Books
Bring on the vandals. After a long winter of pestilence and floods (but not famine), three new books analyse the future of British agriculture and the climate of hysteria created by the fear of infectious disease
Published 21 May 2001
A Countryside For All
Edited by Michael Sissons, Vintage, 188pp, 7.99
Here's a poser that encapsulates half of Britain's politics, and all the affairs of our countryside. All governments involve themselves in agriculture because they don't feel they can leave the nation's food supply to markets and the weather. But for the past 200 years or so, we have had big ships, with a navy to protect them, and access to the Americas; and since the 19th century, we have had refrigeration. So for most of that time, it has been cheaper to import food than to grow it at home - sometimes spectacularly so. The only major exceptions were during the sieges of the two world wars. Only then, in extremis, has it been obvious what Britain's agriculture is for. For just ten years in two centuries, it had the clear objective of feeding people. For the rest of the time, its uses have been arbitrary. So what is it for? Why should the rest of us pay for it?
Now for the biggest puzzle of all: given that farming can be anything we want it to be - productive, laid-back or non-existent - why have we allowed it, and Britain's countryside as a whole, to become such a political, social, aesthetic and ecological mess? Given that we have the luxury of choice, how come we have turned the landscape of Constable into prairie and suburb, to which farmworkers must now "reverse commute" from the meanest city streets? Why do we bang up our animals in Nissen huts and cultivate infection, from salmonella to BSE to foot-and-mouth disease? Why, when we could have had John of Gaunt's demi-paradise, have we chosen (apparently) to fabricate such a nightmare?
Since 1998, Michael Sissons's Countryside Group has sought ways of doing better, and now it presents its thoughts in A Countryside For All. Some of the essays taken alone are worth the cover price. Graham Harvey, the excellent agricultural story editor for The Archers, tells us that "Britain's consumers spend around £60bn on food, of which less than 20 per cent ends up with the farmer". The result is hideously inevitable: "At the time of the BSE crisis of the 1990s, manufacturers at the economy end of the burger market were budgeting just 20p per kg for their meat." But Britain's farmers have brought this on themselves, says Harvey. They and their union, the NFU, have danced jejunely to the supermarkets' tune, churning out more and more for less and less, competing with those from around the world who cut corners and use slave labour. And all the while, people at home have been demanding, and would pay for, the quality they could provide. Abigail Woods, in her PhD thesis on the history of foot-and-mouth, pointed out that mass slaughter was a Victorian expedient (the disease first appeared in 1839) to stave off new outbreaks - not to bring to a halt an epidemic that was already out of hand. The Ministry of Agriculture and the NFU lobbyists are stuck in a 19th-century rut.
On the wider front, Simon Jenkins's statistics support every traveller's impression that Britain's whole topography has become ridiculous: "Britain is one of Europe's most densely populated countries, yet it has the least densely populated towns and cities." This is known as "the doughnut model": a ring of fat with nothing in the middle. Every year, "new buildings swallow up a stretch of country land as large as Bristol (100 sq km)", even though as many as 2,000 sq km lie idle within existing cities and "800,000 houses lie empty". But it is cheaper to build on greenfield sites - and in modern Britain, cheapness is all.
However, although Lord Skidelsky congratulates his fellow conferees on their scope and variety, their overall thesis is too narrow, too self-assuredly right-wing, placing all blame on planners and bureaucrats, on petty corruption at local level, and on urban insouciance and ignorance. The authors include no true greens, no socialists to defend the derided notion of public ownership, and the only bona fide biologist - the theorist and accomplished birder Matt Ridley - uses his allotted space to praise the landowning classes, among them his own ancestors. The old earls were eccentric - Emsworths to a man, he implies - but therein lay their virtue: "One was an agricultural improver; another cared only for the hunting . . . [but] that diversity is now lost." The fox-hunting philosopher Roger Scruton agrees that "the landscape owes its beauty and its fertility to the fact that it is privately owned" - specifically, by gentlefolk in situ - and he dismisses both the National Trust (which is surely admirable) and the Forestry Commission (which clearly isn't) as "absentee landlords".
In truth, there have been many fine and conscientious landowners, but those who would defend the status quo must answer serious charges. In a thousand years of feudalism, Britain has achieved by far the worst record of wildlife conservation in the "developed" world. The earls made a coast-to-coast theme park for huntin', shootin' and fishin', and paid an army of "gamekeepers" to blast to the point of extinction every native beast they thought might get in their way, however flimsy the evidence. The osprey, the white-tailed eagle, peregrines, martens, otters, crows and miscellaneous owls were shot, trapped, poisoned and hung by their beaks and bloodied necks on fences pour encourager les autres. Storks, wild boar, beavers and such minor luminaries as the Large Blue and Large Copper butterflies have also gone by the board. The taxpaying masses who kept the selfish old rogues in their strongholds were told, for their pains, to "Keep Out!", with threatened, and sometimes actual, violence. Yet (as Ridley acknowledges) the dukes and earls leapt at the chance of making a quick buck by flogging their land to the Forestry Commission to create pointless acres of sitka spruce that could be imported for a third of the price. If this is stewardship, bring on the vandals.
And is compromise really possible, as Skidelsky hopes, "in such contentious areas as field sports and the right to roam"? Nobody sensible would object to proper pest control. But hunting with hounds is simply cruel. If that is "country ways", then "country ways" must be amended. The world needs a better relationship with animals, more St Francis than Squire Allworthy. Townies can be beastly, with their litter and their footloose dogs. But the greatest horrors are in the farms themselves - not the honest muck, but the tyres, the concrete and the hideous subsidised sheds. There is true cynicism.
Reform is certainly overdue. We need to take our fellow species seriously - as in reality the old aristos never did. We must retain our farms, however expensive, for as Keynes said in 1933: "A country which cannot afford art or agriculture . . . is a country in which one cannot afford to live." But we must decide what we want the farms to do: simply to produce more subsidised food by the cheapest possible means, as if Europe were still at war, is nonsense writ large indeed. So we need policies to integrate farming with wildlife and to create a countryside worthy of respect, but also to make it accessible to all. The challenge is huge, and is, in essence, the same the whole world over. The authors of this book outline much of the basic problem, which is useful, but most of their solutions are altogether too saloon-bar. They should continue their efforts, but broaden their compass.
Colin Tudge's In Mendel's Footnotes is published by Cape (£18.99)
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