One of the changes we were promised on leaving the EU was to alter the old EU subsidies. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) paid £3.5bn each year to our farmers. Books have been written about the CAP and the various plans starting with US Marshall plan, followed by the EU’s Mansholt and MacSharry plans. We ended up with the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) paying individual landowners £100/yr/acre, to ‘look after’ that land. The more land you had, the more you got.
Many of us criticised the benefits for big landowners, such as the Duke of Westminster, who creamed off £400,000 per annum, and his neighbour, our sovereign, who pocketed £300,000. When I stated that “they did nothing for this” in The Landworker magazine, the Duke’s farm manager challenged me, saying that he provided jobs, so I should be pleased.
I offered to meet up at the local hunting, shooting, fishing hostelry, but he didn’t reply. Land ownership in the UK is the most unequal in Europe, and that’s the way our leaders appear to like it. During the Polish presidency, the EU planned to limit CAP to £250,000 per annum for any one farmer, but David Cameron, our PM at the time, was quickly on his way to Brussels to help stop the limit being introduced.
Brexit lies – again
The Brexit campaign told farmers that they would keep their subsidies. My local MP, Nigel Evans, stood prior to the referendum with Boris Johnson to promise farmers that “subsidies would stay 100% guaranteed”. Hence, many farmers cheered for Brexit.
The National Farmers’ Union council was overwhelmingly in support of ‘Remain’, but decided not to campaign, as it would upset some of their larger farmers. The reality was that in 2020, Johnson’s government announced a complete phaseout of Basic Farm Payments by 2027.
Promising the earth
Before and after the referendum, Michael Gove ran round ‘promising the earth’ to farmers and many environmental groups were supportive. But there was no real plan. After a few years, the first plan was thrown out by the agriculture minister George Eustice, on the grounds of too much red tape.
All the ‘green’ ideas were complex, especially for small farmers. Even Michael Heseltine said they were OK for his farms as he had management systems, but hopeless for small farmers who knew best how to breed cows and sheep. The government department has a bad track record on paying out BPS – being fined heavily by EU for incompetence, when all they had to do was count static land. Anything that moved was going to be too complex.
Environment Land Management Schemes
And so, over the next five years, the nightmare of the Environment Land Management Schemes (ELMS) developed. ELMS consists of three strands: the Landscape Recovery Scheme, the Sustainable Farming Incentive, and the Countryside Stewardship Plus scheme. Each strand was originally planned to receive £1bn. But ‘the environment’ means an awful lot of different things.
PM Johnson said in the Commons: “What we are going to do is use the new freedoms we have after leaving the CAP to support farmers to beautify the landscape”. This view of a romanticised countryside is nothing new. But it does not improve the sustainability of present-day UK farming in terms of energy intensive chemical inputs and dependence on other people’s land and labour.
To be eligible to claim for the Landscape Recovery scheme, you have to have a spare 1,000 acres (500ha) – basically for re-wilding or carbon trading. The Duke’s son will be licking the cream. Meanwhile, small farms are only able to directly access the Sustainable Farming Initiative (SFI). Recent reports say that less than 0.5% (yes 0.5) of the funds allocated have been claimed, as it is so complex. Small Northern farmers are finding selling lamb at market is much more reliable than confusing funding schemes.
Where is the cash going?
Somebody should be putting down a question to find out where these subsidies are now going and who is doing well, compared with how much small farmers are losing. I predict the winners are not only large landowners but ‘environmental consultants’, working for ‘the City’ and now adept with the new language of ‘carbon trading’ and ‘biodiversity net gain’.
The £3.5bn that used to come from CAP could be doing so much more than pump priming the ‘trickle-down’ theory of money, supposedly flowing down the hills to the rural economy. We are talking about an amount that is equivalent to that held back from local council funding. It could help address the big food issues of today.
Food banks are at their most numerous, as more people find themselves in food poverty – a term the government refuses to recognise. Over 27% of people are now obese, just about the highest rate in Europe. Cheap ultra-processed food makes up 57% of the British diet, again more than any other country.
A simple solution
One simple suggestion is to grow and eat more home-grown fruit and vegetables. But “the overall picture in UK horticulture shows production area and volume in decline year on year” I feel particularly concerned about this, as I was sponsored by the government’s Fruit Research Station for my Master’s in plant science. There, the director proclaimed how fruit growing was an emblem of ‘Britishness’ – think of the Vale of Evesham and the Garden of Kent. That ideal is being lost to cheap produce from abroad. Fruit growing was never subsidised, but should be.
We should be having a much broader debate about the role of UK food and farming and how resilient we are to worldwide events, such as the conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Red Sea, and to self-inflicted events such as Brexit. How stable are our supply lines? Food inflation is proving harder to resolve than previously thought. But there seems a deafening silence, with not even a line in The Archers.
Redirecting the cash
We could redirect these subsidies and do what the United States, that great champion of free trade, does. In the US, their Farm Bill pays over $60bn/yr to around 40 million poorer people to help them buy healthier food cheaply. It is called the Supplemental Nutrition Advisory Program.
While fiscal conservatives argue against the initiative, most Republicans and Democrats like it. It helps the Democrats address food poverty and build local economies, and the Republicans like it because it helps their farming base with their ever-present problem of overproduction.
And if we could think bigger
Imagine what we could do with the comparable amount – £2bn – in this country? We could regenerate our soils, invest in independent long-term research, and feed people with better food. But perhaps most of all we could rebuild connections between town and country, particularly the small towns surrounded by countryside here in the North.
I know of one brassica (cabbages and cauliflowers) farmer on the west coast who used to sell his one million heads to Liverpool and Manchester, thorough existing markets. Now he has to drive them all over the North as far as Hull because the supermarkets intervened. All this madness is because of the deference to markets.
We need a proper conversation about ‘taking back control’.
