The True Cost of the European Common Agricultural Policy by Chris Wright

 We’ve just made our annual batch of chutney. Once again our apple tree has done us proud, which is good news for friends and neighbours who also benefit from its bounty. Not that it’s all a one way process. In return for our jars (re-using is better than recycling!) we get a variety of produce; jams, vegetables and eggs.

I mention this not to demonstrate how sustainably we live, but because we might soon be breaking the law. The European Union has strict and ever expanding regulations concerning agriculture carried on within its boundaries. Polish small-holders are discovering, for example, that they cannot hand milk their cows and then sell their milk on – even to their neighbours. And, in the face of the cheap milk surpluses currently sloshing around Europe (the product of factory-style methods), local farmers are getting rid of their cattle as if there’s no tomorrow.

Which, for small-scale farming, there apparently isn’t. The whole thrust of the European agriculture policy is towards increasing the size and ‘productivity’ of farms so that the resulting cheap food can be bulk transported around the continent’s motorways and distributed efficiently through a network of consumer outlets called supermarkets. That is the logic of the Tescoland and, in the process, a viable system of agriculture in Poland, based on small and medium sized family farms, is being sacrificed. The farmers who, over generations, have got to know their land and how best to nurture it, will be encouraged to take better paid city jobs. Soon, there will only be the likes of us, playing at growing food, and agribusiness, using oil-based products and drugs to compensate for a basic disregard for the soil and welfare of the animals they are treating as components of a vast machine.

Quite apart from the human cost, the questionable quality of the food produced and the ethics of treating nature so cavalierly, the system is fundamentally unsustainable. The carbon footprint of modern agriculture is getting worse not better, and we face a looming oil crisis that will stop the whole process dead in its tracks, so dependent is it on hydrocarbon fuels. Rather than promoting bigger farms, increased technology and ever greater food miles, Europe should be moving in the opposite direction entirely.

In times of crisis there is no alternative to local, often very local, production. During the Second World War in this country and, more recently, in Cuba, a significant proportion of the country’s needs were grown within major cities. In Havana, for example, where around twenty per cent of the island’s population lives, there were some 28,000 huertos (kitchen gardens) run by 50-100,000 individuals by the mid-nineteen nineties; only a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union had deprived the Cuban economy of guaranteed exports.

Cuba is no democracy and doesn’t have a great human rights record, but it would be nice to think that our own democratically elected governments in Europe (who are charged with safeguarding our long term welfare) could take a page out of the Cuban book and begin to encourage a return to widespread local production. Not only would such a strategy begin to prepare us for the changes that are clearly on the horizon, it would mark a return to valuing seasonal and local tastes as well as traditional cuisines that reflect local circumstances.

However, I’m realistic enough to recognise that it ain’t going to happen. At least not until some major crisis forces a rethink of priorities. In the meantime, the headlong rush to bigger and bigger agricultural units will continue and, who knows, my wife and I may yet appear in court charged with passing on unsuitable produce to our neighbours. If that happens I hope you will support us!

Copyright 2007 Chris Wright author (Mayfield Park - novel, and Your Wake Up Call - non-fiction) and founder member of Action for Sustainable Living - www.afsl.org.uk