Time To Cut Greedy Farmers Down To Size? No, Emma Duncan, No

There is something dangerous about opinion pieces. I recognise the irony, given that this is going to be an opinion piece, and I know first hand the peril. Today I did not buy my usual weekend copy of The Sunday Times, but over on twitter an opinion piece written by Emma Duncan was brought to my attention. The image below, widely shared on social media, is of the opinion piece in question.

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Okay that's not a good image, but given that the newspaper in question is behind a pay wall/ has to be bought from a shop I think putting in the whole article may be a bit unfair.

Essentially Emma Duncan writes that losing subsidies will be good, because there will be fewer farms and farmers, more imports from developing countries and lots of wilderness to build new houses.

Writing such a piece is fine- everyone is entitled to their opinion and were it well researched and written in a balanced and educated way I would have no problem with it. I can see the problems with subsidies when they are kept by landlords or by people who don't actually produce food on their land and I would like to see a world where agriculture as an industry was competitive without aid.

Emma Duncan isn't writing about that- she seems to want to see a decline in farming, and she writes it with a vindictive, flippant pleasure that made my skin crawl.

One of the things she thinks will be good is a decline in UK food production bringing about a greater call for imports from developing countries. Leaving aside the very obvious issue of food miles and the sustainability of shipping even more produce in from far away countries her argument ignores the danger that food exports put developing economies in.

Take this as a hypothetical example. There is a country- Bolivia or Zambia or Laos- that has a local staple crop. It is grown locally by small scale and subsistence farmers and feeds their families and communities. An amount may go to towns and cities within the country. There is no demand from it abroad, either because it is not a popular food stuff or because other countries are self- reliant. Then something changes and other countries want it. Growers recognise the demand and start to sell to foreign markets. The crop increases in value and the demand means that it is now too valuable to sell on the domestic market. The people who grow the crop can no longer afford to eat it themselves or sell it to their neighbours. They must change their eating habits or starve.

There is a movement called food sovereignty that calls for a reduction in international food trade. They want to see local communities eating food grown by local people. They don't want to see people starving because their crops are being sold to lucrative foreign markets. The short term benefit of doing so does not make up for the long term implications.

That's just one opinion and one side of an argument that I could theoretically write a book about. One of the other aspects is animal welfare, health and crop science.

There are problems with food production in the UK. It's not perfect. However it has the highest standards of animal welfare of any country in the world. Regulations- and yes, many are imposed by the EU- force farmers to comply to standards that are in no way guaranteed when meat and dairy products are shipped in from foreign shores. The same goes for the topical applications for crops, and the welfare of the people who work on farms in the developing world. If you turn your nose up at Primark because you're worried about the conditions in which their factory workers work then you should probably do the same with food grown elsewhere that doesn't come with some sort of Fair-trade accreditation.

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She hates the "monoculture of wheat" that she sees. Under the SFP system farmers can't grown monocultures of wheat. There are rules in place to ensure that they grow a variety of crops. These may not be as extreme as some people would like, but coupled with an emphasis on biodiversity conservation and a growing understanding of the need to maintain soil bio-communities and fertility UK arable farming is getting to be a more diverse place. With UK farmers now even diversifying into quinoa production the fields around you are probably going to look more and more different.

Duncan writes "The only losers will be the farmers. Their revenues will decline and their asset prices fall. And, in the absence of migrants from the EU, they won't have any workers either."

She is perfectly entitled to dislike farmers. Maybe she once got stuck behind a combine harvester or chased by sheep on a foot path. However I strongly believe that she eats. That's the thing with farming- you can be wholly removed from it, understand nothing, completely hate it and yet your very survival hinges on it.

I can understand how she might like to see landowners losing the value of their land. I don't feel the same way but I can understand it. I don't understand how she can take such pleasure in the thought of an entire industry falling, and in people losing their livelihoods. Farming revenues are already low. Hill farmers in particular have been reliant on subsidies to keep their businesses going. Seeing revenues drop again isn't going to help anyone.

She believes that food prices will drop, and that will be a good thing. Food prices, by a percentage of household income, are incredibly low in the UK. Yes there is a growing reliance on food banks, but that is more to do with other cuts and the cost of other necessities than the cost of food.

And will food prices fall? I don't think so. I may be wrong (the whole industry seems to be scratching their heads without an idea what is going on) but without subsidies propping up the industry food prices will have to rise. Whether retailers pass that on to the consumer or not is up to them, but they probably will.

Of course, if Emma Duncan lives off air, or subsists solely from food ethically grown and fairly paid from the developing world and has no qualms about food sustainability then her article absolutely makes sense and was well written and balanced. I'm sure she's written things in the past that I've actually read and gone "Oooh, how interesting." This time she's written about an industry I actually know and care about.

The problem is that her opinion piece seems to lay the blame for almost all of society's ills on one sector, and thinks that by decimating it the world will be a better place.

That's just not very nice.