OPINION: This is not the time to remove direct payments

An open letter to DEFRA secretary Owen Paterson:
Dear Mr Paterson,
Your understanding of agriculture and willingness to take unpopular decisions to support its needs have earned the admiration and respect of the vast majority of farmers.
Your determination to deal with the TB epidemic in our livestock, despite problems with the badger cull, has been particularly impressive. Your support for genetic modification, against the relatively uninformed instincts of some of your cabinet colleagues, has also been appreciated.
And your declared objective to raise productivity in the face of increasing domestic and world demand for food is what farmers want to hear.
However, when it comes to some aspects of CAP reform you appear to have a blind spot. I personally don’t have a problem with the greening requirements the EU has specified and your department appears to have accepted. An area of permanent grass, at least three crops in a rotation and a limited area of land set aside for nature are policies with which I feel comfortable.
But you have repeatedly said you want to shift the maximum 15% EU modulated payments away from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2 so that extra funds can be used for rural development rather than to support farming. This, you are quoted as saying, would deliver significant public good in ways that direct payments can not.
True, this coincides with the wishes of most of the conservation agencies whose priorities do not include a thriving agricultural sector nor the production of food. But you have not been swayed by their strident and blinkered demands on other matters, so why are you so enthusiastic to support them now?
It’s not that I am against environmentally responsible farming. Indeed, my personal history as the founding chairman of LEAF, whose objectives. I still enthusiastically support, should persuade you of that. But the balance between environmentalism and production, were your favoured policy to be adopted, could be distorted too far from what our growing population needs.
Please remember, too, that farmers need to make a living and have a little to spare to spend on the environment. It can’t have escaped your notice that the charities set up to help farmers in financial distress have received more calls for help in the past year than ever before. I am not blaming you or the government for this, although cost inflation over which you and your colleagues claim some control has not helped. The main problems have been extremes of weather. Drought in 2011, floods in 2012 and drought again this year.
These meteorological aberrations have resulted in two and in some areas three bad years in a row and significant numbers of farmers are living on a financial knife-edge.
Your own statisticians have recently reported an average 25% drop in farm incomes last year compared with the previous year (which was down on the year before), with some sectors faring much worse. Cereals down 30%; dairy down 43%; grazing livestock down 50%; mixed farming down 50% and so on.
If you mean what you say about increasing productivity you must give a battered industry time to recover. This is not the time to withdraw direct payments that are already much lower than in most of our competitors in Europe. Please think again.
Yours,
DR
David Richardson farms about 400ha of arable land near Norwich, Norfolk, in partnership with his wife Lorna. His son Rob is farm manager.
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