Farmland - Does It Really Matter and What Should We Do With It?
Much interest in Michael Gove's prognostications on farmland subsidies today. This is a really important issue for environmentalists - perhaps more important than you might think.
Oddly, most people in the UK think that the country is largely concreted over. How much of the UK's land area do you think is densely* built on? According to a recent Ipsos Mori poll, the average estimate is 47%. The actual number is... 0.1%.The younger people are, the more land they think is concrete. 47% is a vast over-estimation of the proportion of land built on at all, which is below 6%
As the BBC's Mark Easton pointed out in his excellentblog, this misconception has disastrous implications for debate about land use.
Oddly, folk living in rural locations had the same level of misconception as those in towns and cities. In other words, this is received rather than observed wisdom.
There's a powerful historical narrative at work here which we need to unravel, and which has a direct bearing on what we do with our farmland. Although it takes up much more of our land than people think, farmland is far from the rural utopia that the same narrative suggests. It's not the green and pleasant land threatened by the looming giants of the industrial revolution and - today - housing sprawl. Most farmers have to work their land very hard to make ends meet.
Farmland is veryimportant for the natural environment. We must concentrate on getting the policies shaping it right. What happens on farmland is much, much more important for biodiversity than what happens in urban areas. It's well over 50% of our land mass, massively more than natural land, and much of it is now very degraded.
The Common Agricultural Policy has done little to halt this degradation. It has probably made it worse. Mr Gove doesn't like the CAP, and has perhaps been surprised to find allies in the environmental lobby. It's expensive, inefficient and politically sensitive. Paying subsidies on the basis of land ownership - with no cap - is inevitably going to produce poor outcomes and promote grotesque income inequalities.
What Mr Gove proposes is a kind of expansion of countryside stewardship and agri-environmental schemes. We will pay farmers for the “public goods” they create rather than the acreage they farm. Mr. Gove mentioned planting woodland, creating new habitats for wildlife, helping improve water quality and recreating wildflower meadows. Potentially good news for Habitat Aid, incidentally, although I wonder where all the seed and plants for this will come from! I hope they will have the right provenance...
This dramatic and potentially really exciting switch in policy begs more questions than it answers. Presumably cost cutting is a rationale for doing it - how big would any new pot be? In order to be meaningful they will have to be landscape wide and administered by an expensive and well informed bureaucracy.
What would be the impact on food prices and how would the electorate react to that? We still produce 60% of the food we eat - what happens as that falls when intensive farming becomes less attractive? What would happen to activities like hill farming, which are fundamentally uneconomic?
I don't see how we can end up with cheap food produced to today's standards or better, an improved environment, and a saving to the public purse. You can't have your cake and eat it.
As the BBC's Mark Easton pointed out in his excellentblog, this misconception has disastrous implications for debate about land use.
Oddly, folk living in rural locations had the same level of misconception as those in towns and cities. In other words, this is received rather than observed wisdom.
There's a powerful historical narrative at work here which we need to unravel, and which has a direct bearing on what we do with our farmland. Although it takes up much more of our land than people think, farmland is far from the rural utopia that the same narrative suggests. It's not the green and pleasant land threatened by the looming giants of the industrial revolution and - today - housing sprawl. Most farmers have to work their land very hard to make ends meet.
Farmland is veryimportant for the natural environment. We must concentrate on getting the policies shaping it right. What happens on farmland is much, much more important for biodiversity than what happens in urban areas. It's well over 50% of our land mass, massively more than natural land, and much of it is now very degraded.
The Common Agricultural Policy has done little to halt this degradation. It has probably made it worse. Mr Gove doesn't like the CAP, and has perhaps been surprised to find allies in the environmental lobby. It's expensive, inefficient and politically sensitive. Paying subsidies on the basis of land ownership - with no cap - is inevitably going to produce poor outcomes and promote grotesque income inequalities.
What Mr Gove proposes is a kind of expansion of countryside stewardship and agri-environmental schemes. We will pay farmers for the “public goods” they create rather than the acreage they farm. Mr. Gove mentioned planting woodland, creating new habitats for wildlife, helping improve water quality and recreating wildflower meadows. Potentially good news for Habitat Aid, incidentally, although I wonder where all the seed and plants for this will come from! I hope they will have the right provenance...
This dramatic and potentially really exciting switch in policy begs more questions than it answers. Presumably cost cutting is a rationale for doing it - how big would any new pot be? In order to be meaningful they will have to be landscape wide and administered by an expensive and well informed bureaucracy.
What would be the impact on food prices and how would the electorate react to that? We still produce 60% of the food we eat - what happens as that falls when intensive farming becomes less attractive? What would happen to activities like hill farming, which are fundamentally uneconomic?
I don't see how we can end up with cheap food produced to today's standards or better, an improved environment, and a saving to the public purse. You can't have your cake and eat it.
- i.e. over 80%+ covered by artificial surfaces like buildings and roads.