The landscape of the future will be recognisable only to geologists. The land
will rise and fall as it always did, but it will be clad in very different
colours.
Gone will be the last vestiges of the quilted patchwork, ripe with the scents
of hay and pedigree herds, that postwar farmers inherited from their fathers.
Vast fields of identical crops will fill the gaps between identical suburbs of
identical brick-box housing. The part of the aural spectrum normally
occupied by insects, birds and animals will be silent or filled with the
drone of traffic.
Cows and sheep will be as rare as corncrakes, their former pastures switched
to bio-fuel, and the price of food will make us wince. Farmers in the future
may have to make a long journey to the bank, but they will be smiling all
the way.
Welcome to drive-thru, wipe-clean, prairie Britain.
Already a report from Natural England called Tracking Change in the Character
of the English Landscape, has concluded that, judged across a range of
criteria - quality of farmland, woodlands, rivers, buildings, “semi-natural
habitats” and historic features - nearly 40% of English landscapes are
changing for the worse.
This is not so much a nightmare as the final chapter of a story that is
already unfolding.
What is different is that the crop sprayer will be steered by economic forces
over which country folk - and even governments - have no control.
Look at the price of wheat, which rose to a record last week as panic spread.
Look at the projections for bio-fuel production from grain. Look at the huge
growth in demand in India and China.
The market is global now and the voices that count are in Washington, Beijing
and New Delhi. So don’t blame the farmers - or even John Prescott.
Hatred of farmers is nothing new. We despise them for what they have already
done - poisoning rivers, obliterating hedgerows, exterminating wild-life. We
have watched them create enormous production surpluses and then take
subsidies for leaving fields empty.
We have seen BSE, foot and mouth, swine fever, salmonella and the criminal
exploitation of migrant workers. We have watched them take our money
(although they complain about the forms they have to fill in to get it),
then spend it on barbed wire to keep us off their land.
And they cannot even feed us properly. National self-sufficiency in food
production over the past 15 years has fallen by 1% a year, until now we
produce only 60% of what we need.
It’s not just the farmers. Villages swarm with wax-jacketed nimbys who will
not allow so much as a brick to be laid within sight of their windows. We
see even the so-called rural “poor” enjoying the benefits of multiple car
ownership.
Add to this the absolute certainty that food prices are about to shoot
skywards and you have all the reason you need to despise the countryside and
everyone in it.
However, the view changes as you get closer. More farmers commit suicide than
do members of any other professional group in the country, and this is not
because they cannot stand the pressure of being rich.
Few other professional groups are expected to sell their products for less
than they cost to produce. In real terms over the past 30 years, farm
incomes have fallen by 66% and a quarter of farms now run at a loss.
Even facts tell lies. In the country, multiple car ownership is often a mark
of poverty, not wealth. So bad is rural public transport, and so distant are
the shops, post office, doctor, school and bank, that there is no
alternative.
What their urban equivalents might spend on food or home, the rural poor must
spend on getting to work.
This does not leave much to live on, especially as social housing, too, is in
short supply. Farm workers on average earn £12,500 a year - £10,000
less than the national average.
The usual definition of poverty in the UK is a family income that is less than
60% of the national median. In rural England nearly 32% of households - more
than 928,000 - fit this mould.
This is despite the influx from town to country of well-off incomers who are
simultaneously pushing up the age profile, inflating house prices and
forcing local families out of the market.
Over the past 20 years, according to the Commission for Rural Communities,
young people aged 15 to 24 have plummeted from 21% to 15% of the rural
population. One consequence of this is a dire shortage of potential young
farmers ready or willing to inherit farms or tenancies from their ageing
fathers.
The countryside is in a fix and things are only going to get worse. But there
is much more to the problem than suicidal farmers, selfish nimbys and the
vanishing young.
Before the second world war, 60% of Britain’s fields were still under grass
and most farms grew oats and hay for horses. There was no particular need to
grow food because we had been able to import all we needed from the empire.
Hitler’s U-boats changed all that. If we wanted to eat, then we would have to
grow our own.
To speed the plough, the government wielded the tool that would see us not
only through the war but right through the rest of the 20th century and into
the 21st: the production subsidy.
It was this, stretched to its limit by the European common agricultural policy
(CAP), that played such havoc with farm incomes and ultimately perverted the
landscape.
Production-linked subsidies encouraged higher yields which swamped the market
and caused prices to fall. To protect their incomes, farmers then aimed for
even higher yields and even more hectares under the plough - a vicious cycle
that did nothing for incomes and worse for the landscape. This is why
corners were cut - why land and crops were turned into chemical junkies
unable to deliver without their fix.
Too late, a reformed CAP has introduced area payments that are not dependent
on yield and offer benefits for environmental improvement.
These have taken some of the pressure off, but it is almost irrelevant now. In
a global market there are new drivers at the wheel and the tongues in which
they speak are Indian and Chinese.
Three factors make change inevitable: world population growth, global warming
and the energy gap. The first means that the world will need 40% more food
by 2020; the second and third mean there will be less land to grow it on.
Last week wheat prices rose to an all-time high after Canada warned that its
output might be down by almost 20% on last year because of bad weather. The
International Grains Council cut its estimate for this year’s global wheat
crop from 614m tons to 607m, while forecasting that demand would reach 614m
tons.
Shortfalls in the past have been offset by buffer stocks. But world reserves
have fallen from 100 days’ supply in 2000 to 40 days’ in 2006 and are at
their lowest since 1979. In a single year, from one harvest to the next, the
price of wheat has leapt from £70 to £120 a ton. French wheat futures rose
last Thursday to the equivalent of more than £160 a ton.
Prices at the checkout will soon reflect this. Bread is not an issue.
Ingredients account for such a small percentage of the cost that each £10
per ton increase in wheat adds only 1p to the price of a loaf. The problem
is grain-fed white meat such as chicken, where 60% of the production cost is
in what it eats.
Mark Hill, a partner in Deloitte, the international business advisory firm,
explained: “A farmer now gets about £1 for a 2kg chicken, of which 60p is
accounted for by feed. This then retails at £3. If feed prices double,
that’s another 60p. Assuming the processor and retailer continue to take the
same margin, the shelf price goes up from £3 to £5.”
At that level it will have a drag-along effect on beef and lamb. Being grown
on grass, they are cushioned from feed prices and will look better value.
But as soon as people start switching, demand will increase and prices will
go up.
The rising cost of grain thus hits the entire food chain and Hill predicts a
period of sustained price inflation. IT gets worse. World population is
predicted to be 50% higher by 2050 and the planet will need more food. At
the same time, more and more land is being lost to climate change, urban
development and bio-fuels.
In George Bush’s drive for energy security, 20% of the US corn crop is already
going into bio-ethanol. That is 20% no longer available for human or animal
feeds.
Europe, too, wants 5.75% of its consumption to be met from bio-fuels by 2010.
This will take a possible 3m tons of wheat out of the UK’s annual 15m-ton
total, thus wiping out its entire export surplus and removing another 3m
tons from the world food market.
Professor John Moverley, chief executive of the Royal Agricultural Society of
England, hardly risks contradiction when he predicts “a major impact on the
supply of food”. This will matter especially as massive economic growth
transforms Chinese and Indian lifestyles.
“As they become richer they will switch increasingly to a grain and meat-based
diet,” said Hill. “The result could be a doubling of grain consumption in 40
years.”
The impact will be felt wherever land is farmed. There are only two ways to
get more food from the soil: by breeding heavier yielding crops or by
cultivating more land.
Over the past 50 years British farmers have done both. Plant breeding,
artificial fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides meant that wheat
production increased by an average 3% a year until the early 1990s. After
that it slowed down to its current rate of about 1% a year.
The reason was simple. “Most of the land capable of being cropped is being
cropped,” said Hill, “and biology puts a brake on it, too. There is a limit
to how much grain you can make a stalk of wheat bear.”
To maximise land use, the European Union has reduced compulsory set-aside from
8% in 2006-7 to zero in 2007-8. But this does not mean that 8% more land
will be brought back into production. The land set aside was the least
productive — the stony bits, the headlands, the bits under trees.
Experts predict that the actual production increase due to the abolition of
set-aside may be as little as 3%. “Yet,” said Hill, “the challenge to
farmers is to double production in the next 40 years. How can they do it?”
The answer, if there is one, will not please the romantics. According to
Moverley, “major change” is coming to the countryside. By this he means the
end of environmental initiatives that restrict productivity and the removal
of livestock from all but the most marginal land.
Hill agreed: “Livestock will be displaced by cropping and meat production off
grass will retreat to the uncroppable hill land.” Translation: anything that
is not already under the plough soon will be, and lowlying villages in open
country will be at constant risk of flooding from run-off. The supply and
demand equation will have its inevitable effect on the price of meat.
Even if this pattern is repeated throughout the industrialised world, and even
if countries with poorer growing conditions could boost their yields to
European levels (about as likely as harvesting mangoes on the moon), the
world’s hunger for grain will not be met. But there is an elephant in the
room — or, rather, two elephants joined at the hip.
One of these is nuclear power, which its supporters claim will reduce the
amount of land needed for bio-fuels. The other is genetic modification (GM),
which its advocates say would enable the step-change in production that the
world needs.
“The statistics will force GM on us,” said Hill.
Moverley agreed: “The UK must tackle the debate on genetic modification.”
Whatever happens, with or without GM, market forces will drive farmers to cram
the land with every last ear of wheat that it will hold.
This will be especially the case after 2012, when the CAP support system will
be reviewed, the market will rule and, if commodity prices go on rising,
farmers will forgo environmental grant schemes in favour of more profitable
crop production.
Perhaps by then the UK government will have realised the importance of food
security, an issue on which it has no policy at present. “Given global
tightening of supply and demand and the inflationary effect,” said Hill,
“nations relying on imports will be vulnerable.”
The government of Tony Blair showed little sign that it understood, or even
cared about, the life of rural Britain. Outside the city margins lay weird,
rabbity badlands that carried less than their fair share of concrete and too
often voted for the wrong party.
Blair’s government did its best to bankrupt farmers by delaying for over a
year the single farm payments due to them under CAP reform and upon which
their survival depended.
It allowed the countryside to be cleansed of the schools, shops and post
offices that are the essential building blocks of proper communities. It
failed to understand that the best form of national defence is food
security, or that the hills and vales of rural Britain had been thrown upon
the mercy of global events.
Whatever school of thought you belong to - GM proselytiser, organic idealist
or defender of the status quo - it is difficult to be optimistic.
