NEWS January 15 2002
Richard AE North: The Death Of British Agriculture,
The Wanton Destruction Of A Key Industry, Gerald Duckworth and Co. 2001

Review by Pippa Gallop

Just what we would have liked to get our hands on at Corporate Watch last year when we were trying to formulate our agriculture project, Richard AE North's (Not to be confused with rabid anti-environmentalist Richard D North!) latest book is a fine example of a detailed but accessible volume. Each of the topics covered could easily have had a whole book to itself, as he moves from crisis to crisis and perpetrator to perpetrator, yet all are full of detail and well-explained, even though he wrestles with the complexities of subsidies and EU directives which would bring most people out in a rash.

We learn, among other things, that the salmonella scare was grossly exaggerated by people trying to justify their jobs' existence, and cringe as we follow government minister after civil servant after independent expert as they fall foul of the latest lie, scaremongering, mistake or exaggeration. He is at his best when talking about regulation, incompetence and self-interest as he exasperatedly explains successive governments’ botched attempts to lessen regulation by means which have only resulted in more, and winces at the shoddiness with which evidence for health scares has been examined.

Mr North is a seriously anti-EU, which is perfectly reasonable, but this angle tends to permeate his writing perhaps more noticeably than any other strand, even when he is talking about the World Trade Organisation. Indeed, this leads to him giving the WTO less attention than it deserves, although he does move on to talk about some of the perils of 'liberalising' agricultural trade when discussing solutions, later in the book.

He is weakest in economics, and his most serious error is to miss out almost entirely discussion of supermarkets, processors and consumers, dismissing the blame being laid at the door of the supermarkets as a 'red herring', and more or less defending them by saying that although many of the accusations levelled against them are to some extent true, they act only as any commercial company must. He swallows whole the supermarkets' line that they are giving customers the cheap food they want, failing to question whether that demand has been manufactured, and allocating the general public no role in bringing about change. He does not seem to appreciate that unless food distribution systems are completely changed, farmers will continue to be put out of business unless subsidies rise again to their current untenable levels. No mention is made of Fair Trade or not-for-profit companies, and although he explains the problem of regulatory capture and larger companies ousting their smaller competitors by lobbying government for more regulation, he does not propose any solutions, leaving the corporate control of the food chain largely intact. He knows that decisions should be made as close to the people they affect as possible, and tries to work this into his solutions, but in the end he still cannot escape from rather bureaucratic-sounding subsidy systems, and with the exception of his preference for decentralisation and less intrusive regulation, his suggestions do not sound different enough from the government's own to warrant any real enthusiasm. He mentions nothing of artificially low transportation prices, which seriously distort the economics of importing food and which, if changed, could have an important impact in making locally-produced food more viable.

The descriptive chapters of this book are excellent, but its lack of attention to addressing the manoeuvres of companies is inexcusable, and leaves intact a food production system with countless disasters waiting to happen. Likewise, the solutions put forward can only be partial without addressing the issue of farmgate prices, and, in his proposals for locally-suited, decentralised subsidy payments, Mr North risks unleashing a bureaucratic nightmare not unlike the one he so fervently criticises.