Not to everybody’s liking

The proposals for a new Common Agricultural Policy have not been welcomed with uniform approval.

The existing system is not simple and understanding the changes is not simple either.  It will take time before all the implications are thought through but here is a rather good summary (it’s a good summary but it isn’t light reading).

Clive Aslet had a thoughtful comment piece in the Telegraph yesterday (other papers largely ignore it despite the fact that this covers the whole of Europe’s farmland) which is well worth reading despite one glaring error – he says that wildlife has flourished as a result of agri-environment schemes.  All the evidence is to the contrary actually.

A cap on CAP payments under Pillar 1 is proposed – thus large land owners like the Duke of Westminster, the National Trust and the RSPB will find their payments capped at 300,000 euros (if euros still exist by 2013!).  Let’s be clear – this would apply to Pillar 1 payments not to Pillar 2 agri-environment payments.  This would limit the ‘income support’ that goes to rich farmers, landowners and organisations and can’t really be argued against.  It protects income support for all farmers (receiving CAP payments which is most of them) but reduces its extent at the top of the scale.  It isn’t quite like introducing a higher rate of income tax for the best paid but it has some similarities.  What it will probably do is create a vogue for dividing your holding into several indepenedent bits – there’s always a way out! And the money ‘saved’ doesn’t go back to you, the taxpayer, it stays in farming to pay for innovation under Pillar 2 – so it’s a tax on richer farmers to pay for innovation for all farmers (I’d quite like a rebate please!).

As I understand it, and maybe I don’t, there will also be a move towards equalising payments across the EU so that the payment rates are more equal across different countries.  Since land prices and salaries are not equal across EU states this is bound to have some pretty big ramifications that people will be thinking about now.

Permanent grassland will be protected – generally a good thing for wildlife and carbon storage  – but the critical year is 2014 so there is an incentive to plough now to avoid that future constraint – madness!

Organic farmers will get a bit of a free ride on the cosntraints attached to Pillar 1 payments – they have made the case that their system of farming delivers lots of benefits already.  This is good in many ways, and will clearly be welcomed by such farmers, but there will be other farmers, perhaps like my mate Duncan Farrington, who is doing lots of good things but is only half way to being organic and he gains no advantage over those who haven’t shifted in that direction at all.

Another proposed reform is to require more variety incropping on arable land.  This sounds a bit odd to me.  It feels a bit like telling me that I can’t paint all the walls of my living room the same colour.  I have sympathy with the lack of enthusiasm from the farming community on this one!

There is a proposal for 7% of land to be devoted to  Environmental Focus Points (ghastly phrase).  Although Clive Aslet say this is a bit like a return to set-aside it isn’t really.  Hedges, trees, buffer strips etc would all count in this 7%.  And Clive’s use of the word ‘derelict’ to describe unfarmed land on farms shows just how extreme some views are.  This 7% can include fallow land – recovering land, land having a rest, knackered land in need of some recuperation!  I would prefer to see more money going into targetted well developed schemes under agri-environment but those schemes are not delivering across Europe because governments have not designed them well enough and farmers, as a whole, with some notable exceptions, haven’t made them deliver.  You can completely understand why the EU is looking at blunt compulsory measures since paid-for, voluntary measures have failed to deliver the goods.  It’s the failure of a Big Society approach which is now being followed by compulsory greening measures.

Depending on what individual governments do, there is scope to maintain payments for agri-environment schemes.  That’s good provided governments, including Defra, do much better on designing these schemes (otherwise I’d like a rebate please).

Responses to these proposals:

CLA and NFU: ‘disappointing and a missed opportunity’.  They want the 7% figure to be reduced – now there’s a surprise!

RSPB: fears reductions in agri-environment payments (I think they may be a bit more pleased than they let on in their press release)

NT: not very impressed either.  I think the quote from the NT is intereting enough to quote in full here;  “The Commission’s ambition to green the CAP is laudable, but the proposals announced today fall well short of meeting this. We’re disappointed that taxpayers in the UK and across Europe – who pay for the CAP – are being short-changed in this time of austerity and sold greenwash. The National Trust was hoping to see proposals that delivered much more for nature and the farmed landscape and prepared us for an uncertain future of climate and food insecurity.  Many farmers in the UK have made great progress over the last two decades integrating care for the environment into their farming practices. National Trust tenant farmers have played a key part in that transformation and we don’t want to see these gains lost.”

 Soil Association: pleased!

This is just beginning rather than ending.  Watch this space!

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