DEFRA’s ‘Path to Sustainable Farming’ heralds a rural revolution
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Today is B-Day for farmers. Government will unveil its seven-year-plan for agriculture, shifting subsidies away from land ownership and towards environmental protection, animal welfare and restoring the countryside. The impact of Brexit will mean the biggest upheaval in rural England for half a century, as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is replaced by a new system. The Path to Sustainable Farming (PSF) is intended to create farms that can survive in the marketplace and farmers who see themselves as custodians of England’s green and pleasant land.
The most obvious change for the farming community will be the phasing out of the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS), which at present guarantees farmers £233 a hectare per annum. These direct payments will begin to fall next year, but the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) will maintain the overall level of subsidy until 2024. By 2027 the BPS will have been abolished, along with the rest of the CAP. These will be replaced by a new Environmental Land Management scheme, which will subsidise farmers to the tune of £1 billion a year for following good practice. By 2024, more than half of all payments will target environment and welfare, while improvements in productivity will also be encouraged, with training and equipment subsidised. Farmers who do not wish to adapt to the new system will be incentivised by lump sum exit payments, while new farmers and managers will benefit from a “new entrants support scheme”.
The overall purpose of the PSF is to create a self-sufficient agricultural sector that not only meets but exceeds present standards for animal health and welfare, cuts pollution of air, water and land, preserves wildlife and serves the public’s desire to enjoy the beauty of our unique landscape. The hope is that all these aims can be achieved without either increasing the burden on the taxpayer or raising food prices for the consumer.
Society in the country has always been conservative and normally votes Conservative. For the next seven years at least, down on the farm the Tories can expect their name to be mud. A new emphasis on “fairness”, with farming as a more professional, less hereditary vocation, heralds the end of a cosy relationship of landowners and the state. Members of the National Farmers Union won’t take kindly to the loss of up to half of their income. As in France, with the gilets jaunes, we can expect protests. This Government is firing the opening shots in a rural revolution.
If the aims of the PSF sound utopian, that is because they are — at least in part. According to a study cited in Tim Lang’s excellent book Feeding Britain: Our Food Problems and How to Fix Them (Pelican, £25), some 75 per cent of English farmers face cuts in profitability by 2027 of between 22 and 67 per cent. Even with the new subsidies for environment and animal welfare, many will simply go out of business. And there is little in the new plan to stop the tendency to concentrate land ownership in fewer, wealthier families. Smallholders are favoured in the phasing out of direct payments, but they will continue to struggle to compete with larger, US-style agri-businesses.
The problem is the stranglehold of monopolistic food retailers on the market, which has squeezed margins and forced farmers to rely on the state. Our cheap food culture enables supermarkets to make vast profits, while the “externalities” of the food industry — the costs of obesity, diabetes, pollution and loss of biodiversity— are paid by the taxpayer. No Government wants to be blamed for pushing up the cost of food, least of all in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has actually boosted the profits of the biggest players in the food retail trade at the expense of the hospitality industry. Home cooking with raw ingredients may be fun but it is also unpaid labour and we are all doing much more of it, in some cases for the first time. Unlike supermarket executives and shareholders — whose bonuses and dividends have soared — the farmers who produce those ingredients have not noticeably benefited from this increase in demand for British produce.
The path to sustainable farming is thus likely to be a thorny one. DEFRA has made a good start with today’s policy document, but it will need to work closely with other departments, especially the Treasury, to reform the rest of the food and retail industry. The fact that the UK has the worst record on obesity is now widely understood to have had a fatal impact on the pandemic here. Brexit has been sold as an opportunity to tackle modern farming’s endemic cruelty to livestock, but it may also permit food imports from countries with even lower welfare standards. The PSF includes incentives and penalties to deter farmers from inhumane practices such as cutting off chicken beaks and pig tails, or keeping animals in cages, crates and stalls that severely restrict their movements. It won’t help to give farm animals better lives, however, if their owners go bust and there is an exodus from agriculture. We need to educate hard-pressed consumers so that they choose quality rather than quantity. Otherwise they will simply switch away from expensive British food to cheaper imports. The rise of veganism is a threat to farmers only if they fail to adapt. And the pandemic has reminded us that fast food is not always good food.
The next few years will make or break the English farmer. The plan set out today is only the beginning of the more comprehensive agricultural revolution that is required. The outlines of such a grand scheme were set out last year by the Oxford economist Dieter Helm in his remarkable book Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside (William Collins, £20). Professor Helm’s influence is apparent in the PSF document and in Government thinking about rural issues more generally. This shift has been inherited by the DEFRA Secretary George Eustice from his predecessor Michael Gove, now masterminding Brexit policy at the Cabinet Office. Even before the UK emerges from the Covid crisis, Gove and Eustice need to get their act together with the Chancellor and Prime Minister to combine their new vision for the countryside with a wider programme of economic reform. The green and prosperous land envisaged by Helm could also be a pleasant one. But we have a long way to go before England’s rural revolution can create the rural idyll for which we all yearn. B-Day is just the beginning.
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