Farmers will still be here long after Leunig is forgotten
Most of us want to be loved. Or at least liked. Or at the worst tolerated. But farmers could be forgiven for thinking that, as far as an increasing number of pressure and campaigning groups and organisations is concerned, they don’t make it into any of the above categories. Not even tolerated.
Vegans, vegetarians, tree planting enthusiasts, rewilders, animal welfare groups, environmentalists – a suggestion to kill all farm animals to reduce climate changing emissions, you name it, then someone has it in for farmers.
To some extent the groupings might be new but farmers have always felt uneasy about a public that thinks they have an enviable subsidised lifestyle. Big, obviously expensive machines and fourwheel drives in full view don’t help. Nor do some intensive livestock farming systems.
Efforts are made by organisations such as the national farmers’ unions to explain and argue the case for farmers and why they do what they do to make a living, but public deafness seems to be catching and, as the joke goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.
The latest, and bluntest, attack is from one of the UK government’s advisers to the Treasury. Counting the beans to find that farming contributes only about 0.5 per cent to Britain’s economy, Dr Tim Leunig suggested that we don’t need farming at all.
Get rid of farming, close it down and import all our food instead of about 40 per cent of it. Save £4 billion a year in subsidies and think what a boost it could give to post-brexit trade negotiations with the United States – an open goal for US food suppliers in return for whatever in its dreams the British government hopes to sell to them.
Leunig is apparently close to Dominic Cummings, the Prime Ministerial adviser cum controller who has made it clear he wants to shake up institutions such as the Civil Service and revolutionise the government’s way of getting results. Something as long-established as support payments for farmers is an obvious target.
Even that is not quite the same as getting rid of farming. Some of the biggest sectors of farming are already effectively unsubsidised such as eggs, vegetables, potatoes and dairying. The most heavily supported such as beef cattle and sheep tend to be on land unsuitable for any other type of production and help keep small communities going against increasing odds.
Leunig seemed to suggest that if Singapore can thrive while importing 100 per cent of its food and drink, why not the UK? For an economist – someone defined as knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing – the difference between a virtually enclosed community of five million and a diverse island population of well over 60 million where farming has always been an integral part of the countryside, seems to have escaped him.
In one way it does not seem worthwhile writing about Leunig. He made an outlandish suggestion that made a few headlines but it’s not going to put tens of thousands of farmers and their staff on the scrapheap, denude the countryside of animals or turn millions of acres of arable land into rough grass and weeds. Farmers will still be here long after Leunig is forgotten.
In another way it is worthwhile noting him because he represents the same bizarre way of thinking that led George Monbiot recently to suggest killing all farm animals to help reduce climate change.
It’s worrying to think that there might be more outside than there are locked up when the real case is, as it always has been, that Britain should be producing more of its own food needs, not less.
Trade deals and increasing consumer demand in the past 30 or 40 years for foods that can’t be produced here make more “food from our own resources” – as the ineffective campaign and government report from the 1970s tried to do – increasingly difficult.
But there are enough energetic and innovative farmers in business to make it possible, regardless of what this UK government, or the Scottish government, does with support payments, environment schemes, tree planting projects or trade agreements with other countries.