A report released at the Oxford Real Farming Conference this week has called for a ‘new deal’ to help struggling farmers and improve the environmental performance of agriculture, whilst doing away with direct payments to save the public purse over £1bn a year.  

The report, by the New Economics Foundation and Global Justice Now, was released on Wednesday. It offers a “progressive solution” to questions around post-Brexit agriculture policy, proposing to redirect the £3bn that currently goes to UK farmers each year from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The groups behind the report suggest that there is a “Broad consensus that this policy has been a disaster on multiple fronts.”

Subsidy funds in their current guise are only guaranteed in Britain until 2020, and farming minister George Eustice has suggested that after this time they will be removed or parred back, with funds possibly being linked to environmental performance or issued as part of grant schemes to support young farmers or enable farmers to buy technical equipment to boost production.  

The campaigners said a public dialogue on any new agriculture policy is desperately needed. They said that a key aim of a new policy would be to avoid overproduction and end the flooding of markets in the global south, where small scale farmers who feed most of the world’s population have been harmed by the effects of the EU Common Agricultural Policy.

Having looked at a range of possible scenarios resulting from Brexit, New Economics Foundation and Global Justice Now advocate:

• Giving each active farmer with over 1ha of land a universal payment of £5,000, which they say would redistribute available agriculture funds and level the playing field, whereas the current finding regime awards large amounts to large landowners with virtually no strings attached. This would also reduce the overall spend on farm funding.
• Offering grants for medium-scale, regional infrastructure, including processing facilities and local business development programmes to allow local supply chains to be strengthened and maintained, while supporting new business models and small-scale producers.
• Offering extra funds for farmers and landowners providing specific public goods. They said decisions on which public goods to prioritise and how to allocate the budget should be devolved to regions, which would set 10-year frameworks based on local knowledge. These public goods could include soil carbon storage and climate change mitigation, better animal welfare or flood prevention.

Commenting on Wednesday, Stephen Devlin, Senior Economist at the New Economics Foundation said, “Our farming and food system faces serious challenges; from climate change, to ever-lengthening supply chains and the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a small, wealthy elite. Brexit has thrown all the pieces into the air, and it's up to us to shape how they fall.
 
“Real change is needed to support environmentally beneficial farming methods, increase jobs in the rural economy, improve support for small-scale farmers and re-localise supply chains. People want to see a food system that works for them and for the environment. It is time for government to catch up.”

Speaking after Defra Secretary Andrea Leadsom’s address to the Oxford Farming Conference on Wednesday morning, in which she highlighted the government’s support for agri-tech, suggested Brexit would be a boon for farming and promised to slash ‘red tape’ in the sector, Global Justice Now’s director Nick Dearden said, "Andrea Leadsom’s obsession with red tape will certainly appeal to Brexit populists, but it doesn’t offer much concrete support to the challenges that the UK farming sector is facing.

“Contrary to her speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, the real threat to farming in the UK is not ‘red tape’, but an unfair system of subsidies that massively benefits the richest land owners while leaving small-scale farmers high and dry.
 
“The uncertainty that is facing the UK agricultural sector as a result of Brexit could be resolved if the government was committed to a system of subsidies that promoted small farmers while fortifying the social and environmental benefits that farming can bring. Our research  analysing different subsidy models shows that such approach is not only possible, it could even work out over a billion pounds cheaper than the current model that channels enormous amounts of public money into the pockets of Britain’s wealthiest.“