09/30/wildlife-sssi-sites-target-natural-england/>
that the government has abandoned even its pathetic target of protecting
50% of our sites of special scientific interest (threatened by farming,
above any other industry). Nearly half have not even been inspected
<https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2018/09/07/half-england-sssi-sites-not-monitored/>
over the past six years. On the day Michael Gove, the environment
secretary, announced his new payments plan, he also promised to find ways
<https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-brighter-future-for-farming> of
reducing or removing farm inspections.

Nowhere is this replacement of rules with money more preposterous than when
it is applied to farm animal welfare. The government acknowledges that
welfare standards should be raised. But instead of doing so through
legislation, it proposes “targeted payments”
<https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/684003/future-farming-environment-consult-document.pdf>
for farmers who treat their animals well. Why should animal welfare be a
matter of economic choice?

Is also hard to see how its policies would defend small farmers. The
European system has been a disaster for them, but will this be any better?
The question is sharpened by the government’s ambition to strike a US-UK
trade deal, which is likely to sacrifice farming
<https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/working.papers/USUK%20FTA%20516%20FINAL.pdf>
in return for concessions on financial services. Any government of the US,
which has much lower food and welfare standards, will want a deal that
permits it to sell its disgusting farm products
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/14/us-trade-deal-government-farming-practices-livestock-antibiotics>
in the UK. If this happens, only the biggest and meanest farmers here will
be able to compete.

The evidence from New Zealand, where all subsidies were stopped in 1984, is
mixed. Since then, livestock farms have consolidated, but the number of
small horticultural farms and vineyards has risen
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15693430601108086>. I want to
see opposition parties press the government to do two things. First, to
promise that any US-UK trade deal will exclude food and agriculture
altogether, even if this means no deal. Secondly, to ensure that
supermarkets, which exercise monopsonistic power (too few buyers) pay a
fair price to the farmers they currently exploit.

I would argue that payments for environmental goods should be reserved for
those that didn’t exist before, while existing wildlife habitats are
protected through regulation. I also believe that farmers should seek
planning permission before changing a field boundary, ploughing a meadow or
felling an orchard.

But I’m less clear about whether there should be a special support payment
for small farmers, as some people argue. How would we distinguish between
those who owe their living to farming and those who have bought their land
as a hobby? Why should small farmers receive this money, when small
builders do not?

Perhaps we need an entirely different approach. How about expanding the
stock of county farms (publicly owned land), which has been steadily
shrinking
<https://whoownsengland.org/2018/06/08/how-the-extent-of-county-farms-has-halved-in-40-years/>
as a result of government cuts? Where the land is suitable, county councils
could divide up their farms and offer tenancies to small farmers at
below-market rates. This might be a better way of supporting genuine
farmers with public money. And how about a community right to buy land, of
the kind now exercised in Scotland
<https://www.gov.scot/Topics/farmingrural/Rural/rural-land/right-to-buy/Community>
?

I don’t have all the answers, and I doubt anyone does. But I do know that
good policy depends on constant challenge and debate. And so far, there
hasn’t been enough of either.

www.monbiot.com







-- 
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared