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Newsletter
Issue 7
January-February 2002
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Farming Fallacies The 'radical rethink' of Britain's agricultural policy is upon us. In February, the long awaited Policy Commission report on the Future of Farming and Food was published amid much cooing from conservationists. The commission was set up by the Government ostensibly to advise on the future of the countryside and the corporate fat cats who profit from it. Its key idea was to transform farmers from serious producers of food into 'Stewards of the Countryside', by subsidising farmers to environmentally manage their farms, and withdrawing the current system of production subsidies. With less than five months to get their heads around the farming crisis, the ten commissioners including Sir Peter Davis, CEO of Sainsbury's, Ian Ferguson of Unilever and DeAnne Julius, former CIA economist, have come up with an elegant exercise in 'joined-up thinking' across government, linking health, education, tourism, biodiversity, farming and the food industry. The current buzz words are all there - 'reconnection', 'sustainability', 'incentives for change rather than regulation', 'creating value-added products for niche markets' and making farming responsive to market signals. For the few farmers who do survive the end of production subsidies (which have been propping poorer farmers up while the supermarkets screw them), the future looks rosy indeed. They will be funded by the tax payer to build beetle banks and plant hedgerows around their enormous holdings, while rainforests are chopped down and peasants kicked off their land in India and across Eastern Europe to feed our obese population. In the report, supermarkets get off with a small rap on the knuckles for coming up with an unsatisfactory voluntary 'Code of Practice' for dealing with suppliers, but the general trend of the report claims it is the farmers' responsibility to get better at negotiating with the supermarkets, rather than the government's responsibility to curtail supermarket power. The unspoken question throughout the report is 'where is our food going to come from?' Britain could have a thriving local food economy - i.e. growing and selling locally what can be produced locally. You may be surprised to know that the UK is currently 80% self-sufficient in food. With genuine government support to build a local food infrastructure - covered markets, relaxation of planning and inappropriate health and safety regulations for small producers etc, the countryside could be a vibrant place to live, work and enjoy. That is, it could be if it weren't for the supermarkets and the WTO demanding that British farmers compete with farmers worldwide. This has driven the environmental destruction, animal welfare abuses and health disasters plaguing British farming as farmers strive to compete with 'for-export' plantations across the Global South. At the same time as the Policy Commision is re-drawing the British Countryside, the Department for International Development is sinking most of its aid budget this year into a project called Vision 2020, which will see the Indian province of Andhra Pradesh transformed into export-oriented monocultural crop production, with 40 million subsistence farmers thrown off their land. To be fair to the Commissioners, the remit for this 'radical' shake up of agriculture was seriously limited. It had to be '...consistent with the Government's aims for Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, enlargement of the EU and increased trade liberalisation'. But without tackling the liberalisation of agricultural trade, driven by the profit-hungry multinational food processors and supermarkets, there will soon be no more small farmers around the world to drive a local food economy. It is now, more than ever, necessary to build a campaign against this continued liberalisation and the supermarkets who have yet again escaped regulation. Further reading: |
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