The End of British Farming
Andrew O’Hagan
This last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would continue on my way to Devon, passing through other places waking up in the middle of the worst agricultural nightmare in seventy years. My boots are without guilt, but in all the walking here and there, in the asking and listening, I came to feel that British farming was already dying, that the new epidemic was but an unexpected acceleration of a certain decline.
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[1] According to Which? magazine (28 February), this confidence should not be extended to Sainsbury’s chickens. In a survey, the magazine found 22 per cent of the store’s chickens to ‘contain unwelcome bacteria’, including salmonella. This was worse than Safeway (21 per cent) and Tesco (6 per cent).
[2] The Maff Report on Wages in Agriculture (Stationery Office, 40 pp., £11, 29 October 1999, 0 11 243054 6) asserts that employers agreed that wages were too low, especially for casual workers, and suggested that their pay be increased by 5 per cent. As the Report also notes, however, Government inspectors have had a very low success rate in prosecuting employers who pay below the agreed rate. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many growers, especially in the horticultural sector, still pay illegally low wages.
[3] Subsidies available for one animal, dependent on the size of herd and its location: a Suckler Cow Premium, £117 a year; Beef Special Premium, £84; Hill Livestock Compensatory Allowance, £69.75.
[4] On 11 January this year the European Commission formally approved a scheme by the British Government to pay £34m in compensation to arable farmers to offset the effects of the weakness of the euro against sterling since July 1999. ‘I am delighted to say that the Commission has now approved our scheme,’ the Agriculture Minister, Nick Brown, commented. ‘This is an exceptional response to very difficult trading conditions.’ Bizarrely, though, at the height of the foot and mouth epidemic, the Government began referring to this money as ‘compensation’ for animals slaughtered as a result of the outbreak. In fact, the money was earmarked to compensate farmers for the euro imbalance, and has nothing to do with foot and mouth disease.
[5] Suicide and Stress in Farmers by Keith Hawton, Sue Simkin, Aslog Malmberg, Joan Fagg and Louise Harriss (Stationery Office, 122 pp., £17.50, 11 December 1998, 0 11 322172 x) shows how far from being a joke Carruthers’s comment was. Research for the book was undertaken ‘following recognition of the apparent increased risk of suicide in farmers in England and Wales’, and what it showed was that ‘farmers contributed the largest number of suicides of all the high-risk occupational groups . . . the majority . . . faced problems connected to work (including financial problems) at the time of their death.’ Almost half these problems were classified as ‘major’ – ‘which meant there was an imminent danger of the farm being lost’.
[6] The Killing of the Countryside, discussed in the LRB by David Craig (8 May 1997), is the most convincing account available of the destruction of British rural life by postwar policymakers and corporate agribusiness. It is the source for several of the figures I use here.
[7] The Scottish Executive, Department of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries, has published a series of useful documents on these and other matters relating to CAP, available at www.scotland.gov.uk
[8] Not everyone agrees that the feeding of meat and bone-meal is an indirect result of EU intensification alone. Hugh Pennington’s letter in the LRB (25 January) points to the practice’s popularity in Britain early in the 20th century. It would probably be more accurate to see this kind of feeding as one promoted, rather, by agricultural intensification in wartime.
[9] Zed, 158 pp., £9.99, 11 December 2000, 1 85649 900 6.
[10] ‘A review of cotton production in Zimbabwe,’ the agronomist Fred Zinanga reports in Brave New Seeds, ‘shows that 70 per cent of the total crop produced annually comes from the small-scale farming sector. As these farmers can barely afford inputs, the crop is normally grown on advances from the cotton companies, which are later deducted at the end of the season. The question is, how would these small-scale farmers be able to afford the purchase of transgenic seeds, especially those with the Bt gene which have to be purchased annually? Monsanto is pushing hard to introduce this crop in Zimbabwe without going through the normal procedures of testing the technology and studying its economic compatibility with the local farming system . . . It is therefore suicidal to encourage farmers to cultivate the supposedly lucrative transgenic crops, since their seeds are beyond their means.’
[12] Our Countryside: The Future. A Fair Deal for Rural England (Stationery Office, 176 pp., £28, 28 November 2000, 0 10 149092 5, www.wildlife-countryside.detr.gov.uk/ruralwp/cm4909/index.htm).
[13] Supermarkets: A Report on the Supply of Groceries from Multiple Stores in the United Kingdom (Stationery Office, 3 vols, 1256 pp., £80, 10 October 2000, 0 10 148422 4, www.competition-commission.org.uk).
[14] Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Safeway each expressed concern at the approach taken by the questioners. Safeway had ‘reservations about the way in which its answers might be presented in the report’. Sainsbury’s said that ‘the yes/no style of format requested by the CC had not always been appropriate; hence, in a small number of cases it had commented on a practice without giving a yes/no answer. The response summarised company policy in respect of each of the individual practices listed. It was not possible to check that every policy had been consistently and uniformly applied by each of the 350 or more buyers, over the last five years.’ Tesco found the approach of the questionnaire wholly unsatisfactory: ‘it said that the fundamental basis for buyer/supplier relationships was a two-way negotiation process through which both supplier and buyer strove to achieve their individual objectives. The reality was that both parties were likely to compromise in order to reach mutually acceptable agreements.’
[15] Tesco argued that higher costs resulted from promotions instigated by the producers themselves, which required a barcode change; Sainsbury’s that payments were negotiable; Somerfield that payment was not always necessary; Safeway, which did not say that it engaged in the practice, said ‘that it would not expect to pay for barcode changes on branded products, and on own-label products the packaging was paid for by the supplier so it, too, would fund the changes.’