Agriculture is one of our great national assets. Our grass grows 11 months of the year, we have rainfall that most countries envy, and we are surrounded by sea. And food is something everyone needs. Trust capitalism to find ways of wrecking it…

The ‘free market’: farming’s road to ruin

WORKERS, FEBRUARY 2009 ISSUE

Walk into a supermarket in Britain, and you’re often hard pushed to find fruit and vegetables grown this country. Depending on the whims of the global market, even British onions can be hard to find. Instead, we are presented with lettuces from Spain, beans from Uganda or Guatemala, strawberries from the USA. The only constant is that prices just seem to go up all the time.

And how they go up! In the year to March 2008, according to figures compiled by the Bloomberg news agency, world corn prices rose by 31 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and wheat by 130 per cent. Prices for rice, said the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, went up 74 per cent over the same period. In the first nine months of 2008, urea-based fertiliser increased in price seven-fold.

This should be a time of opportunity for British agriculture to rise again, providing us with fresher, safer food with much lower transport costs and associated pollution. So what is happening?

National asset

In a Britain dominated by the banks, agriculture gets short shrift. Yet it is one of our great national assets. Including rough grazing, we have 18.6 million hectares of agricultural land (440,000 of them idle under the EU’s “set aside” policy), our grass grows 11 months of the year, we have rainfall that most countries would envy, and we are surrounded by sea. And food is something everyone needs.

British farms: crippled by the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy and a government here that doesn’t care what is grown.

Yet in 2006, agriculture’s contribution to GDP was estimated at a mere 0.5 per cent. The once-independent National Union of Agricultural and Allied Workers has long been subsumed into the T&G/Unite, its Headland House headquarters in London now occupied by the National Union of Journalists – there’s a metaphor for modern Britain.

The number of British universities offering courses in agricultural sciences is dwindling. Just recently, at the end of January, a report from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Chemical Engineers warned that efforts to improve food production and use were threatened by a shortage of properly qualified scientists and engineers, which “could harm the nation’s food industry and its capacity to deliver”.

For years, the government has taken its standard view on food: the market will provide. The government has ignored agriculture, urged on by large landowners who want to be free to employ migrant labour and grow whatever makes the most money, and to sell land off for inflated prices to property speculators. After all, what is agriculture compared with the City?

The T&G/Unite estimates that there are around 135,000 workers in agriculture in Britain, with another 20,000 in horticulture and several thousand in forestry. Yet the claimed membership of the union’s Rural, Agricultural and Allied Workers’ trade group is just 16,000.

During the Second World War Britain was basically self-sufficient in food – it had to be. But now we have balance of payments deficits of £3.165 billion in meat alone (2006 data), £1.135 billion in dairy, £978 million in fish, and £320 million in cereals. In fruit and vegetables, the deficit was a massive £5.392 billion.

At current prices, Britain’s overall balance of payments deficit in food of £8.334 billion in 1999 ballooned to £14.330 billion in 2006. And Brown talked about no more boom and bust!

Going cheap?

The global rise in food prices was big news before the credit crunch kicked in. Commentators (no global shortage of them) appeared with coloured graphs to “prove” that prices had actually gone down since the early 1970s – a period carefully chosen, since the early 1970s saw an artificial surge in prices similar to the rise we saw last year.

“The long era of cheap food is over,” said BBC international development correspondent David Loyn at the end of May 2008. Shoppers not just in Britain but all around the world would have been mystified to read such stuff. Food is not cheap – there are just varying levels of expensiveness.

For the 920 million people who the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said were going hungry before the price increases, all food is expensive. For the poorest people in cities, who can spend half their income on food, all food is expensive – according to the World Bank, 1.4 billion people subsist on less than $1.25 a day.

As it turned out, the sensational increases in food prices were not the result of some natural law of rising prices. They came from speculation: capitalists gambling on rising prices were buying up harvests that had yet to be sown. As the frenzy grew, farmers joined in, in some cases withholding grain in the hope that next week, next month, the price would go higher.

That particular bubble has now burst, but prices have yet to subside. Verdict, the leading British retail analyst, reported in January that food inflation in Britain in the 12 months to the end of December 2008 hit 11.9 per cent.

And with meat and fish up 17.7 per cent and fresh fruit and veg up 16.8 per cent, what price healthy eating, especially for those on lower incomes?

What Britain needs

Even in its present diminished form, agriculture represents something Britain desperately needs: a real industry, a real economy, real products. What we’ve had is too much fizz. As the long financial bubble bursts, we can see exactly what the banks have contributed to the economy over the past decade – less than nothing.

Now that the banks are sucking in public money at jaw-dropping rates (in the last three months of last year, £2,000 for every man, woman and child in the country), what Britain urgently needs is industry that creates real, usable value. And what better industry than agriculture and fisheries, whose end products keep us all alive?

Instead of being a huge net importer of food, we could feed ourselves to a large extent. That, after all, is what Britain managed during the Second World War. That, however, would need a national plan, planning is anathema to this government.

Our ability to plan is not in doubt. The Royal Society of Edinburgh, for example, published a report in September last year called “The Future of Scotland’s Hills and Islands” which dealt authoritatively and succinctly with the issue.

“A new approach based on an explicit policy of achieving rural community viability is required,” it said, “that co-ordinates and integrates social, economic and environmental measures for rural areas; and empowers communities to use their initiatives and deliver outcomes within an overall national strategy.”

This attitude, says the Royal Society of Edinburgh, is in marked contrast to the government’s approach, which is actually to abolish direct support for agriculture when the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy is reviewed in 2013.

Out of the EU!

We cannot do what is required without independence from the European Union, which has always looked enviously at Britain’s agriculture and fisheries. The average British farm is 57 hectares, as against an average for the EU of 20 hectares. Large, relatively efficient farms dominate: according to UK Agriculture, around 14 per cent of all farms account for over 65 per cent of the agricultural area.

Above all, people in Britain need to talk about the “S” word: sovereignty. We need to be able to control our own country, and that includes being able to determine what we will grow, how we will grow it, where we will sell it, and what price to sell it for. The first two the EU claims the right to dictate to us. The last two it will not allow governments to decide for themselves: the market must rule.

The unmistakeable conclusion is that if Britain is to ensure a steady supply of fresh, affordable and safe food for its people and a proper balance in its environment, it must take control of its own agriculture and fisheries. And there is only one way to do that – Britain must decide to leave the European Union.

EU pesticide diktat threatens crops

If the European Union has its way, it might not just be hard to find a British onion – it might be impossible. The EU is pushing to ban a number of pesticides under the guise of health and safety. The consequences will be soaring food prices in Britain, and increased mortality from insect-borne diseases such as malaria in tropical countries. A study by Sean Rickard from Cranfield University estimated that a ban on 15 per cent of the number of permissible pesticides – which is what the EU is trying to push through – would lead to a doubling of farm gate prices for cereals, potatoes and brassicas such as cabbage. Note that it is not a question of permissible levels. The EU is pressing for an outright ban. The consequence, according to an impact assessment published in December by Britain’s Pesticides Safety Directorate, would be “to remove the foundation-stone of control programmes on wheat against septoria [a fungal disease that causes leaf spot] with potential for substantive yield losses”. And not just wheat. “Loss of some herbicides would seriously affect weed control in some crops such as carrots, parsnips and onions,” the report says. In fact, a study by the University of Warwick predicts a 30 per cent fall in wheat production and the possible disappearance of root crops such as carrots and onions. Any trace amount of pesticide found – at whatever minuscule level – will mean that a crop cannot be sold. The result could be devastating, and not just for British agriculture. A Ugandan website, The New Vision, reported in January: “Just two years ago, Uganda had to stop spraying tiny amounts of DDT on walls inside houses in a highly malarial region because of exporters’ fears that their crops would be (illegally) rejected by the EU—fears fanned by EU representatives’ statements in Uganda.” The site goes on to report that many insecticides used against diseases such as dengue and malaria are threatened by the EU legislation. Pyrethroids, widely used in the treatment of bed-nets, could be banned, even if derived from the chrysanthemum and therefore “natural”. Professor Sir Colin Berry, Emeritus Professor of Pathology at Queen Mary College, University of London, has slated the plans. “The costs of implementing this legislation will be high – crop yields will fall, food prices will rise, more land will have to be farmed and fewer habitats conserved. But it is hard to imagine what the benefits will be,” he said. Berry continued: “The idea of chemical-free farming is absurd and dangerous. This legislation will not improve human health – the European Parliament’s document in support of the legislation is simply an apologia for a position, not a scientific review.” The Pesticides Safety Directorate says the ban could “ultimately render conventional agriculture as it is currently practised unachievable”. But under existing EU regulations, Britain has no veto over this disastrous legislation.

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