Leaving it until one month before the UK leaves the CAP to announce your new agricultural policy is frankly ridiculous but here we are. The Government’s new policies for farming promise the same amount of money for agriculture but allocated differently, on the basis of helping the environment not production of food and that raises many questions.
If, as we have been told for decades, farmers are the custodians of the countryside; why do we have to pay them to do the right thing? Surely they are already stopping chemicals and animal waste from polluting our rivers, rotating crops to preserve the soil, planting trees, preserving wetlands and preventing flooding.
Well maybe they will get even better now the Government is moving subsidies from production to environmental criteria, but who will get the money?
How do you measure soil improvement or flood prevention, find who is to blame for polluting chemicals, check that animal welfare is being maintained? These are all subjective tests that will need a lot of form filing and checking, which as we know from the CAP farmers hate. More importantly who will be able to manage the applications and create the schemes to take advantage of this new system? Big farms with money and time to spend on consultants, cutting through red tape and inventing profitable schemes or the poor, small hill farms where this kind of work is most important?
In my experience promising the same money for a sector but allocating it differently, aids those who can work the new system best, not those who need it most.
https://jonty.substack.com/