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Farmers’ strike? It’s a rotten business
Charles Clover
Environment Editor, Daily Telegraph
Daily Telegraph of 3rd November 2005
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/11/03/do0302.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/11/03/ixopinion.html
Filed 06 Nov 05
There is something a trifle annoying about the
idea of a farmers’ strike however much one may care for the
countryside, or for the plight of farming. A farmer is both worker
and the boss, so it is difficult for him to strike against himself.
Even if he is just a farm worker, he can’t very easily take
the day off and leave the cows unmilked without bringing misery
to his livestock and ending up in court for neglect.Yet who can
claim that their semantics have never become tangled at an emotional
moment? Who can doubt that in the self-inflicted pain of the three-day
“farmers’ strike”, organised by Farmers for Action,
there is a note of desperation that is unnerving? Whether one is
a simple shopper, one of those well-remunerated people in the boardroom
of a chain of supermarkets, or a minister at Defra, it is time to
watch that milk being poured away and to reflect.
Dairy farmers are desperate because their anguish
has gone on for so long. First, at the end of the 1990s, it was
the tenants - like my cousin Rupert, once one of the most efficient
dairy farmers in Shropshire - who discovered they could not make
money from a milk price that dipped below 18p a litre when it cost
19p to produce. Rupert is now a plumber (or rather a manager of
a firm of plumbers) and pays himself a better salary.
Then it was the turn of the smaller owner occupiers
to find there was no profit in milk production. A thousand dairy
farmers have been going out of business a year. Sheep, after a blip
a year ago, are back in the doldrums. Beef producers are desperate
for the EU ban on their produce to be lifted. More than 80,000 people
are thought to have left farming each year in the past five years
- the majority from the livestock sector. There are farms for sale
everywhere. In fact, it has taken a commendably long time for British
farmers to start behaving like French ones.
No one doubts that the plight of farming is at
least partly down to the buying power of the supermarkets. Milk
is sold in supermarkets for around 54p per litre, while farmers
are paid 18p. The price at the farm gate was 25p a decade ago. Potatoes
sell for £550 a ton, while farmers are paid £95. Beef
on the butcher’s counter at Sainsbury’s will cost an average
of £4.25 per kilo, while farmers have been paid around £1.90.
Lately they have been competing with imports of chewy Brazilian
beef from Tesco coming in at around £1.60 - less than it costs
to produce here.
What has been missing until now was a sense of
why all this mattered to the rest of us - though it does. The understandable
assumption made by politicians of all complexions for 15 years or
more has been that the pressures of the market are a good thing.
Less of the wage packet spent on food means more to be spent on
fancy cars, electronic goods and holidays, which means voters feel
richer. It has been difficult to put one’s finger on the downside
of letting the supermarkets bully the farmers, until now.
Anyone who truly understands the countryside -
and there are all too few of them left - will show you the price
that has been paid. Nobody can afford to put anything right. The
fencing is falling down. The gates are not being rehung. And in
every village, on every skyline, is a bit of land that ought to
be grazed, but isn’t, because there is no value left in grazing.
Grazing animals made the British landscape, and now the absence
of them is unmaking it, or at least reducing its nature conservation
value. Hardly any offspring of farmers are turning to the land.
The fields grow rank, as they did in Henry V when the men were away
at war.
Yet Tesco’s profits are counted in billions
- because, the farmers claim, the share of the profit between the
farmer, the wholesaler and the retailer is unequal. Somewhere around
the time that your local Tesco - planted there with all sorts of
planning conditions in the 1980s - suddenly sprouted a new, white
“Extra” store that conformed to none of the previous conditions,
supermarkets got used to having it all their own way.
People used to say we have all benefited from
that power, in the price of goods that we buy, so why should we
complain? Now the price that is being paid in the countryside is
daily more obvious - the family farm is on its way to becoming a
thing of the past and there are forecasts of a milk shortage of
one billion litres by 2007, and I suspect there are the beginnings
of unease.
The anguish of the dairy industry began when,
for mistaken reasons, the EU told Britain to abolish the Milk Marketing
Board. Every year the board held a review of the milk price and
settled the profits farmers, middlemen and retailers could take.
It was deemed to be a monopoly - and its arrangements would be unlikely
to be accepted by the Office of Fair Trading today. Yet the office
has been slow to sniff out all sorts of monopolistic, anti-competitive
practices enforced by supermarkets upon hapless producers - loyalty
payments, fees for the packaging of goods,flagrant threats to withdraw
contracts to enforce loyalty rather than price.
Ministers place their faith in a voluntary code
of conduct between farmers and retailers, but it is difficult to
have faith in this. There is so much anecdotal evidence of breaches
of the code by supermarkets. Even the most free-market farmers and
landowners now believe that some independent scrutiny of the price-setting
process is needed. As David Fursdon, elected yesterday as the Country
Land and Business Association’s new president, put it: “Something’s
got to be done.”
That something could begin with an OFT inspector
empowered to take evidence anonymously, to combat the fear of speaking
out in public against the retailers. It could continue with an ombudsman,
as long as he had teeth and rapid powers of intervention.
The farmers’ strike may yet be an own goal
- if it leads to panic buying by consumers or, perhaps, to milk
washing down watercourses and polluting rivers. That is a risk.
It could also be a turning point in the battle for sympathy between
the farmers and retailers, with the public siding with the farmers
for the first time since industrial agriculture lost the plot in
the 1980s.
©Charles Clover, Daily Telegraph
Further reading recommended by Land-Care
 Editorial
(2005). Some conervationists wake up to the fact that "environmental"
agendas may not be good for conservation.
See ENVIRONMENT Homepage, filed 13 Jul 05, www.land-care.org.uk
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