The Real Welfare Scroungers

The Guardian carries a penetrating and devastating article by George Monbiot on agriculture policy.

In July 2013 the British government imposed a £26,000 cap on the total benefits a household can receive. In the same month it was pursuing a different policy in urgent discussions in Brussels: fighting tooth and nail to prevent the imposition of a proposed cap precisely 10 times that size (€300,000, or £260,000). The European commission wanted this to be as much money as a single farmer could receive in subsidies. The British government was having none of it. It won, with the result that this measure is now discretionary – member states can decide whether or not to cap farmers' benefits. Unsurprisingly, the British government has decided not to.

 Farmers comprise just 0.3% of the population of England and 1.4% of the rural population.  The biggest 174 landowners in England take £120m between them. A €300,000 cap would have saved about £70m. Why should a cap be imposed on the poor but not the rich?

The address of Eustice's ministry, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, is 17 Smith Square, London SW1. The address of the National Farmers' Union is 16 Smith Square, London SW1.  Rural policy and farming policy are, to the government, synonymous; 98.6% of rural people are marginalised by the decisions it makes.

As  rules and penalties regulating the ordinary recipients of benefits have become so onerous that many find them almost impossible to meet, the rules and penalties attached to the benefits the rich receive are being reduced. The conditions attached to farm subsidies (which are called cross-compliance) are already so weak as to be almost non-existent.

For example, there are several rules which are meant to encourage farmers to protect their soils from compaction and erosion. Their purpose is to sustain fertility, to defend water supplies and the ecology of the rivers and to prevent flooding. Not one of these measures appears to be either functional or enforceable. All farmers receiving subsidies must complete a soil protection review.  Once every 100 years on average, an inspector from the Rural Payments Agency will visit the farm. If the inspectors identify a soil erosion problem, they have the power to offer guidance about how to rectify it. And that, in practice, is it. There are hardly any cases of this guidance being followed up with even the threat of action, let alone the imposition of any penalties. And even the guidance, now promises to be "slashed". Most inspectors have no expertise in soil erosion. So all they tend to do during their centennial visits is to ask the farmer whether he or she possesses a soil protection booklet. If the answer is yes, that's job done, even if their soil is rushing off the fields and into the rivers. To discover whether or not farmers are causing a related problem – soil compaction through the use of heavy machinery in the wrong conditions – inspectors need to dig holes in the fields with a spade, to look at what has happened to the soil layers. But they do not possess the power to conduct an "invasive investigation" (that is, digging a hole). So they are not permitted even to detect, let alone enforce, a breach of the compaction rules. Even these unenforceable non-rules are deemed too onerous for farmers growing a crop that both strips and compacts the soil faster than almost any other. Because the rows are planted so far apart, and because the soil is left bare through autumn, winter and much of the spring , maize causes more severe erosion than any other cereal crop. Yet maize growers are entirely and mysteriously exempt from the erosion rules. A soil scientist, Robert Palmer, calculated that so much compaction and erosion is caused by maize growing that a 10-hectare field causes the run-off of 375m litres of water. Maize expanded 24% between 2012 and 2013, much of it in sensitive catchments. This is a formula for repeated flooding.  In the catchment of the River Tamar in Devon, one study suggests, soil is being lost at the rate of five tonnes per hectare per year.

 There is the complete absence of enforceable regulations on the phosphates farmers spread on their fields, which cause eutrophication (blooms of algae which end up suffocating much of the freshwater ecosystem) when they run into the rivers, poorly regulated use of metaldehyde, a pesticide that is impossible to remove from drinking water, the use of neonicotinoid insecticides for all other purposes, without any idea of what their impact might be on animals in the soil and the rivers into which they wash and licensed before any investigation was conducted.

There is just one set of rules that are effective and widely deployed: those that enforce the destruction of the natural world. Buried in the cross-compliance regulations is a measure called GAEC 12. This insists that, to receive their money, farmers must prevent "unwanted vegetation" from growing on their land. (The rest of us call it wildlife habitat.) Even if their land is producing nothing, they must cut, graze or spray it with herbicides to get their money. Unlike soil erosion, compaction and pollution, breaches of this rule are easy to detect and enforce: if the inspectors see trees returning to the land, the subsidy can be cut off altogether. Many of the places in which habitats might otherwise be allowed to recover – principally the highly infertile land in the uplands – are kept bare by this rule. It's another means by which floods are hard-wired. The government has just raised the incentive to clear such land, by announcing that hill farmers will now be paid the same amount per hectare as lowland farmers – equalising the rate upwards, not downwards.

The amount of public subsidy paid to the owners of grouse moors may soon be going up by 84%. These are among the richest people in Britain. The management of their land to maximise grouse numbers involves the mass destruction of predators and the burning of blanket bogs, causing floods downstream and releasing large amounts of carbon. The British government currently spends – on top of the £3.6bn in farm subsidies disbursed in this country – £450m on research and development for the food and farming industries. Much of this money could be characterised as corporate welfare. Yet a search of the British government's website finds not one mention of regenerative permaculture. Not a penny of public money is being spent on investigating its potential here.

As George Monbiot puts it: “It's not hard to see how land that is now being pillaged, eroded, polluted and wrecked could be allowed to remain productive – even to produce more food for people than Britain does today while also supporting a vibrant ecosystem.”

Indeed for even in th 19th Century that supposed dry crusty old economist Karl Marx was writing on the declining fertility of soil under capitalism. From Capital, volume 1, on "Large-scale Industry and Agriculture":
“Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres, and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil...But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism...it compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race...All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress toward ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility...Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”

 Marx  emphasised  it was both necessary and possible to rationally govern human relationships with nature, but this was something "completely beyond the capabilities of bourgeois society." In a future society of freely associated producers, however, humans could govern their relations with nature via collective control, rather than through the blind power of market relations. There was a need for planning and measures to address the division of labor and population between town and country and for the restoration and improvement of the soil. Marx’s asserted that a concept of ecological sustainability was of very limited practical relevance to capitalist society as it was incapable of applying rational scientific methods and social planning due to the pressures of competition.

Land in capitalism is a commodity as Engels explains:
 “To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” (Frederick Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy)
 As he also pointed out elsewhere this drive for profit can lead to ecological catastrophe:
“ What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertilizer for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees--what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock!”

Marx offers a vision of the nature of a future society in Capital, Volume 3:
“From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of households].”