A plan to revive farming and rural areas that includes making home produced food more affordable.

 

A plan to revive farming and rural areas that includes making home produced food more affordable.

Landworker magazine, Spring 2024 

Farming subsidies have been cut by a third by the government since Britain left the EU. Meanwhile, hundreds of farmers have left the land.

But Charlie Clutterbuck, veteran Unite food activist and campaigner has a plan to revive farming and rural areas that includes making home produced food more affordable.

Back in 2017, 175,000 farmers and landowners received £3.5bn in individual payments from the Basic Payment Scheme of the Common Agricultural Policy.  (CAP) It was a figure Boris Johnson “guaranteed” would be maintained if Britain left Europe. He later changed his mind when his government announced in July 2020 a complete phaseout of Basic Farm Payouts by 2027.

Unite’s Charlie Clutterbuck, a soil scientist and food security expert, was never a big CAP fan, mainly because big landowners such as the Duke of Westminster were creaming off large subsidies for themselves.

When he stated that “they did nothing for this” in Landworker magazine, the Duke’s farm manager claimed that as he provided jobs everybody should be pleased. When Charlie offered to debate the issue with the generally very vocal local hunting, shooting and fishing community there was silence.  

UK land ownership is the most unequal in Europe. Our leaders like that. When the EU planned to limit CAP to £250,000 annually for any one farmer, Prime Minster David Cameron was quickly on his way to Brussels to successfully block the limit being introduced.

So, at the time of the EU referendum Charlie’s book Bittersweet Brexit: the future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour put forward an entirely new funding method for rural areas in which the CAP monies going into the pockets of the already wealthy would be switched into subsidising 300,000 rural jobs at an annual cost of £10,000 each.

Before and after the EU referendum, Michael Gove ran round ‘promising the earth’ to farmers and many environmental groups were supportive. But like everything Gove touches there was no real plan and after a few years it was thrown out by the 2019-20 agriculture minister George Eustice.

“All the ‘green’ ideas were complex, especially for small farmers. Even Michael Heseltine said they were OK for his farms as he had management systems, but hopeless for small farmers who knew best how to breed cows and sheep. The government department had a bad track record on paying out BPS – being fined heavily by EU for incompetence, when all they had to do was count static land.

“Anything that moved was going to be too complex,” explains Charlie.

The transition out of CAP between 2021 and 2027 is now taking place under the Environment Land Management Schemes that are according to DEFRA ‘designed to contribute to our range of objectives - farming and nature can and must go hand in hand to support resilient food production and farm businesses and to achieve our target outcomes for environment and climate.’

ELMS funding is being allocated under three strands: Landscape Recovery Scheme (LRS), Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) and the Countryside Stewardship Plus (CSP) scheme.

Each strand was originally planned to receive £1bn. But ‘the environment’ means an awful lot of different things.

PM Johnson said in the Commons: “What we are going to do is use the new freedoms we have after leaving the CAP to support farmers to beautify the countryside”.

According to Charlie “This view of a romanticised countryside is nothing new. But it does not improve the sustainability of present-day UK farming in terms of energy intensive chemical inputs and dependence on other people’s land and labour.”

To be eligible to claim for the LRS you have to have a spare 1,000 acres (500ha) – basically for re-wilding or carbon trading. Meanwhile, small farms are only able to directly access the SFI.

Recently released figures reveal that under ELMS in 2022-23 the total sum spent was £2.230 billion.

“This is over a third less than Johnson’s original promise,” laments Clutterbuck. “Direct payments to 84,000 farmers, including 865 who have left the industry during the year, are £1.4bn.

“Payments under Environment Land management, including CSP, towards 39,000 farmers total just £572 million. And as this figure also includes SFI then I can only conclude that this backs up what many farmers have told me that very few are applying,” explains Clutterbuck, who first appeared in Landworker in 1977.

 “One MP should be putting down a Commons question to find out exactly where these subsidies are now going and who is doing well. I predict the winners are not only large landowners but ‘environmental consultants’, working for ‘the City’ and now adept with the new language of ‘carbon trading’ and ‘biodiversity net gain’.

Charlie wants the £3.5bn that used to come from CAP to help address the big food issues of today.

Food banks are at their most numerous, as more people find themselves in food poverty – a term the government won’t recognise. Over 27% of people are now obese. Cheap ultra-processed food makes up 57% of the British diet, more than any other country.

A simple solution

One simple suggestion by the soil scientist is to grow and eat more home-grown fruit and vegetables. This would revive UK horticulture.

Clutterbuck feels particularly concerned about this, as he was sponsored by the government’s Fruit Research Station for his Master’s in plant science. There, the director proclaimed how fruit growing was an emblem of ‘Britishness’ – think of the Vale of Evesham and the Garden of Kent.

“That ideal is being lost to cheap overseas produce. Fruit growing was never subsidised, but should be.

“We should be having a much broader debate about the role of UK food and farming and how resilient we are to worldwide events, such as the conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Red Sea, plus events such as Brexit.”

Follow the USA

These subsidies could be redirected towards a scheme adopted by the United States where their Farm Bill pays over $60bn annually to around 40 million poorer people to help them buy healthier food cheaply.

While fiscal conservatives argue against the initiative, most Republicans and Democrats like it. It helps the Democrats address food poverty and build local economies, and the Republicans like it because it helps their farming base with their continuous overproduction problem.

“Such a scheme here could be combined with specific general projects consisting of renovating social housing and community facilities.  People in rural areas would vote for such a programme,” Clutterbuck concludes.

 

1.       In writing this article a request was made of Steve Reed, the shadow rural minister, to comment on Charlie Clutterbuck’s observations and on whether he would be willing to ask where the subsidies have gone or are set to go to. Reed did not respond. He is following in a long tradition of shadow rural ministers who are generally uninterested in the post and offer nothing to rural communities.