Farming: the post-Brexit landscape
It has always been one of the big opportunities of Brexit, said Guy Adams in the Daily Mail: the chance to escape the “destructive and wasteful” Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), and devise our own system of farming subsidies. This week, the Government revealed what that new regime might look like, at least in England (the other UK nations will have their own devolved systems). Under the proposed seven-year transition plan, the £3bn paid to farmers in England last year (based on the acreage of land they manage) will be phased out. In its place, ministers will introduce new subsidies to encourage innovation, and to reward farmers for improving “the natural environment” and animal welfare for the “public good”. It’s hard to argue with the concept, but the devil will be in the details. How exactly will these public goods be measured? And will they be compatible with the public desire for affordable food?
As the plan goes out to consultation, it’s sure to run into a hundred objections, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian – as you’d expect. It does, after all, represent a massive change for the farming industry – one that many farmers will struggle to adapt to. But after the disastrous CAP, which subsidises intensive farming methods and favours rich landowners, this is emphatically a step “in the right direction”. As a farmer, my concern is that this reform will change too little, said Jamie Blackett in The Daily Telegraph. I fear we’ll end up with an “EU-lite” bureaucratic system under which farmers will be paid just enough to stay in business in order to “curate” the countryside, while food continues to leave the farm gate “at or below the cost of production, helping to boost the profits of quasimonopolistic food processors and supermarkets”.
Britons’ odd relationship with the countryside complicates agricultural policy, said The Economist. In the US or New Zealand, farmland is “something that you might travel through in order to get somewhere pretty”, but here we expect agricultural land to be beautiful. If lowland crop farms are encouraged to create more meadows, hedgerows or wetlands, no one will complain. But changes to upland livestock farms in places such as the Lake District and Dartmoor will be more controversial. Environmentalists think that such areas are overgrazed and create “deserts of nibbled grass”, and that the land should be allowed to revert to scrub and trees. But Britons are sentimentally attached to the current look of these places. “People care about the environment. But they might turn out to care more about landscape.”