Revealed: farmers received less than 0.5% of post-Brexit money last year
Farmers are very much less than 0.5% of the population after all.
Revealed: farmers received less than 0.5% of post-Brexit money last year
Farmers are very much less than 0.5% of the population after all.
If the guardian regularly defends the interests of farmers then I’m afraid I missed it but calling farmers in aid to whinge about Brexit seems entirely consonant with normal editorial policy. There’s a rather good piece in Unherd.
Whilst I have a lot of sympathy for farmers, as far as I can tell these subsidies are to mostly designed to allow farmers to make a living by not farming the land. As such I do wonder what the actual economic benefit is.
“Whilst I have a lot of sympathy for farmers, as far as I can tell these subsidies are to mostly designed to allow farmers to make a living by not farming the land. As such I do wonder what the actual economic benefit is.”
If you mean the new ‘ELMS’ scheme then yes you are right, most of the payments are designed to stop food production in some way, either by taking land out of production entirely, or by forcing the farming that is taking place to do so less productively. The old scheme just paid a flat rate regardless of what happened, and most farmers (being people who like doing stuff) continued to farm as before, and used the money to subsidise operations in bad years, and to invest in the fabric of the land (hedges/ditches/fences etc etc). Under the new scheme the flexibility will be gone. You’ll only get money for a hedge if you manage it in the exact way some environmental studies graduate sat in an office has decreed is the way to do it, for example, and at a fixed rate that doesn’t actually pay for the job. The entire scheme is a bureaucrats dream, literally hundreds of options, with two competing arms of the scheme providing very similar (but slightly different) options for farmers to take, the rules of which must somehow be meshed and interpreted for the infinite number of different circumstances individual farmers find themselves in. If you fancy a read the latest batch of payment options are detailed here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/environmental-land-management-update-how-government-will-pay-for-land-based-environment-and-climate-goods-and-services/environmental-land-management-elm-update-how-government-will-pay-for-land-based-environment-and-climate-goods-and-services
That is not even all of it, there’s a whole load more that was published last year, and there will probably be more later this year.
Most farmers have decided there’s no point joining the new scheme (hence the 0.5% takeup) because the payment rates are so low for each option that once the costs of complying with that option have been taken off there’s hardly any ‘profit’ left, and what there is isn’t worth the hassle of having Defra crawling all over your farm telling you that some land feature is half a metre too narrow, and as a result you don’t get paid this year, and they want the last 3 years payments back as well.