British Government to Pay Green Farmers

Since the Industrial Revolution, it has been hard to make farming pay, if indeed, it was ever easy. At the subsistence level, farming may fill the belly, or it may not depending on the weather. In more developed economies, fewer and fewer people are needed to produce more and more agricultural products. And in the 21st century, few in the developed world can even afford to farm. Yesterday, the British government announced a sensible policy that will make it more financially feasible to live a rural life, while at the same time creating value for society that wasn't there earlier.

According to the BBC, "under the Environmental Stewardship Scheme, every farmer in England will be able to earn payments for making their land more hospitable to wildlife." A government minister at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "It is the biggest change to farming for a generation." For once, a government minister might have underestimated the importance of a government initiative.

The plan is part of the government's "Sustainable Strategy for Farming and Food," and changes in the EU's Common Agricultural Policy make it possible. Under the plan, "Entry Level Stewardship" will give farmers £30 per hectare (about 2.5 acres) for work that benefits wildlife. Farmers have always been close to the land, but this plan makes them societies guardians of the countryside (which the good farmers always were) and pays them for it (which is truly new). Birds in Britain have not fared too well under intensive industrial agriculture, but if farmers are getting paid to put back their habitat, a revival is still possible.

The change is not so much in finances, although fixing up a small farm could bring in a few hundred without too much bother, but in the way Britain will view farmers. When their sole motivation has been to get as much out of the land as possible, somethings were sacrificed that did cost the country, but the price was never paid. If part of their job is to protect the land as well as use it, they will also become bigger pains in the neck to those who continue to pollute and abuse the countryside.

In America, the plan would make even more sense. Farming in certain areas is meteorologically marginal at best, and crops like cotton can exhaust the soil quickly. Letting land lie fallow is a passive way to deal with some of it, but nothing would help rural America as much as paying the people who still live there to protect and nurture it.

At the same time, this stroke of genius comes from the same government that decided to ban fox hunting ineffectively (thus irritating both pro- and anti-hunting Britons). Even wise politicians can do foolish things, or is it foolish politicians can still do wise things by accident?


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home