The Common Agricultural Policy makes up a huge proportion of the EU budget – vast amounts of money are spent or doled out, and yet the farming sector is in an ongoing crisis. This latest extract from Ten Years On explores how British farmers could be affected by a new relationship with the EU:

Eric Parker is planning on retiring from dairy farming next year. A few years ago he was saying that the business was a mug’s game. Yet now he is happy that his son, Bill, is stepping up to the mark. ‘The reforms that we made here as long ago as the late 1970s have set us a good thirty years ahead of our competitors, who’re only now anticipating major farm mergers and takeovers’, he says.

‘I always felt, when we were in the EU, that what I thought of as ‘the continental culture’ actually revelled in making rules and regulations.  One irony, of course, was that having had the pleasure of making them, if they didn’t suit on some occasion or other they were equally happy to ignore or evade them. On the other hand, in DFEA, DEFRA, and MAFF before that, the  civil servants have always been far more enthusiastic about following rules. We’re not perfect here, but we do tend to prefer the more straightforward way of doing things with fewer regulations.  I don’t get the endless packages of paperwork through the post I used to a few years ago. It was irritating to think that I’d become a form-filler rather than an agriculturist.  Now I can get on with my job without filling out endless paperwork to prove I’ve complied with health and safety, and we tend to rely instead on basic rules and common sense. Some of the regulations were stupidly burdensome like the one that required us to transport away dead livestock in a manner not far short of what you’d do for the mother in law.  Thank goodness we got rid of those. And some ten years of over-intrusive red tape.’

‘Mind you,’ he goes on, ’things didn’t get better all at once.  Leaving the CAP didn’t result in some miracle overnight transformation.  In my own business, for example.  Now, fifty years ago, we were mostly self-sufficient in milk here. Under the CAP, the system had become so corrupted and dairy farming in Britain had got so damaged that many farmers turned to dealing in quotas rather than selling milk at depressed UK gate prices. Once we were no longer bound by the EU treaties, it was possible to make reforms to rescue the dairy industry. I mean we’d suffered from quotas suppressing British production in favour of guaranteed French imports.  All that’s come to an end.  And, thanks to that major public push by the Ethical British Produce campaign back in 2014, and that grand lass Joanna Lumley, supermarkets were shamed into negotiating an extra 4p in the pint deal with us and a guaranteed future profit margin, in return for us supporting basic Compassion in World Farming principles. 

At milking time, he calls us in to see how it’s done and points out with pride the healthy animals and the yields he’s getting.

‘What’s really encouraging is that for the first time I can remember, livestock breeding’s beginning to be a profitable industry. East Asia, especially China, is starting to buy British dairy produce, just as world food prices increase again.
And that brings me to something else very dear to me as a dairy farmer.  When we had that brief scare six years ago about bovine pleuropneumonia, the government and the industry acted fast to set up a highly localised cull together with swift vaccination and registration of nearby livestock.  The chain of authority was clear from the start.  If we’d still had then to depend on the Commission and the Council of Ministers to agree what to do, we’d probably have had another stock disaster.  Getting that 72 hours start on the problem was critical.  Even the NFU said so.’

After we talked to Eric we met an agricultural writer, Sarah Ryder. The daughter of a farmer herself, born and brought up in the Dales, she gave us a picture of what benefits – and also what problems – have followed from Britain’s present relationship within a trading area rather than a growing federal superstate.

Sarah started by telling us about the impact our leaving the CAP had had on the rest of the membership of the EU.

‘When we left they faced a four year reduction in the CAP budget and there was a growing unwillingness to fund French farmers.  What the remaining EU countries did was shift to a part-state funded system to plug the gap. Once this became established, it provided a massive push to reform. The tax-paying public in France, Spain, Italy and Germany felt for the first time in decades that they themselves were paying to subsidise food, and more expensive food at that. They could see how much was wasted and how much was off-loaded, dumped actually, at knock-down prices and who was profiting from it at their expense. Quite quickly they began to take a direct interest in what was going on. Since it was their money, they started demanding it be spent well. Their political representatives also woke up to the fact that their constituents were not all working on farms. Movements for reform have begun to spring up everywhere, popular campaigns demanding real change.’

We ask her what has changed for the better here.

‘Leaving the European Union meant Britain dropping the Common Agricultural Policy. What happened initially was that the UK ended funding for the central CAP budget and set up its own UK-CAP in parallel. At the outset, DEFRA simply match-funded existing grants paid out in the UK while future policy was debated. Yet this simple action saved British taxpayers one billion pounds a year, through no longer having UK taxes subsidising foreign farmers.  The most important thing though, has been that our government’s been able to retarget where agricultural aid ends up. When we were still under the CAP, too many who got the money weren’t the ones who should’ve got it; grain barons, major land owners on prime land, and the really bizarre cases. Between 2002 and 2007, CAP funding of £223,000 went to a defence laboratory; £112,000 to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets; £88,000 to a hotel chain; £42,000 to a coal mine; £28,000 to a gypsum mining company; £27,000 to British Telecom; £16,000 to a water company; £14,000 to a racehorse trainer; £5,000 to Eton College; and thousands of pounds for caravan sites, museums, cathedrals, airfields, sports clubs and so on. It seemed you could get farming aid if you played tennis on it or landed a plane on it. All that’s been stopped.  Now you only get it if, like any farmer you speak to, you keep livestock or grow crops on it.’

Sarah takes a fat file down from the shelf above her desk. ‘It’s also very helpful that we’re not contributing to insanities like these.’  She shows us evidence of EU spending – quite a chunk of £6 million – on promoting produce.  As she says, ‘you don’t have to promote this industry.  None of us has any choice about being a consumer of agricultural products.  What else do they think we’d be eating?  And, look here, another nearly £6 million on PR for the CAP – they called it “enhancing public awareness.”  The only beneficiaries of that expenditure would be the agents doing the PR campaign.  Oh, and they provided well over £100 million in aid to producer organisations that could lobby on behalf of the CAP.  Perhaps no one should be surprised that the Commission had a contingency fund of £12 million to cover the costs of being sued and fined for mismanagement.’  She closes the file. ‘This is from 2009. The wage bill for the senior people running the CAP was around £72 million.  They’re spending over £5 million a year on their office furniture,’ is her parting shot.