Just imagine for a moment that a politician spoke the truth. Now stretch your imagination even further and imagine that Owen Paterson, Defra Minister, spoke the truth. Here is what he would say.
“Her Majesty’s Government announce that we will impose punitive taxes on organic food in order to keep it at a price level that will deter consumers. We will implement policies to encourage agricultural practices that will destroy the soil on which all life depends. We will also continue to ensure that foods that lead to obesity and ill-health are subsidised by our government and foods that lead to good health are taxed, regulated or prohibited.”
“Your Government believes that bigger is better, so we will support the biggest farms the most and encourage obesity to that we can have bigger people to help support a bigger NHS.
“Like Labour, the Conservative Party believes that people who own large amounts of land and money should be rewarded for their cleverness or accident of birth by receiving large amounts of money from the taxpayer on a never-ending basis. We therefore intend to continue to reward all owners of large landholdings with £110 every year for every acre of land that they own, or £265 per hectare, regardless of how they manage it. However, we will make it difficult and complicated to claim for farmers who own less than 50 acres. People who own a farm and home will not have to pay inheritance tax. We will continue to charge inheritance tax on non-farmers who own property worth more than £325,000.”
“We will ensure that subsidised farming pays best when farmers do least to rebuild soil fertility and treat animals as cruelly as inhumanly possible. We will ensure that farmers who grow food to be burned as biofuels will make more money than farmers who grow food for human consumption. We will support farming that accelerates climate change. “
What do they really say: “Britain needs to be able to feed itself in an uncertain world. Our farmers are our guarantee of food security and food independence. Britain’s farmers are the backbone of rural society and help us preserve all that is best about British tradition and our countryside. We are importing too much food, we need to be more self-sufficient.’
What tosh. The fact is that for every country where there is reliable data, the evidence shows that smaller farms are from 2 to 10 times more productive than large farms. That’s productivity as normal people know it – i.e. getting a profitable income from an input of labour and capital. In subsidised farming productivity just means ‘production.’ It is measured in soybeans and corn and doesn’t measure the input costs or the labour costs or the externalised costs such as greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and soil degradation. The profit comes from the taxpayer.
Of course small farms also tend to integrate crops and livestock, they rotate their crops, they employ human beings. Most importantly, because they live on the land and it has been in the family and they expect it to continue to be in the family they treat the land with respect and care. An industrial farm uses up land and the employees don’t really care about a future beyond the next pay cheque.
What would happen if we took away all the subsidies and only allowed land to be inherited tax free if it was smaller than, say, 200 acres?
Farmers would go back to mixed farming. Our current system mirrors the disastrous communist farming of the 1950s and 1960s, where government decided what would grow where and who would grow what. Farmers would study the market and respond to demand from consumers, not price manipulation by government.
Agriculture is multifunctional. It produces food but it also manages the landscape. It creates employment and it should keep us all healthy.
Sadly, it does the opposite. It would be better to plant trees on the 40% of the US land that is devoted to growing corn to be burned as ethanol. Why subsidise greenhouse gas emissions when you could be planting trees?
What can be done? Nothing in Whitehall, nothing in Brussels, nothing in Washington. They are hopelessly corrupted by the manufacturers of agrichemicals who spend fortunes on lobbying them and ensuring that the public have no say in how their food is produced.
We just need to be aware and become the change. Every person who cuts back on meat and uses the savings to always buy organic food is slowly but surely driving back the tide of industrialisation. Supporting small farms, local food producers and the future.
