Goodbye beautiful Britain
Pastor Dale Morgan
From The Sunday Times
August 26, 2007
*Goodbye beautiful Britain*
Enjoy the countryside while you can. In the near future there will be no
place for sentiment, no eye for beauty and no room for cows and sheep.
Don't blame the farmers: the culprits are population growth, global
warming and the energy gap- Richard Girling
The landscape of the future will be recognisable only to geologists. The
land will rise and fall as it always did, but it will be clad in very
different colours.
Gone will be the last vestiges of the quilted patchwork, ripe with the
scents of hay and pedigree herds, that postwar farmers inherited from
their fathers.
Vast fields of identical crops will fill the gaps between identical
suburbs of identical brick-box housing. The part of the aural spectrum
normally occupied by insects, birds and animals will be silent or filled
with the drone of traffic.
Cows and sheep will be as rare as corncrakes, their former pastures
switched to bio-fuel, and the price of food will make us wince. Farmers
in the future may have to make a long journey to the bank, but they will
be smiling all the way.
Welcome to drive-thru, wipe-clean, prairie Britain.
Already a report from Natural England called Tracking Change in the
Character of the English Landscape, has concluded that, judged across a
range of criteria - quality of farmland, woodlands, rivers, buildings,
“semi-natural habitats” and historic features - nearly 40% of English
landscapes are changing for the worse.
This is not so much a nightmare as the final chapter of a story that is
already unfolding.
What is different is that the crop sprayer will be steered by economic
forces over which country folk - and even governments - have no control.
Look at the price of wheat, which rose to a record last week as panic
spread. Look at the projections for bio-fuel production from grain. Look
at the huge growth in demand in India and China.
The market is global now and the voices that count are in Washington,
Beijing and New Delhi. So don’t blame the farmers - or even John Prescott.
Hatred of farmers is nothing new. We despise them for what they have
already done - poisoning rivers, obliterating hedgerows, exterminating
wild-life. We have watched them create enormous production surpluses and
then take subsidies for leaving fields empty.
We have seen BSE, foot and mouth, swine fever, salmonella and the
criminal exploitation of migrant workers. We have watched them take our
money (although they complain about the forms they have to fill in to
get it), then spend it on barbed wire to keep us off their land.
And they cannot even feed us properly. National self-sufficiency in food
production over the past 15 years has fallen by 1% a year, until now we
produce only 60% of what we need.
It’s not just the farmers. Villages swarm with wax-jacketed nimbys who
will not allow so much as a brick to be laid within sight of their
windows. We see even the so-called rural “poor” enjoying the benefits of
multiple car ownership.
Add to this the absolute certainty that food prices are about to shoot
skywards and you have all the reason you need to despise the countryside
and everyone in it.
However, the view changes as you get closer. More farmers commit suicide
than do members of any other professional group in the country, and this
is not because they cannot stand the pressure of being rich.
Few other professional groups are expected to sell their products for
less than they cost to produce. In real terms over the past 30 years,
farm incomes have fallen by 66% and a quarter of farms now run at a loss.
Even facts tell lies. In the country, multiple car ownership is often a
mark of poverty, not wealth. So bad is rural public transport, and so
distant are the shops, post office, doctor, school and bank, that there
is no alternative.
What their urban equivalents might spend on food or home, the rural poor
must spend on getting to work.
This does not leave much to live on, especially as social housing, too,
is in short supply. Farm workers on average earn £12,500 a year -
£10,000 less than the national average.
The usual definition of poverty in the UK is a family income that is
less than 60% of the national median. In rural England nearly 32% of
households - more than 928,000 - fit this mould.
This is despite the influx from town to country of well-off incomers who
are simultaneously pushing up the age profile, inflating house prices
and forcing local families out of the market.
Over the past 20 years, according to the Commission for Rural
Communities, young people aged 15 to 24 have plummeted from 21% to 15%
of the rural population. One consequence of this is a dire shortage of
potential young farmers ready or willing to inherit farms or tenancies
from their ageing fathers.
The countryside is in a fix and things are only going to get worse. But
there is much more to the problem than suicidal farmers, selfish nimbys
and the vanishing young.
Before the second world war, 60% of Britain’s fields were still under
grass and most farms grew oats and hay for horses. There was no
particular need to grow food because we had been able to import all we
needed from the empire.
Hitler’s U-boats changed all that. If we wanted to eat, then we would
have to grow our own.
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
and into the 21st: the production subsidy.
It was this, stretched to its limit by the European common agricultural
policy (CAP), that played such havoc with farm incomes and ultimately
perverted the landscape.
Production-linked subsidies encouraged higher yields which swamped the
market and caused prices to fall. To protect their incomes, farmers then
aimed for even higher yields and even more hectares under the plough - a
vicious cycle that did nothing for incomes and worse for the landscape.
This is why corners were cut - why land and crops were turned into
chemical junkies unable to deliver without their fix.
Too late, a reformed CAP has introduced area payments that are not
dependent on yield and offer benefits for environmental improvement.
These have taken some of the pressure off, but it is almost irrelevant
now. In a global market there are new drivers at the wheel and the
tongues in which they speak are Indian and Chinese.
Three factors make change inevitable: world population growth, global
warming and the energy gap. The first means that the world will need 40%
more food by 2020; the second and third mean there will be less land to
grow it on.
Last week wheat prices rose to an all-time high after Canada warned that
its output might be down by almost 20% on last year because of bad
weather. The International Grains Council cut its estimate for this
year’s global wheat crop from 614m tons to 607m, while forecasting that
demand would reach 614m tons.
Shortfalls in the past have been offset by buffer stocks. But world
reserves have fallen from 100 days’ supply in 2000 to 40 days’ in 2006
and are at their lowest since 1979. In a single year, from one harvest
to the next, the price of wheat has leapt from £70 to £120 a ton. French
wheat futures rose last Thursday to the equivalent of more than £160 a ton.
Prices at the checkout will soon reflect this. Bread is not an issue.
Ingredients account for such a small percentage of the cost that each
£10 per ton increase in wheat adds only 1p to the price of a loaf. The
problem is grain-fed white meat such as chicken, where 60% of the
production cost is in what it eats.
Mark Hill, a partner in Deloitte, the international business advisory
firm, explained: “A farmer now gets about £1 for a 2kg chicken, of which
60p is accounted for by feed. This then retails at £3. If feed prices
double, that’s another 60p. Assuming the processor and retailer continue
to take the same margin, the shelf price goes up from £3 to £5.”
At that level it will have a drag-along effect on beef and lamb. Being
grown on grass, they are cushioned from feed prices and will look better
value. But as soon as people start switching, demand will increase and
prices will go up.
The rising cost of grain thus hits the entire food chain and Hill
predicts a period of sustained price inflation. IT gets worse. World
population is predicted to be 50% higher by 2050 and the planet will
need more food. At the same time, more and more land is being lost to
climate change, urban development and bio-fuels.
In George Bush’s drive for energy security, 20% of the US corn crop is
already going into bio-ethanol. That is 20% no longer available for
human or animal feeds.
Europe, too, wants 5.75% of its consumption to be met from bio-fuels by
2010. This will take a possible 3m tons of wheat out of the UK’s annual
15m-ton total, thus wiping out its entire export surplus and removing
another 3m tons from the world food market.
Professor John Moverley, chief executive of the Royal Agricultural
Society of England, hardly risks contradiction when he predicts “a major
impact on the supply of food”. This will matter especially as massive
economic growth transforms Chinese and Indian lifestyles.
“As they become richer they will switch increasingly to a grain and
meat-based diet,” said Hill. “The result could be a doubling of grain
consumption in 40 years.”
The impact will be felt wherever land is farmed. There are only two ways
to get more food from the soil: by breeding heavier yielding crops or by
cultivating more land.
Over the past 50 years British farmers have done both. Plant breeding,
artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides meant that wheat
production increased by an average 3% a year until the early 1990s.
After that it slowed down to its current rate of about 1% a year.
The reason was simple. “Most of the land capable of being cropped is
being cropped,” said Hill, “and biology puts a brake on it, too. There
is a limit to how much grain you can make a stalk of wheat bear.”
To maximise land use, the European Union has reduced compulsory
set-aside from 8% in 2006-7 to zero in 2007-8. But this does not mean
that 8% more land will be brought back into production. The land set
aside was the least productive — the stony bits, the headlands, the bits
under trees.
Experts predict that the actual production increase due to the abolition
of set-aside may be as little as 3%. “Yet,” said Hill, “the challenge to
farmers is to double production in the next 40 years. How can they do it?”
The answer, if there is one, will not please the romantics. According to
Moverley, “major change” is coming to the countryside. By this he means
the end of environmental initiatives that restrict productivity and the
removal of livestock from all but the most marginal land.
Hill agreed: “Livestock will be displaced by cropping and meat
production off grass will retreat to the uncroppable hill land.”
Translation: anything that is not already under the plough soon will be,
and lowlying villages in open country will be at constant risk of
flooding from run-off. The supply and demand equation will have its
inevitable effect on the price of meat.
Even if this pattern is repeated throughout the industrialised world,
and even if countries with poorer growing conditions could boost their
yields to European levels (about as likely as harvesting mangoes on the
moon), the world’s hunger for grain will not be met. But there is an
elephant in the room — or, rather, two elephants joined at the hip.
One of these is nuclear power, which its supporters claim will reduce
the amount of land needed for bio-fuels. The other is genetic
modification (GM), which its advocates say would enable the step-change
in production that the world needs.
“The statistics will force GM on us,” said Hill.
Moverley agreed: “The UK must tackle the debate on genetic modification.”
Whatever happens, with or without GM, market forces will drive farmers
to cram the land with every last ear of wheat that it will hold.
This will be especially the case after 2012, when the CAP support system
will be reviewed, the market will rule and, if commodity prices go on
rising, farmers will forgo environmental grant schemes in favour of more
profitable crop production.
Perhaps by then the UK government will have realised the importance of
food security, an issue on which it has no policy at present. “Given
global tightening of supply and demand and the inflationary effect,”
said Hill, “nations relying on imports will be vulnerable.”
The government of Tony Blair showed little sign that it understood, or
even cared about, the life of rural Britain. Outside the city margins
lay weird, rabbity badlands that carried less than their fair share of
concrete and too often voted for the wrong party.
Blair’s government did its best to bankrupt farmers by delaying for over
a year the single farm payments due to them under CAP reform and upon
which their survival depended.
It allowed the countryside to be cleansed of the schools, shops and post
offices that are the essential building blocks of proper communities. It
failed to understand that the best form of national defence is food
security, or that the hills and vales of rural Britain had been thrown
upon the mercy of global events.
Whatever school of thought you belong to - GM proselytiser, organic
idealist or defender of the status quo - it is difficult to be optimistic.