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.
Hi Mally well I have some thoughts on Eagle and they are that it is very suspicious because it is really early for hill lambs to be born as if any bad weather wet and cold would kill them off and Eagles generally take carrion if available but tend to take live prey for chicks which are probably 4 weeks away and I suspect if Eagle was going to eat the lamb for itself it would have eat it where it either found it dead or where it killed it why spend energy carrying it.Think perhaps 5% of hill lambs either stillborn or die soon after so it could have been found dead.
So is it a old photo or doctored photo but we all know that Golden Eagles do take in all probability a small number of lambs.
One interesting fact is that a sheep farmer very close to where that photo supposedly taken found a Sea Eagle injured with badly broken wing alerted Dave Sexton the Mull RSPB officer and Kellan the Eagle taken to mainland,fantastic vet and team looked after him for 3 months and he is now enjoying wild flying on Mull again.