The prospect before us

Still reeling from foot-and-mouth, and racked by a generation’s worth of muddled and contradictory policies, today’s countryside is facing unprecedented pressures. But out of crisis, opportunity can spring. In the pages that follow, we explore some of the imaginative and inspiring ways in which rural communities can be revived, farming renewed and fresh vigour injected into the rural economy. We set out what the new government should do to put the countryside on the road to a sustainable future. First, though, we need to know where we’re starting from. Oliver Tickell sets the scene.

[gfimage id="140"]An attractive green backdrop to an urban lifestyle?[/gfimage] Just how sustainable is our countryside?
Ask any farmer and you’ll wish you hadn’t bothered.
Thanks to low prices right across the gamut of agricultural commodities, farm income in 2000 fell by a quarter to its lowest level in 25 years – dropping below £10,000 a head. As a share of the national economy, farming contributes less than 1% of created value: a record low.
There is nothing very sustainable about farms that cannot pay their way. And given that the countryside was created by farming, and that farming is essential in maintaining today’s rural landscapes, that puts the countryside as a whole at risk.
Yet government policy has, until now, been paradoxical. The UK has been committed both to cutting farm subsidies, which will further reduce cash flows, and at the same time to the ‘globalisation’ of trade in farm produce. This puts UK farmers – working within the constraints of small-scale, intimate landscapes, along with planning restrictions on farm buildings and pollution controls – in direct competition with the USA’s million-acre grain farms and million-hog pig farms, or the million-tree apple orchards in central France. It is a battle the British farmer is surely destined to lose.
So what about farmers’ markets, the rise in local produce, and the organic revolution? There may be considerable future potential – but it has yet to be realised. A small number of producers do well producing retail-ready foods for sale at farmers’ markets, or ‘veggie boxes’ for direct delivery. And a growing number of organic producers are finding a ready market. But while a majority of people favour cheap food at any price, with little interest over where it comes from or how it’s produced, there’s a long way to go before these capture a really substantial chunk of the market.
One of the costs arising from this unequal competition into which British farmers have been forced is the continuing loss of wildlife populations, and the erosion in natural habitats. Both have suffered enormous losses over the last 50 years, mainly as a result of agricultural intensification. The good news is that recent findings indicate that the rate of destruction has recently slowed – although it has yet to be reversed.
While legal protection given to endangered habitats and species remains weak in many areas, government policy, reflected in Biodiversity Action Plans and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, is at least pushing in the right direction. And it has also moved to increase the opportunities available to farmers under the ‘agri-environment’ provisions of the Common Agricultural Policy, which pay them to manage land in ways more compatible with wildlife, and support conversion to organic methods. For the moment, though, support levels remain disappointingly low and dwarfed by production-oriented subsidies. If the new government is serious about addressing rural sustainability issues, tackling this should be a key priority – not least by pushing for CAP reform.
The agricultural support structure of the CAP has resulted in farms becoming larger, more mechanised, and specialised on a narrower range of outputs – not surprising as the largest 20% of UK farms receive 80% of the support. The increased ‘efficiency’ has led to significant reductions in land-based employment. From some 475,000 jobs in 1989 in agriculture and horticulture, numbers dropped to barely 400,000 by 1999, then fell a further 6% last year.
Increasingly, rural housing is inhabited not by farm workers or artisans, but by people who depend for their income on the far stronger urban economy, and who move to the country in search of a better quality of life. For most people who live in the British countryside today, the land around them is no longer the physical base of their employment and livelihood, but rather an attractive green backdrop to an essentially urban lifestyle. Exacerbated by the sell-off of council housing, the urban occupation of rural homes has made it increasingly hard for the native inhabitants, who lack the support of urban-derived incomes, pensions and dividend payments, to be able to live in the countryside at all. So many farmworkers are forced to find homes in towns and commute to the countryside to work – passing in the opposite direction people on their way to earn the salaries which allow them to afford the houses that once would have been the natural habitat of the farmworker. Generating affordable housing for country people is another key challenge for policymakers.
The countryside has become a place of transit – its roads getting steadily busier as people choose or are forced into lifestyles that demand ever more travel. This in turn is exacerbated by the closure of village shops, pubs, post offices, police stations, schools... The relative ease of car transport makes this process possible, and it is encouraged by organisations from supermarkets to education authorities who ‘rationalise’ service provision to a small number of centralised locations. Revitalising rural communities – making them places to live and work, rather than simply travel from or to – is an essential step in tackling this.
One small crumb of comfort: taken as a whole, countryside residents are generally wealthier, less fearful of crime and enjoy higher environmental quality than their urban counterparts. However, the affluence and contentment of the rural majority cannot be allowed to disguise the deep problems of those who have been left out of the far-from-universal prosperity.
Depressed? You might be. But you might also be spurred into action for a more sustainable countryside. And there’s no doubt that this, belated and partial as it may be, is beginning to creep up the policy agenda.

Average farm incomes dropped from a high of £25,000 per year in 1995 to £7,800 in 2000

Unemployment in the countryside is less than half that in urban areas

29 July 2001

Oliver Tickell