Daniel Hannan:
The EU subsidies drove food prices up and encouraged destructive farming practices. We can create a system that avoids both
Britain is importing 42 per cent of its food – the highest figure for half a century. Does that bother you? If opinion polls are right, it probably does. Such statistics leave many of us uneasy. We fret that dependency makes us vulnerable to shortages. We want to be self-sufficient. We see food as a strategic resource, of greater value than more frivolous goods. The National Farmers’ Union talks of “rich countries allowing their agriculture to decline and then expecting the rest of the world to feed them” – unintentionally admitting that it is generally the post-agrarian countries that have become rich.
As we begin to draw up a national farming policy for after Brexit, however, it is worth going back to first principles and asking whether agriculture, which accounts for less than 1 per cent of our economic activity, ought to be in a special category. Why, after all, does the idea of being dependent on food imports unsettle us? We’re rarely bothered about being dependent on imported combine harvesters or telephones.
The desire for self-sufficiency has its roots not in economic theory but in evolutionary psychology. Life on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa was a constant search for the next meal. The desire to provide against famine, to hoard, is encoded deep in our genome, and our political opinions reflect our instincts. To some extent, huntergatherer intuitions make the whole notion of trade awkward. But those intuitions are especially powerful when it comes to food: back then, there were no combine harvesters to worry about.
Britain stopped being self-sufficient in food in the 18th century. As we began to make and sell more diverse goods, we found it profitable to buy in the nutrition we needed. In consequence, we became the world’s greatest and wealthiest nation – and, at the same time, we began to eliminate malnutrition.
It turned out that pursuing selfsufficiency was counter-productive, because it made nations vulnerable to localised disruption and bad weather. Buying food at world prices from dispersed suppliers was, paradoxically, a far surer guarantee against hunger, as there was always likely to be a surplus somewhere. Most of the world had caught up with this approach by the Sixties, since when starvation has become much rarer. Famines now generally happen only as a consequence of war, except in the handful of states that still reject global markets and seek to grow all their own food. North Korea, for example, pursues selfreliance (“juche”) as the supreme goal of economic policy. It lost more than half a million people to hunger in the mid-Nineties.
Britain adopted free trade – including, with some glitches, in food – for the better part of a century after scrapping the Corn Laws in 1846. The Second World War forced a return to domestic production, which lingered for a while after 1945, but the real shift came when Britain joined the Common Agricultural Policy, which explicitly aimed at European juche through external tariffs and production subsidies.
In consequence, food became much more expensive, driving up inflation and weakening the economy. People were forced to pay twice over, as taxpayers and as consumers. The cost fell most heavily on the poorest, for whom food purchases represented a higher proportion of the weekly budget. Output-based subsidies encouraged the use of chemical fertilisers and the felling of hedgerows. For Britain, a net food importer with relatively efficient farms, the CAP was an especially bad deal: in 2014, we paid in £4.6 billion and got back £2.9 billion.
Those figures are enough to tell us that, after Brexit, we can give our consumers and our taxpayers a better deal while still supporting our farmers. Buying food at world rather than EU prices would, according to OECD figures, cut grocery bills by 17 per cent. As well as being of huge value in itself, this reduction would free up a lot of money for people to spend on other things, and so boost the economy in general.
How will our farmers cope with new competition? When every other country except New Zealand subsidises its producers, could we really take away their protection and their grants? In purely economic terms, yes we could. I have been surprised by how many farmers in my constituency oppose subsidies, seeing them as keeping inefficient producers in business at the expense of younger farmers, who can’t get started.
Yet the question is not purely economic. Most of us recognise that Britain has an unusual landscape, in that most of our loveliest spaces are farmed. In other developed countries, farming and natural beauty are divorced. To Americans, pretty countryside means the Rockies, to Germans the Black Forest. But when we think of beauty, we think of copses and hedgerows and other signs of cultivation. The splendour of our countryside is a common resource, whose wealth we all share.
It is right to pay the people who curate that treasure. To put it another way, if the state prevents landowners from realising the full value of their property – in other words, if it bans them from turning fields and moors into golf courses and housing estates – it ought to compensate them.
So let’s fund that service explicitly, rather than as an incidental side-effect of food production. To his credit, Michael Gove flagged up precisely such an approach in his first speech as the minister in charge, speaking of a post-CAP subsidy system that would “support those landowners and managers who cultivate and protect the range of habitats which will encourage biodiversity”. That can be done through a straightforward acreage-based grant – a blunt instrument, but cheap to administer – or through more explicit ecological criteria.
At present, we give more to wealthy French farmers than to poor African farmers. Outside the CAP, we can tailor our policy to our own countryside, cutting prices while rewarding the stewards of our landscape. Such an opportunity won’t come again.