The Mail on Sunday ran a 'story' yesterday on the 'fact' that Richard Benyon, A Defra Minister, earns £2m from EU farm subsidies. On closer reading you will find that the £2m is over a 10-year period and so averages out at £200k per annum.
And the Mail on Sunday states that 100,000 UK farmers share £3bn in farm subsidies which means they average out at around £30k per farm per annum. Because of the way the subsidies are allocated, big farms get big amounts, and I am a little surprised if Mr Benyon's farm, at, we are told, 20,000 acres, receives as little as £200k but it could be right.
The Mail on Sunday also says that Agriculture Minister James Paice, who is a farmer, has received 'several thousands' of pounds too over the last decade. I'd be very surprised if he hasn't!
And, the RSPB gets these payments too - as written about before on this blog. Anyone who owns farmland would be mad not to claim the money on offer.
Last year we wrote in the Guardian about the faults of the CAP - they are manifold and manifest. But the faults are in the fact that most CAP payments are in the form of income support and aren't encouraging more environmentally friendly farming. If we want to give all farmers, including Mr Benyon, the RSPB and the President of the NFU, income support that is fine, I guess. It's support that hasn't suffered at all in the recession which the rest of the economy is experiencing. But the real need is to make sure that that money produces a better countryside for us all. I am sure that Mr Benyon and the RSPB would both want to be near the front of the queue to receive money from a reformed CAP which paid farmers for farming sustainably. The fact that the CAP does not do enough to encourage sustainable farming practice is a real scandal.
A love of the natural world demonstrates that a person is a cultured inhabitant of planet Earth.
The debacle over the Forest Sales should get us all thinking about land ownership in this country. First, we seem to want cheap food and farmers have genuinely seen incomes squeezed while supermarkets get richer and richer. Second, there are a lot of things our countryside produces we don't pay for at all - if farmers were paid (the same money, not new money) to give us clean drinking water how quickly would the £800 billion cost of cleaning excess nitrogen out of our water shrink ?
I think we should pay for these services - and just as I would argue that the people opf this country get fantastic value for the 30p pa we each contribute to the National Forest Estate, I think farmers should be paid for delivering the goods - so the quicker we get away from simple income support and the sooner we have an open debate on what society should and shouldn't pay for the better it'll be for all of us, including farmers.
Finally, Mr Benyon was very quiet (because of his forestry interests) in the great forestry debate - but he did look very uncomfortable ! I visited his woods recently and they are exemplary - he is one of the owners who, for modest grant aid, opens his woods to local people & they are carefully & beautifully managed for the whole range of things woodland can produce from timber to wildlife.