Only a tiny minority of rural Britons are farmers – so why do they hold such sway?
We have a problem. The environment secretary, George Eustice – the highest green authority in the land – is, in a crucial respect, a climate denier. In an interview with the Telegraph, he claimed that “livestock, particularly if you do it with the right pastoral system, has a role to play in tackling climate change”.
Though such claims are often made, there is no evidence to support them. A wide-ranging review of the data by the Oxford Martin School found no case of a livestock operation sequestering more greenhouse gases than the animals produce. Moreover, because of the very large land area required for grazing livestock, pastoral systems carry a massive carbon opportunity cost (this means the carbon that would be captured if the land were returned to wild ecosystems). According to the government’s Climate Change Committee, “transitioning from grassland to forestland would increase the soil carbon stock by 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare (on average across England) … This is additional to the large amounts of carbon that would be stored in the biomass of the trees themselves.”
Misleading climate claims are the livestock industry’s tobacco tactics, used to confuse, obfuscate and distract. When the UK environment secretary repeats a destructive sector’s propaganda, we are not in safe hands.
But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. Eustice is a trustee of his family’s farm, which raises pigs and sheep. I often find it hard to see where his interests end and the public interest begins. Though government advisers have repeatedly called for meat consumption to be reduced for environmental reasons, Eustice says he has “no intention” of encouraging us to eat less. In a letter to people living in farmhouses in the Tiverton and Honiton constituency, where a byelection will be held this week, he boasts about tearing down environmental protections: “We’ve binned the three-crop rule, we’ve scrapped the greening requirements … we’ve delayed changes to the use of urea by at least a year … a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote to support farming.”
Of the six ministers at the environment department, Defra, all but one either own farmland or were brought up on farms owned by their families. The same goes for the chair of the parliamentary committee that’s supposed to hold the department to account. It’s entirely right that farmers should be represented in government. It’s entirely wrong that they should be represented in Defra to the exclusion of almost everyone else.
Government figures show that there are 115,000 people, across all categories, working on English farms. They comprise 0.2% of the total population, and 1.2% of the rural population. If you include everyone who might be involved in farming, including farmers’ spouses, partners, directors and managers, the total reaches 306,000, which means 0.5% of the total population, and 3% of the rural population. In other words, using the most generous definition of farmers and farmworkers, 97% of rural people are not employed by the industry. But as far as government policy is concerned, farming and the countryside are synonymous. If you’re not a farmer, your interests are overlooked, your voice unheard. You’re a second-class rural citizen.
This agricultural hegemony helps
to explain the government’s disastrous food strategy, published last week. Farming already enjoys an extraordinary range of derogations from planning laws, often to the great detriment of local people, who can do nothing to prevent their views from being ruined and their air and rivers from being poisoned. The new food strategy proposes even greater exemptions from public accountability for giant greenhouses, “vertical farms” and other agroindustrial infrastructure.
Instead of seeking to reduce meat consumption, the strategy concentrates on feeble technofixes for single aspects of the problem, such as feed additives that seek to reduce the amount of methane burped by cattle. It says it will remove “bureaucracy” and make regulations more “proportionate”: both codewords for cutting public protections. Someone in government stripped out all the effective environmental measures the strategy was expected to announce. It postpones any decision to encourage the rewilding of unproductive grazing land, which is essential to reversing wildlife decline and was recommended by the lead adviser, Henry Dimbleby.
These failures reflect a general reversal of Johnson’s environmental commitments, feeble as they were, in response to one of the most pernicious lobby groups in the UK, the National Farmers’ Union (NFU). The NFU manages to position itself on the wrong side of almost every issue. If you want to fight the rules that are meant to protect our rivers from agricultural pollution, it’s your champion. If you want first to resist and then undermine the ban on the most deadly biocides invented, neonicotinoids, the NFU is there for you. If you want to torpedo the rules intended to protect the soil, you have a friend. The environment department, Defra, occupies 17 Smith Square, London SW1; the NFU, 18 Smith Square, London SW1. It scarcely matters which door you enter: you’ll hear the same story.
Now the government’s flagship green policies – Environmental Land Management schemes, which are supposed to replace the disastrous European subsidy system – are under threat.
Astonishingly, and disgracefully, the Labour party has formed an alliance with the NFU, Steve Baker, Jacob ReesMogg and other members of the Tory hard right in opposing this genuine – perhaps unique – Brexit opportunity. When a party pays insufficient attention to any issue, it is swept along on the currents of power, and becomes aligned with the most potent and dangerous corporate lobby groups.
We need farmers. We also need to ensure that, like any other sector, they are properly regulated, and their particular interests cannot override the wider public interest. I’m often accused of being anti-farmer. But I simply want to see the same standards applied to farming as to any other industry. I want to see the rational use of public money and the land it affects. After all, there would be almost no livestock grazing – the farm practice with by far the highest ratio of destruction to production – in this country if it were not for subsidies. Given that we pay for this land to be used, shouldn’t we have a say in what happens to it?
I want to see Defra diversified and clear lines drawn between private and public interests. I want to see the lobbying power of the NFU curtailed. I want to see a government that represents all those who live in rural areas, rather than one group to the exclusion of others. Is any of this too much to ask?