The Small Farm Future Blog

A Parable of the Talents…

Posted on February 12, 2012 | 3 Comments

I don’t suppose I have much in common with the Duke of Westminster, Britain’s fourth richest man, but I discovered recently that we share an income source. Both of us get EU handouts courtesy of the Common Agricultural Policy. I think the duke must have the system better sussed than me judging by our pay cheques: a cool £820,000 for the duke, and a not very cool £700.15 for me.

I derived the former figure from an interesting article by George Monbiot, in which he named and shamed some of the major beneficiaries of the CAP – who also happen to be some of the major landowners, since CAP payments are largely tied to size of holding. As Monbiot points out, this negative tax for the rich is not exactly progressive. Unfortunately, the mud sticks to farmers of all kinds – we all seem to suffer from the stereotype of the agricultural subsidy junky in the public imagination. So as someone feeding at a lower trophic level on the EU gravy train, I’d like to share my CAP experience with you as a prelude to asking whether we shouldn’t just get rid of the whole damn thing, as Monbiot suggests. The answer is of course we should – so long as its beneficiaries are prepared to make the sacrifice. And by beneficiaries I don’t mean the Duke of Westminster and his ilk, though I share Monbiot’s distaste. I mean the great British consumer – in other words, you and me.

But first, here’s a brief summary of one small farmer’s CAP experience. When I first bought my 7 hectares of Somerset farmland the single farm payment was just coming in and I was very green in countryside matters, so I let the whole thing slip past me with a certain lofty disdain. I wasn’t earning my living from farming at the time, and it felt good to be above all the money grubbing. Fast forward seven years and I’m a full-time veg grower, annual income circa £5,000, and suddenly the single farm payment doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. So to cut a long story short, we invested no little time and money in buying the SFP entitlements we should have started with, and on 1 December 2010 (I remember the date) found that our bank account was £738.31 to the good.

Fast forward another year, and some weeks after I’d submitted my next claim I discover that the Rural Payments Agency has decided to audit it. A thick wodge of papers is (mis)delivered in the post, including a satellite photo of my holding extensively annotated to indicate where the RPA, in its wisdom, disagrees with my claims. One of the many sticking points was the newly planted coppice woodland which the RPA described as ‘non-coppice woodland’, and therefore a ‘permanently ineligible feature’. I spend most of an afternoon when I should have been actually farming striding around the holding with camera and GPS, trying to fit the fine and immeasurable distinctions of a working smallholding into the RPA’s taxonomic grid. Several letters and telephone calls follow, the result of which is that I concede to the RPA’s view of things in every respect. When, for example, I explain that the ‘non-coppice woodland’ is in fact coppice woodland that is still too young to coppice, the charmingly polite civil servant at the RPA says “Ah well, it’s not coppice woodland then is it, if it hasn’t been coppiced yet?” What chance do I have against the grinding logic of the RPA?

As a quick aside, I have to note that if instead of planting coppice I had simply cut the grass annually on the site where the coppice stands I would have received the subsidy, whereas the fact that I’m in the process of developing it as wood pasture disqualifies it, at least for now (though I was advised to contact the Forestry Commission to see if I was eligible for another subsidy) – which tells you first of all that there’s a disastrous disjunction in rural policy between farming and forestry, and second of all that bureaucracies can’t deal with things that don’t happen on an annual cycle, like developing a sustainable farm ecology for example.

Anyway, enough enough. It’s easy to mock bureaucracy, but those of us who accept money from the public purse can hardly complain when we’re subjected to scrutiny. I’m sure there are many who will sleep easier knowing that as a result of their extensive investigations into my holding the RPA saved the taxpayer £38.16 this year. It probably cost them more to mount the enquiry, but broader principles are at stake.

So much for the details of my own personal CAP odyssey. What are the larger issues? Well, first of all it’s worth bearing in mind that the total income from UK agriculture is about £4.3 billion, and CAP payments total around £3.3 billion – so I imagine that the CAP is keeping many farmers afloat, which doubtless is where the subsidy-junky gibe comes from. But then again, why are farmers so reliant on their subsidies? Could it have anything to do with the fact that we’re remunerated at close to or less than the costs of production? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Tesco, Britain’s largest food retailer, reports operating profits in excess of £3.8 billion, an increase of nearly 50% in four years? And could that have anything to do with the fact that UK consumers now spend less than half the proportion of household income on food than they did fifty years ago?

The issue of farm subsidies is a complex one, but the big food companies and, through them, the consumer benefit both directly and indirectly from them. They benefit indirectly through a subsidy regimen that keeps farmers just about afloat so that the retailer can pay unreasonably low farm gate prices, mark them up (or ‘add value’ to them, in the weasel words of the recent Foresight Report), and then sell them on to consumers at ‘competitive’ prices. It’s neat politics – placating the all powerful figures of the retailer and the voter/consumer, while the farmers get the blame for their subsidy-dependent ways, meanwhile being forced into ever more vicious competition with each other in the global race to the bottom caused by abstract, planet-trashing consumerism.

Talking of planet-trashing, another aspect of the CAP regimen is environmental payments for ‘green’ agricultural practice. On this topic, George Monbiot says, “The rest of us don’t get paid for not mugging old ladies. Why should farmers be paid for not trashing the biosphere? Why should they not be legally bound to protect it, as other businesses are?”

No doubt these are good questions. But if farmers are legally bound to protect the biosphere then by the same token it must surely be reasonable for them to pass on the additional costs of not trashing the biosphere to the people buying their produce. And is that something we, the consumer, are prepared for? Will we cope without our £5 chickens, our £5 potato sacks, our buy-one-get-one-frees? Will we happily buy vegetables from local agroecological growers because we know that they’re growing our food responsibly and well? And before we deride farmers for their subsidy habit, will we first look in the mirror?