Another Brexit Bonus

[cyril evans awaydays]

Perhaps a sensible discussion?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59886350

I think we would all probably agree that even if you didn't support leaving the EU, one benefit once it's happened is having the flexibility to make a greater array of policy decisions.

One area we seem to be diverging is in terms of farm subsidies, which previously were paid based on the size of the farm. It now seems that post-Brexit, the UK will be factoring in other environmental elements into this, which broadly speaking seems a good idea to me. I suppose one concern is that we still need farms to focus on producing food and you can envisage a situation where someone almost gets paid for doing nothing except having a lot of land and letting it go wild for environmental purposes.

Quite a change in how we manage agriculture and land potentially anyway.

Note - this refers to England only and I'm not sure if Wales intends to depart significantly

Sort of.

It is more a greater weighting towards payments for public goods rather than for being an active farmer. Under the Common Agricultural Policy there were two streams of support, one area based and the other for environmental measures. England has always tried to maximise its use of the environmental measures fund and the opportunity of transferring money from one pot to another.

You are right that the flexibility as a consequence of leaving is that the balance can be increased. The old subsidies will be tapered down and eliminated by 2024 and replaced by the new schemes if the pilots are a success. A few points to note though:

1) The latest iteration of the EU CAP is doing this anyway. Far less emphasis on common schemes and more on each member state producing its own Strategic Plan so most of what is being proposed could be achieved within the EU;

2) Under the CAP, the UK had about £3.5 billion a year for agricultural subsidies. Having left England has committed to maintain that level of annual payment for a period. At some point though this funding stream will have to compete against all the other priorities that different governments might have;

3) There is a real risk that under these proposals that tenant farmers will be the big losers. On the area based scheme the subsidies went to the "active farmer" but for environmental measures England targeted the landlords/land owners because they could have fewer bigger agreements and get economies of scale. This is likely to accelerate and tenants could lose their existing funding and be at the whim of their landlords to see a commensurate reduction in their rents to compensate on land that is less productive. The rich get richer and all that;

4) You mention diminished food security which will also be under threat from the type of trade deals we have seen negotiated post-Brexit with Australia and New Zealand and UK produce competing with that subsidised on the continent with whatever additional bureaucracy Brexit brings in exporting UK agriculture. These schemes cannot be seen in isolation, which is why bodies such as the National Farmers Union are getting increasingly angsty (I say increasingly as angsty has been their default position in my experience)!

[JamesWales]

Sort of.

It is more a greater weighting towards payments for public goods rather than for being an active farmer. Under the Common Agricultural Policy there were two streams of support, one area based and the other for environmental measures. England has always tried to maximise its use of the environmental measures fund and the opportunity of transferring money from one pot to another.

You are right that the flexibility as a consequence of leaving is that the balance can be increased. The old subsidies will be tapered down and eliminated by 2024 and replaced by the new schemes if the pilots are a success. A few points to note though:

1) The latest iteration of the EU CAP is doing this anyway. Far less emphasis on common schemes and more on each member state producing its own Strategic Plan so most of what is being proposed could be achieved within the EU;

2) Under the CAP, the UK had about £3.5 billion a year for agricultural subsidies. Having left England has committed to maintain that level of annual payment for a period. At some point though this funding stream will have to compete against all the other priorities that different governments might have;

3) There is a real risk that under these proposals that tenant farmers will be the big losers. On the area based scheme the subsidies went to the "active farmer" but for environmental measures England targeted the landlords/land owners because they could have fewer bigger agreements and get economies of scale. This is likely to accelerate and tenants could lose their existing funding and be at the whim of their landlords to see a commensurate reduction in their rents to compensate on land that is less productive. The rich get richer and all that;

4) You mention diminished food security which will also be under threat from the type of trade deals we have seen negotiated post-Brexit with Australia and New Zealand and UK produce competing with that subsidised on the continent with whatever additional bureaucracy Brexit brings in exporting UK agriculture. These schemes cannot be seen in isolation, which is why bodies such as the National Farmers Union are getting increasingly angsty (I say increasingly as angsty has been their default position in my experience)!

Thats interesting, thanks for posting

I'm less fearful of NZ and Australia. To me, if we cannot compete with them, it suggests that whatever system we have had in place has been inefficient and needs to change. Why are they so successful? I heard they have no subsidies at all? Larger farms?

[cyril evans awaydays]

Thats interesting, thanks for posting

I'm less fearful of NZ and Australia. To me, if we cannot compete with them, it suggests that whatever system we have had in place has been inefficient and needs to change. Why are they so successful? I heard they have no subsidies at all? Larger farms?

Australia is low by international standards and New Zealand is essentially subsidy free. I once attended a talk by the New Zealand Minister of Agriculture at New Zealand House in London. He spent a lot of the talk extolling the virtues of going subsidy free. Later on after he left I chatted to a couple of his aides who privately conceded they wished there were support systems available. Australia, particularly has economies of scale.

The danger is seeing farmers as an homogenous group. The problem is mainly in the livestock sector and within that sector on upland farms. Many of these farms are not farming at a profit and the subsidy is the only means of making a living. These people are a world away from the barley barons of East Anglia who can probably compete on the world stage and have the sophistication and infrastructure to adapt. Even there, I did some work with one of the major fruit and vegetable organisations in the UK. Their leader said he would be quite happy to operate without subsidies but hat he would be uncompetitive if the playing field was not levelled in the rest of Europe.

The fear about the deals to date is that they will set a precedent for deals to come. It's not so much that those agricultural sectors are so successful but that their negotiators have engineered a deal that will make them more successful in the future with little beneficial quid pro quo for the UK if you believe the UK Government's own analysis of the deals.

I guess it comes down to how much you care about the economic viability of the vulnerable sectors of UK farming in the general scheme of things.