How Many Slugs has George Monbiot Caught?
Today I read this opinion piece, by George Monbiot, oracle of the moment on all things climatic and green. He has the attention of the intelligent British media, and he has some pertinent things to say. But I’ve never quite been able to digest his arguments in the same way that I would once have savoured Jonathan Porritt’s every word. Today, I worked out why.
Let me just set out my stall on this. I live in a part of the country which Nicholas Crane, in his 2011 series ‘Town’, described as the least populated region of England. I came here in the Eighties, as a child of twelve, at a time when a retired ploughman, who sometimes shared my journey into town on a groaning Midland Red, would address me in his deep Worcestershire growl as “Little Maid”. This when he wasn’t at the window exclaiming in horror at the wobbly lines of the new Spring’s tractor-dug furrows. He’d never sat on a tractor. He’d only ever worked with horses - and “they’d have been sacked for furrows as crooked as that” in his day.
I must also hold my hands up to being one of a line of townie incomers. My grandparents moved from North London, to take part in the famous Essex plotlands scheme. My parents, suburban fans of The Good Life, took their enthusiasm for backyard vegetable growing to a preposterous level and moved us all out here. This place has a deep-rooted rurality that’s long-gone, even in other, more accessible, areas of the countryside. Sheer isolation means you can only survive here by getting by, at least in part, with nature, and without money. I love it as much as I hate it. And vice versa. But most of all I know it. I’ve grown up with these people, and lived with them, on and off, for thirty-odd years: from Pony Club mum, to rapacious industrial cultivator, to mixed family farmer, to small-town shopkeeper, to agricultural engineer. I might not subscribe to their beliefs, or even understand how they can live as they do; but I certainly respect their right to be who they are, and I understand the hardships that lie at the heart of rural life. And this is where Monbiot and I signally part company.
To take issue with his article is, by necessity, to flirt for a moment with ad hominem dirty business. Monbiot makes much of the close proximity of DEFRA and the NFU’s headquarters, at neighbouring addresses in Westminster’s Smith Square. But lots of bodies with an interest in power - whether the holding of it, the seducing of it, or the getting of it - are snuggled together in this hallowed corner of SW1. Monbiot sees this as proof that the NFU exerts undue influence on the subsidy regime. But DEFRA doesn’t formulate subsidy policy, and hasn’t done for years: it’s all handed down for them to administer, direct from the arcane corridors of the dodgy EU. The NFU and DEFRA undoubtedly enjoy many neighbourly conversations - but both, under a Common Agricultural Policy which dictates rural policy across twenty-eight European countries, are clients of a bigger state. Monbiot either secretly knows that this is how the political landscape is raked - or he betrays a cataclysmic ignorance. Let me say just this: Monbiot was born in Paddington. He grew up in prosperous Henley. He went to Stowe and Oxford. His father was a businessman who consulted for the Tories. His maternal grandfather was a Conservative MP. He is a member of the political establishment.
This is all perfectly acceptable. Some of my best friends have similar profiles. But aside from implying that he's misrepresented the political picture for the sake of flogging a flaky angle for his story, it prompts the question: how many slugs has George Monbiot personally caught? How many times has he walked out of the house to find that every single bud has been stripped from his stepover Bramleys in yet another midnight coney raid? And has this ever meant that George Monbiot felt the cold dread of actual starvation? Has the loss of a year’s brown sauce, or a winter’s worth of vitamins, ever meant more to George Monbiot than the drag of having to draft an unscheduled email to Abel and Cole?
The thrust of Monday’s Guardian piece, nominally about soil erosion, but really about whipping up a bit of a click frenzy and pushing the Monbiot vision for the countryside, is to equate ‘rich landowners’ with ‘welfare dependents’. But it’s clear that he is maintaining a central premise whose integrity first requires that we view the farmer/landowner as nothing more nor less than a private individual: an entity, apparently, on a conceptual par with good old White Dee, sat on her couch all day with a cuppa and a fag. Worse: he assumes landowners to be universally cash-rich. And, most heinously, he conflates farmers with landowners, and so, in his private parallel economy, he makes all farmers private individuals who are definitively rich. I know all this to be spectacularly untrue. The evidence is in the people living all around me.
In maintaining this fiction he goes so far as to describe the National Farmer’s Union as a ‘Trade Union’. Now, forgive me if I somehow misinterpreted the whole thrust of the Seventies, but I always thought a Trade Union was a pressure group created by employed private individuals, and designed to curb the managerial excesses of those individuals’ employers. To describe the NFU as such takes disingenuity into the realms of willful misrepresentation. Farmers, first and foremost, are business people - and are themselves employers. All the family farms I know, large or small, trade as Limited Companies, employing, when they can afford it, small, fluid teams of semi-casual low-skilled, and a handful of full-time skilled people. They frequently provide their employees with free, or low-cost housing, too. The NFU is a business association, and can be forgiven, I think, for behaving as such.
The second major problem with his ‘welfare dependents’ premise is that welfare benefits paid to the UK’s private individuals are drawn from the UK’s own welfare budget, whereas agricultural subsidy payments are drawn from the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy budget - a budget which, in 2011, cost the UK a gross contribution figure of € 4.082 billion (£3.37 billion) (1).
Were we to stop paying our farmers all the subsidies they currently claim, we would be sacrificing a nett backflow to the UK economy which at 2011 figures was worth a very useful €3.315 billion (£2.73 billion) (1). That’s our money, don’t forget, being repaid to us. Or, more accurately, our money reclaimed from a rapacious Brussels, via the agency of farmers’ subsidy claims, and then recirculated through the networks of their suppliers, wage bills, and personal expenditure, into some of the most sclerotic and starving backwaters of our economy.
Not everyone who lives in the country is a farmer, he says, and farming policy must not marginalise those rural people he defines, by exclusion, as ‘not’ farmers. This is true. Monbiot’s own figure is that only 1.4% of the rural population are farmers. But ‘farmers’ does not include all the people who are involved in, or benefit from, farming. To say on this basis that 98.6% of the rural population are marginalised by farming policy is to misrepresent the facts by some considerable margin. Many of the rural women who self-describe as ‘stay-at-home mums’, for example, are likely to have at some point worked as seasonal pickers or packers, or in a farmgate retail operation. Industrial food processors, and the individuals they employ, rely on the proximity of prime producers (aka ‘farmers’) for their raw materials. Without materials to process, these ‘not farmers’ would be thrown onto those very welfare benefits that cost you, the taxpayer, money. A struggling pub landlord, visited by a thirsty combine gang on a hot harvest lunchtime, falls in love with the farmer who’s just doubled the day’s takings by treating the boys to a couple of rounds. A rural ‘contractor’ hires his machines and his services to farmers in ditching, hedging, shearing, combining, and all sorts of more arcane activities you’d be hard-pressed to make a living out of if you didn’t have access to contracts reliant on a farmer’s farm. And if one of Monbiot’s 98.6% self-describes as a ‘mechanic’, and you take away the farm machinery he relies on for his livelihood, who then is being marginalised? And by who?
Farmers are often tenants, scraping together their ever-rising rent; and if they do own their land, they’re likely mortgaged up to the eyeballs. Chances are that those mortgages were raised only during the past twenty terrible years - just so people could pay themselves a basic level of subsistence while they worked to keep their farms going in the hope of better times. In farming, you’ve got to love being covered in mud, and crap, and living in smelly wellies and tattered overalls - even if, in paper assets, you’re a multimillionaire. From year to year you have to hoard your alleged millions, too, just in case you find yourself living on capital when high-stakes agricultural income streams crash and burn - as they often do. In harvest time and at lambing there is no downtime - and no overtime. You live in your boiler suit, and you work through the night. This you do without any additional personal pay, and even then, in business terms it’s often a struggle to recoup - let alone profit from - this unhealthily high time investment.
Monbiot rails against the current policy of land clearance - but when set-aside was the EU’s diktat, I remember a farmer friend practically weeping into his pint as he described the decades of work that had gone into cultivating a particularly plush stretch of arable that he was now forced to stand by and watch, as it disappeared under a sea of brambles and tough-rooted nettles. You’ve got to have dug one of those buggers out to know the true profundity of that man’s heartbreak. In the wake of waves of DEFRA-enforced movement bans and slaughter, and five successive Summers of torrential rain, many previously debt-free farmers have hocked themselves and their businesses to rebuild or replace exceptional prize-winning herds destroyed by DEFRA and compensated at bog-standard rates; to cover those months of soaring feed bills and zero income while market-ready livestock could not be moved or sold; and to fund the replanting of crops which they worked to plough and seed, and then watched rot. They put themselves through this because they love the land. Not because they’re raping it and laughing their way to the bank. What farmers really want, from DEFRA, and from the EU, is to be left alone. To farm.
I’m afraid Monbiot only betrays his isolation from the sharp end of farming by repeatedly equating the agricultural community with 'the rich'. Even asset-rich, farmers, whatever their methods, are subject to the same yield risks as any small business, this exacerbated by climatic vagaries - even without the added intensity of climate change. Without subsidy, this risk exposure would be simply too great for many smaller farmers to persist in their eternal uphill climb - and so the intensification and industrialisation of agriculture which have already proven to be so destructive would only intensify, in a horrific Darwinist parody. It would be survival of the worst, not the fittest.
In his criticism of current monocultural methods, advocating permaculture as a panacaea, and alleging that it is being deliberately suppressed as a potential route to complete food security, Monbiot swerves the inconvenient fact that these islands have never been entirely self-sufficient in food. We’re a seafaring nation, and we’ve always looked outwards, as well as inwards, for our food. Seventh Century records (2) survive of olive oil, wine, rice, pistachios, dates, figs and spices being imported to Britain via Marseilles - this at a time when the population of the entire UK was somewhere in the region of five million, and there was plenty of quality land to go round. We’ve traditionally eaten a lot of roots, brassicas and fish - freshwater fish, particularly - and cereals of any description have always been a high-input crop, difficult to grow in the UK at the best of times, and technically awkward to turn into food. Until Jethro Tull came along, monocultured cereals were relatively luxurious, and wheat has only become a cheap proposition since the American ‘grain invasion’ of the 1870s (3). Biofuel cereal crops such as miscanthus and maize are indeed advocated by farming advisors, expressly because of the tax breaks and subsidies which are indeed given. But that’s because the EU’s carbon reduction policy is a hopelessly ‘blunt instrument’ - this in the words of 2014 EU Green Party candidate for the South-West, Molly Scott Cato. The EU is making the arthritic farming dog walk on its hind legs - against the vet’s advice. You can’t blame the farmers, blown on the winds of bureaucratic fancy, for taking the EU’s freely proffered shilling. You can only blame the politicians - and the half-baked ideas, I’m afraid, of certain environmentalist politicians who merely dabble in the agricultural world.
Subsidy shapes agriculture. Not the other way around. Only from the First, and more rigorously in the Second, World Wars, has the government interposed itself in the direction of our agriculture, originally formulating policy to maximise production - and inducing producers to go along with its plans by means of cash bribes. Sorry: ‘subsidies’. Food security in wartime was critical to victory. Post-war, the manipulative intercession of government money has - as in all spheres of life - become a creeping mycelium, thriving on the rot of the host. But to label the farming community as complicit in this distortion of how our land is managed is to look down the wrong end of the telescope.
As bureaucracy, taxation and subsidy have bitten ever deeper into the wider economic landscape, so they’ve taken ever greater chunks out of farmers’ ability to compete if they should choose to swim against the governmental tide. Professional farmers are forced to comply with today’s hot policy - or go under, rendering themselves uncompetitive simply by sacrificing their chance of accessing these policy-driven payments. It is now all about big business, but this is driven by the EU itself. At one time subsidy gently reached into every conceivable corner of the rural economy - and with potentially unrecognised environmental benefits. Back in the Eighties, as a thirteen-year-old hobby beekeeper, I personally received something like £2.51 a year in European subsidy to buy sugar for my single hive. All EU bee money now goes into outfits of 150 colonies or more - and into the bureaucracy responsible for regulating these. It’s provoking to wonder whether keeping that money in the hands of the empathetic hobbyist, and so keeping more hobbyists in beekeeping, might have gone some way to preventing the decimation of the UK’s honeybee population, given that highly pressured industrial bee management is under suspicion as a potential cause of colony collapse - just as much as the subsidised pesticides Monbiot himself correctly derides.
All this brings us, ultimately, to Monbiot’s advocacy of permaculture and rewilding as a viable national alternative to ‘conventional’ agriculture. I love permaculture. I practice it. I love wilderness. I live in it. And so I see the holes in the Monbiot plan. He rails against the current pro-grouse policy, despite the fact that this is a landscape tourist business if ever there was one. And yet he doesn’t once mention that there are, in fact, generous tax-breaks and subsidies presently on offer for forestry planting. What lazy client-of-the-state landowner wouldn’t bite off the feeding hand for this easier work, more certain pay-off - and far bigger margins? Permaculture and forestry are natural partners. Forest is one of the best protectors we have against soil erosion. It's the original and best source of biomass. But Monbiot doesn’t once mention this when railing against government handouts.
Sadly, beautiful though the vision might be, Monbiot’s recommendation, that subsidy be used to engineer a move to small-scale permaculture and rewilding, is to propose two opposing combatants for a fight to the death. Subsistence farming, which is what a permaculture set-up basically boils down to - a combination of empathetic light-touch husbandry and foraged harvest - depends not only on a certain level of knowledge and competence in the people managing it, but also on a hugely intensive time input. You might not be busily ripping up the ground a couple of times every year, and constantly sprinkling weird stuff over it - but in terms of vigilance and crop protection, the inputs needed to make any large-scale permaculture project really fruitful would make it completely unviable from a business perspective. Not least because the seasonal time demands are horribly uneven, so you couldn’t employ a permanent skilled staff. With wildlife miraculously excluded from the site, and with the owner doing all the work, permaculture could prove marginal but sustainable. Even so, you’d go from the high-stakes, high payout gamble of the conventional farmer to the assuredly low returns of a time-hungry and unpredictable harvesting system that’s a terrible fit with modern commerce. The reliance on subsidy which he denigrates would only become more deeply entrenched, and the wider rural economy - which, outside the Home Counties, is entirely reliant on financial osmosis from the farmers and farming-reliant trades at its heart - would be fatally compromised.
But imagine for a moment if, as proposed, we combined the big but superable challenges of getting a commercially-viable yield from permaculture with the additional challenge of surrounding our cultivation with burgeoning wilderness. Wilderness replete with seed, bud, and berry eating birds, seedling-loving gastropods, nutty mice and squirrels, herb-wolfing, bud and bark-stripping rabbits - and all the untidily bloody-thirsty predators that come with them, bringing to the table their awkward taste for free-range chicken. We would be concocting a recipe for disaster. We would have poor people employed to sit in the fields overnight with birdscares and rattles - just as we did in the Fourteenth Century. We would eat a lot of pigeon pie. We would soon be festooning our fecund groves with gamekeepers’ gibbets. A powerful and persistent wildlife population, as we have where I live, would be competing directly with people. And some, less competent, people would actually starve, subsidised to draw their terminal breaths on the velvet turf of Monbiot’s biodynamic Eden.
Cultivated food crops are a magnet for wildlife. Nuts and top fruit, permaculture’s star players, are so particularly delicious to wildlife that I have never had a single ripe cobnut from my highly productive Red Filbert in the ten years since I planted it. I wonder if George Monbiot has ever watched a morello cherry being stripped of its fruit by a street gang of blackbirds and jackdaws? They gather for days, chattering, menacing, on the surrounding chimney tops and branches, waiting for the fruit to reach its moment of perfect ripeness. And then they swoop, tearing the fruit from shattered branches, leaving the tree cleared and broken in a matter of minutes. A neighbour who once witnessed this apologised that he’d been too afraid to intervene when he saw them attack. This from a towering, burly guy, who grew up gay in Stoke on Trent. He’s no shrinking violet. It takes me four hours to securely net that tree. Imagine if I had to net an orchard. Or fight the jackdaws.
So: a move to permaculture, regardless of subsidy, would be a move to harsh subsistence farming. Disposable income in the countryside would all but disappear. The only free cash would soon be that imported in the pockets of Monbiot’s ecotourists - and, slowly but surely, what remains of the economic integrity of the rural population would completely come undone. And with the tourist idea comes another problem: people in a place like this are insular, socially awkward, and beset with a weird sort of crippling inertia. If things stay as they always have been, and faces stay familiar, everyone rubs happily along. Any threat of major circumstantial change, as with the recent attempt by Tesco’s to open a store in a local town, and all is thrown into panic. If a stranger turns up in the hardware shop and asks for some rural thing they only half understand, the shop staff will be friendly, and will do their best to help - but the cultural gulf between townie and native yawns wide enough to swallow both of them. Ecotourism can certainly work if it’s contained, clearly defined and professionally interpreted - but the idea of turning the whole of our landscape into some kind of fun park for weekending Cockneys is simply never going to fly. The council doesn’t clear up their rubbish out here, for a start - and the locals, who will pick it up, will mightily resent it. The only way Monbiot’s ecotourism fantasy could ever happen is if the entire rural population were, like the lamented poor of Elephant and Castle, of Shoreditch and of Stokey, forcibly transplanted.
And that word ‘poor’ is at the heart of this argument. While Monbiot slams the rich, he overlooks the farming poor - even as he’s busy smearing them with the sticky mud of privilege. For the Monbiot vision to become reality, we would have to do something with all those inconvenient poor people littering our ruined countryside. We could employ them to sit in fields and scare off birds, maybe - or you, the taxpayer, could pay to put them on housing benefit, and shove them into all those urban one-bed flats that we don’t actually have.
For the ultimate fruit of the permaculture/ecotourist vision would be the displacement of whole country populations. Our picturesque historic market towns would become dormitory wastelands, second-home ghettos, and places for the old to wind down. Tourism brings rich people to desirable places - and those rich people often choose to stay on. We’d be turning the whole of the British countryside into a wafty Tolkienian version of the Cotswolds, or Cornwall, where these days being poor is to be excluded from the very business of living in your own hometown. Ironically, even as he purports to champion the workless poor against some kind of venal agricultural mafia, Monbiot proposes a future in which the rich would win hands-down.
NOTES
1 http://cep.rhul.ac.uk/cep-blog/2013/3/12/eu-budget-what-is-the-uks-cost-and-benefit-from-the-common-a.html
2 The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England, by Peter Sawyer (Oxford University Press, 2013)
3 http://www.econ.ku.dk/research/publications/pink/2008/0808.pdf
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