Sunday Times
Magazine
2001.08.26

British farming has given us BSE, swine fever and, now, foot and mouth. So should we care if the latest crisis kills it off? Special investigation by Richard Girling. Photograph by Peter Marlow 

 
 DEAD MEAT 

Outside Charing Cross station the Metropolitan police are advertising for information about a woman's torso they've dragged from the river. Around a corner, homeless smackheads barely out of their childhoods are appealing for 'spare change'. The warming air, rising in lazy thermals over the shop fronts, carries with it a perfect imprint of the city, etched in urine. Of course, to remark on any of this is as naive as noticing fresh roadkill in a Norfolk lane. It marks you out as an ingénu. And yet... 
Ten minutes later I am on the sunlit balcony of a gentleman's club off Whitehall, enjoying lofty views of the Embankment Gardens, Big Ben and the Thames. In the lounge, MPs and bearers of ancient titles fold back their crosswords and sip their chablis. The man who rises to greet me is different from the others only in that he has a self-made look about him: sleek, carefully groomed, wearing a suit that he has obviously not inherited from his father. In his hand he clasps a sheaf of notes, the skeletal framework of a private lecture that will take him an hour and a half to run through. Subject: how to save rural England from ruin. The irony is that this bastion of old-moneyed privilege is none other than the Farmers Club. And here, over freshly brewed coffee, barely two blocks from the kind of human debasement that no Middle English villager could even begin to imagine, we sit talking about rural poverty. About injustice. About the need for light to shine in the cavernous dark of urban incomprehension. About the very survival of rural England. Pass the begging bowl? Pass the sick bag, more like. And yet... 
There is nothing sentimental in what my companion has to say; no hint of special pleading. Mark Hill is a partner in Deloitte & Touche, the big-hitting international accountancy firm. Even last autumn, months before foot and mouth disease struck, he had noted that UK farm incomes over the previous year had dropped by 28%, and that net income 
"Farmers were as warmly insulated against economic chill as a lamb in a fold"

from an average family farm had fallen in five years from a comfortable £80,000 to an unsurvivable £8,000. The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Maff) agreed. Farm incomes, it said, were at their lowest ebb for more than 30 years. The Royal Agricultural Society, too, had spoken of 'cataclysmic change'. And Hill himself had written with masterful understatement: 'Our farming clients,' he said, 'are clearly facing some very tough decisions.' 
With foot and mouth squeezing the life out of the countryside, the decisions are getting tougher by the day. In Devon on this very same spring morning, the last of the great funeral pyres is being built, stiffened corpses slotted into place like a huge, obscene parody of a dry-stone wall. In the same beleaguered county, four farmers' wives have begged the police to remove their husbands' shotguns. Pig farmers have been dropping on average £7 on every animal they sell. Sheep and poultry men have concluded that they have no more chance of long-term survival than chair bodgers or wheelwrights. Nationwide, 2.98m sheep and 576,000 cattle have been culled so far. British farming is staring into the pit. And yet... 
Hill is not playing for sympathy - you'd find more sentimentality in a professional sniper. No: the case for the countryside does not rest on nostalgia. Or on compassion for bankrupt farmers and their suffering children. Or on any anxiety to save the corncrake. What will make or break rural England is the same thing that makes or breaks us all - market economics. Indeed, Hill scarcely talks about farmers at all. In the jargon of his cold-eyed trade, he speaks of 'primary producers'. 
The trouble is, in the vacuum-packed, halogen-lit world of all-night supermarkets and microwave suppers, when the only thing with mud on it is the family hatchback, the primary producers are as remote as pollinating bees. Who needs them, anyway? In a global economy where anything can be imported from anywhere - chicken from Brazil, pork from Poland, beans from Kenya - production will always gravitate to wherever it is cheapest. And cheapest is rarely going to mean British. 
So why shouldn't food follow industries that have gone the same way - steel and coal, for example? Why not let the foreigners, with their pool of cheap labour, get on with the dirty business of growing and breeding, while we - employing brains rather than brawn - import cheap raw materials and convert them into expensive manufactured foods with huge profit margins? If farmers are going to the wall, why not let them go? The chicken tikka masala will keep on coming just the same. 
The changing social order - the loss of farm jobs and the colonisation of villages by middle-class boarders who have no understanding of agriculture - has meant that many farmers already feel displaced. '[They] often feel marginalised within the rural community, leading to a belief that farming operates in a hostile environment,' says the Royal Agricultural Society.Yet farmers over the years have grown accustomed to unpopularity. 
They have been accused of systematically abusing, polluting and disfiguring the countryside; of resisting public access; of antipathy to wildlife; of cruelty to chickens, turkeys, veal calves and sows; of lacking any sign of gratitude for decades of public subsidy; for gracelessly taking public money and then slamming the gate in our face. Above all, they are blamed for the cost-cutting, disease-spreading habits that brought us salmonella, BSE and foot and mouth disease. Bank-ruptcy? It's too good for them. Farmers, of all people, should realise they can only reap what they sow. And yet... 
The trouble is that, in literal terms, they know this only too well. When it comes to wringing the last bushel of grain from a hectare of wheat, or the last drop of milk from a cow, they are very, very good at what they do. Their productivity has been going up for decades. In 1945 a hectare of wheat produced 2.6 tonnes of grain. 
Last summer it produced 8.01. In 1945 the UK had 2.7m dairy cows. By last year the number had fallen to 2.1m, yet the overall yield had nearly doubled - from 8.1 billion litres of milk in 1945 to 14 billion in 2000. But here's the catch. As productivity climbs remorselessly towards the ceiling, so the profitability graph plunges towards the floor. It is the unyielding cycle of market economics - supply and demand. The more farmers produce, the greater the supply, the lower the prices and the less they earn. Earning less, they can only maintain their incomes by growing yet more. 
And so the cycle continues. The more efficiently they work, the worse they suffer. And this explains a lot. You begin to see why corners have been cut. Why space-wasting hedges and copses have been bulldozed. Why growth-promoting chemicals have been pumped into everything from chickens to barley. Why the entire landscape has been wrestled to its knees in forced obeisance to the gods of maximum yield. 

To make sense of the mess we're in, we have to look back to the 1939-45 war. From the historical record emerges a picture of such smock-and-pitchfork quaintness that it seems closer to Merrie England than the age of the internet. In 1939 there were still 1.5m working horses on UK farms, and only 6,000 tractors. There were no barley barons or chicken kings. No notion even that farmers had a responsibility to 'feed the nation'. Sixty per cent of the farmed landscape was still under grass. 'Most farm incomes came from growing oats and hay for horses,' says Hill. 'There were very few arable fields but a lot of livestock, and a lot of land devoted to horse production.' There was no particular need to grow food because, like the imperious Victorians who had shaped our attitudes, we'd been able to import all we needed from the empire. 
When war came, Hitler could hardly have caused more trauma to the English landscape if he'd bombed the fields directly. With U-boats stalking the sea, importing food was no longer an option. If we wanted to eat, we'd have to grow our own. The Spitfire would take the glory, but in terms of self-preservation the most important weapon was the plough. By converting grazing land to arable, even in 1939 you could raise the food value from 100,000 calories per acre to over 2m - in other words, you could feed 20 times as many people. 
To speed the plough, the government wielded the tool that would see us not only through the war but right through the rest of the 20th century: the production subsidy. For every acre of grass a farmer ploughed, the government would pay £2, which was approximately double the actual cost. More than that: it would pay him a guaranteed price for his crop. If the market price fell below the guarantee, then the government would make up the deficit. This was the price to the nation of wartime self-sufficiency. But the subsidies, or 'deficiency payments', did not stop when the war ended. World prices could go up and down all they liked, but it was all the same to the farmer: he remained as warmly insulated against economic chill as a lamb in a fold. And so the food family became dysfunctional. The primary producer was so distant from the consumer that he had no interest in what was being charged in the shops. 
In the countryside after 1945, the only noticeable change was in the focus of the conflict. The battle now was against farming tradition; against the limitations of an ancient technology that had evolved over 10,000 years; against nature itself. What grew when a farmer simply drilled seed into the ground was no longer enough. Where 
"Shoppers stand convicted of double standards"

once the soil's fertility had been preserved by craftsmanship - by the feeding and cleansing of the land by crop rotation and animal fertiliser - now it was preserved by science. Out went the nursery-book mixed farm with its patchwork of fields and meadows. In came monoculture and boardroom management. Food began as it ended, with packeted convenience - pesticides and growth regulators at one end; microwave dinners at the other. For a while, farm incomes soared. 
And then came Europe. Deficiency payments were replaced by the bureaucratic, self-confounding paper chase of the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with its pounds-per-tonne production subsidies, butter mountains, wine lakes and - last stop on the line to meltdown - set-aside, with farmers being paid to grow weeds. The vicious cycle turned faster and faster. Higher production, lower prices, higher production. The system was no longer feeding the nation; it was feeding itself - feeding upon itself. Even the subsidy system was contradictory. While some farmers were claiming extra payments to remove hedges and ponds, others were paid to put them back again. While Europe fiddled and Maff muddled, the industry burned. 
Globally, the flames were fanned by economic collapses in Russia and Asia that wobbled the world economy. While demand shrank, the production express went on racing towards the buffers. BSE, meanwhile, had done its bit to make England the last place on Earth from which anyone would buy a farm product - a fatal handicap at a time when world prices were in a prolonged slump. The unavoidable question - was the desecration of the countryside a fair price to pay for 'cheap' food? - increasingly invited a negative response. Swine fever in East Anglia brought yet more horrific images to our screens, until the only truly strong and healthy animal left in the national bestiary was its currency, the indefatigable pound sterling itself. 
For farmers, it was like being savaged by their own guard dog. The tragedy was that subsidies under the CAP were paid in euros. The high pound depressed the value of their subsidies just as certainly as it had depressed exports and rolled out the red carpet for cheaper imports. The government stepped in with 'agrimonetary' adjustments to bridge the gap, but there were too many holes in the dyke for one finger to plug. By spring last year, UK farming's total income was a mere 35% of what it had been in the mid-1970s. 
The government's own rural white paper made no bones about it. 'Farming,' it said, 'is going through its most difficult period since the second world war.' Its most difficult period, in other words, since Neolithic settlers arrived 10,000 years ago and found the fields of the future buried beneath a forest. In England alone, farmers and their workers were leaving the industry at the rate of more than 450 a week. The government was urging them to diver-sify - running bed and breakfasts, restaurants, riding schools, IT consultancies, anything but milk more cows. There was a lot of talk about the need to 'respond to market fluctuations', but not much about 'feeding the nation'. 

	

Forward-looking means not seeing farming purely in terms of food production. The buzz word - horrid but unavoidable - is 'multifunctionality'. 
In plain English, this means that such things as the conservation of landscape and wildlife, the development of alternative energy sources and the maintenance of a clean water supply should count on the credit side of farming's balance sheet. There has to be more to agriculture than growing food at lowest cost for global markets. We do have a choice. We can live in parkland and pay twice - directly to import our food, and indirectly through taxation for the parkland to be maintained. Or we can make a smarter choice where we pay only once, for our food to be produced in our own fields, and get the management of the countryside thrown in for free. 
Well, almost. If there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is certainly no such thing as a free landscape. And the question is: who pays? As a nation of shoppers we stand convicted of double standards. We say we value the environment and want it protected but, says the Royal Agricultural Society: 'A degree of hypocrisy is evident amongst the majority of shoppers, who do not follow this through in their purchasing decisions.' Reality cannot be ducked. For all the tractor logos and farm-assured labels with which supermarkets emblazon their products, British consumers will not buy food just because it is British. They want special offers; they want cheapness; they want value. 
For the men on the hill, how is such a reality to be survived? Nobody, not even the most purblind of village idiots, now believes in a system that pays farmers to grow food that nobody wants. One solution might be to end all subsidies and simply surrender to the market. That would concentrate farmers' minds all right, but, warns the Royal Agricultural Society, only at the cost of bankrupting 40% of them overnight. And in the orgy of cost-cutting that would follow, you could kiss goodbye to any idea of environmental stewardship. 
The market cares as little about landscape as it does about humans who stray into its line of fire. Save the skylark? Forget it. If the flow of taxpayers' money cannot be turned off, however, it can certainly be better deployed. The need, says the Royal Agricultural Society, is for 'total land management' - ie farming for the benefit of the broader rural economy and the health of the landscape, not food production alone. Farmers in future need to be subsidised in proportion to the amount of land they farm, and the way in which they farm it, not the size of the harvest. 
As it is so clearly in the public interest for the countryside to be properly managed, and for landscape and wildlife to be conserved, it is right to expect taxpayer beneficiaries to meet their share of the cost. Under a scheme of targeted benefits, farmers would be subsidised on a sliding scale according to the amount of 'public good' they were doing: the habitats they were conser-ving, the species they were protecting, the woods or heathlands they were planting, and the access that they provided. Because the poorest land often carries the highest amenity value, this would have the added benefit of targeting according to need. Ruthless monoculture merchants - the fabled barley barons of the east - would not need, deserve or receive any subsidy at all. At the other extreme, hill farmers on land of marginal economic value but huge environmental importance might receive more in subsidy than they earned from selling their sheep. 
On the broader canvas there would be political advantages, too. That great globaliser, the World Trade Organization (WTO), is immutably hostile to European farm subsidies and wants them stopped. Well, so be it. Whereas the free-trade purists might object to production subsidies, they can hardly object to farmers being paid to conserve the environment. Already there has been some minor alteration of the CAP, reducing some production subsidies and reallocating a proportion of the money as cash-per-hectare 'area payments', to be made irrespective of yield. The UK government is urging it to move further and faster, but confronts a huge weight of political and bureaucratic inertia. The result, in lieu of action, has been a listless round of discussion documents, consultation papers and committees, accompanied by often incomprehensible tinkering with the current system. 
If there was ever a time when farming dominated the political landscape, that time is long past. With evident reluctance, and at the eleventh hour, the general election was postponed to avoid disenfranchising communities isolated by the foot and mouth crisis. Otherwise, the only reference to the countryside came from the urbanite Labour MP Tony Banks, who as ex-sports minister knows exactly when to kick a weakened opponent. For him, the pressing rural issue was a ban on fox-hunting. Failure to deliver this, he said, would be 'a running sore' in the next parliament. 
Even before the foot and mouth crisis, farmers were struggling to make ends meet. On average throughout last year (2000), farm-gate prices for almost all the main commodities were less than the cost of production. 
Production costs and average price:
  Wheat £110 a tonne - £70-80
  Barley £130 a tonne - £70
  Rape £270-300 a tonne - £120-130
  Milk 17p a litre - 17p
  Beef £1.20 a kilo - 90p
  Lamb £1.20 a kilo - 92p
  Pork £1.05 a kilo - 95p 
Production costs don't include any income for the farmer, or returns on capital. Not even subsidies payable on cereals (£30 a tonne), lamb (25p a kilo) and beef (30p a kilo) could lift them into profit.
Source: National Farmers' Union 

Regardless of what happens to hunting, and regardless of Maff's disappearance into the new Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the antis will have the satisfaction of seeing many of their opponents forced from the field. As the farming industry polarises, so further losses will be inevitable. 'Whenever there is pressure on an industry,' says Hill, 'you get polarisation. The people hardest hit are those in the middle - businesses that are not large enough to achieve economies of scale, yet not small enough to switch to local niche markets. A rationalised industry therefore ends up with a few very large operators at one end of the spectrum, and a multitude of very small businesses - organic cheese makers, organic meat producers, etc - at the other. It's the supermarket versus the delicatessen. There is room for both in the market, but little scope for anyone in between.' 
The great temptation for many small and medium-sized outfits is to switch to organic, but here again the economic undergrowth conceals a trap. The temptation is obvious: demand for organic food is growing - by as much as 40% a year, says the Soil Association - and 70% of it has to be imported from abroad. The pitfalls, however, are exactly the same as they are for 'conven- tional' produce. Other countries have lower labour costs and can therefore supply more cheaply. And if there is a widespread switch to organic production, the supply-and-demand equation will be turned on its head. Only for as long as demand outstrips supply can organic farmers charge a premium. 
Is there nothing, then, that medium-sized producers can do to prevent the trap door yawning beneath them? If they cannot compete on price - and they can't - the only option is to compete on quality while simultaneously climbing further up the food chain to claim more of the 'added value'. The opportu-nities are clearly spelt out in the Royal Agricultural Society's policy document, Routes to Rural Prosperity. Either individually or in groups, farmers can process their own food and sell direct to the public from farm shops or through farmers' markets (see box, above left). They can sell to the catering trade. They can convert to speciality food production - organic meat, cheese, yogurt - to sell locally or through supermarkets. If the worse comes to the worst they can follow the government's advice, convert the farm buildings to alternative use and diversify into other businesses. 
On my way home from Ely, I follow a hand-painted sign advertising that traditional staple of rural cottage enterprise: the free-range egg. There is a dog whimpering somewhere; the sound of something banging in the wind; a pair of pigeons crashing out of an unpruned apple tree. I call out, the tentative, lone voice of a vanishing market. Nobody comes. Unless concern for the countryside turns itself very rapidly into action, the risk is that nobody ever will. 

END

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