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JOHN HUMPHRYS: But first, Tony Blair hosted
a "Farming Summit" at Number Ten last week and sent the farmers away with
a promise of more money to help them out of their crisis. But the crisis
remains and no-one, least of all the farmers themselves, believe that things
can carry on as they are for very much longer. Something has to give.
The Agriculture Minister Nick Brown is with me. We'll talk about that
in a minute if we may Mr Brown but the Country File programme that was
on the air just before us showed, as you may know, a report from Queen's
University in Belfast, amongst other places, about Chrone's disease and
the bacterium that causes it which is apparently found in three out of
every hundred bottles of milk. Now that on the face of it sounds desperately
worrying. Are you worried about it?
NICK BROWN: The bacterium that's referred
to in the programme is a world wide problem, this isn't unique to the United
Kingdom and of course it's killed by pasteurisation.
HUMPHRYS: Yeah, but not all of
it apparently.
BROWN: Well in the laboratory experiments
that the government has done, the normal levels and above normal levels
are killed off by pasteurisation. The theory is, and there's no agreement
amongst scientists about this, that in some circumstances it may get through
and there may be a link but the scientific advice to government doesn't
tell us that that's the case and as with everything in this area, the government
relies on being professionally advised.
HUMPHRYS: But because there is
this disagreement between the experts and some very sensible, very serious
senior people they're saying it is terribly worrying indeed, are you going
to do anything about it?
BROWN: Well there is a research
programme that's underway now. As you know, responsibility for these issues
has just transferred to the Department of Health and to the new Food Standards
Agency......
HUMPHRYS: Will they be looking
at this?
BROWN: Well they take the lead
in this issue from now on but we have been not only pushing forward the
research frontiers, we've also conducted our own experiments and at normal
levels and above normal levels the bacterium is killed off by pasteurisation.
Pasteurisation itself is a very powerful public protection measure. I
mean that's why it's in place.
HUMPHRYS: But because of this research
and because of the warnings raised by this particular professor you wouldn't
say people should be cautious about drinking milk?
BROWN: No. No..... I wouldn't....
I mean this is just a personal view, although we still allow green top
milk which is unpasteurised milk to be sold, I personally don't drink it.
I drink pasteurised milk and it's safe to do so.
HUMPHRYS: Absolutely safe as far
as you're concerned?
BROWN: I'm not going to get into
a debate about what is absolutely safe. It isn't absolutely safe to go
to bed at night. We're getting into a semantic area now but it's certainly
safe enough for me to feel I can drink it with confidence.
HUMPHRYS: Okay. Two hundred million
pounds for the farmers as a result of this farming summit, not much of
a summit as it turns out but there we are. The Prime Minister met a few
farmers and talked to a few people and you came away with this two hundred
million pounds which you will no doubt be very pleased with. But you would
accept that it is no more at the very best than offering a breathing space.
BROWN: It was a very successful
summit and the best things that came out of it weren't the things that
had a price tag attached. The retailers were able to present their new
Code of Conduct for the supply chain. Now that's something that's going
to be enormously welcome to farmers and to distributors and processors
and to the retail chain itself. Ben Gill was able to launch - the President
of the NFU was able to launch the new quality assurance mark which pulls
together the different quality assurances and enables people in the supermarket,
because the retailers pledge to use it to buy British Assured Standards
and they said, the supermarket leaders said they would be using it on British
products, so you look for the mark, you're getting a high standard product
and it's British.
HUMPHRYS: But it's money that they
want understandably because their incomes have fallen. If you look at
the figures as you know very well indeed, have fallen by sixteen per cent
in the past five years, that's nearly five billion pounds. Now when you
set two hundred million pounds against that it isn't very much is it so
they are still in crisis are they not?
BROWN: John, they're my ministry's
figures. I mean farm incomes have been depressed for the last three years
and we have never concealed the extent of that. What we're trying to do
is to develop sensible policies that will get British agriculture through
to better times. We cannot buy the problem out and the money that was
announced last Thursday isn't an attempt to do that. What we're doing
is targeting the money that we have got, measures that we know will get
farming through to better times. We're spending it on a range of things:
Hill farm supports, lifting the weight limit on the OTMS which will be
a help to dairy farmers.........
HUMPHRYS: OTMS is the ........
BROWN: It's the Over Thirty Months
Scheme.... I'm sorry some of this is quite technical, but the idea is to
try and tackle the three problems which are low commodity prices on the
world market, the weakness of the Euro, and that's why we've made proportionate
use of the counter-veiling agro-monetery compensation, and the BSE Public
Protection Measures which do put an extra cost onto UK farmers and the
government at the summit accepted the cost of some more of those measures
ourselves, hence the point about lifting the weight limit.
HUMPHRYS: But if you asked most
farmers what their biggest concern is in relation to their drop in incomes
they would say it's the value of the pound, it means that they cannot sell
their products abroad at the sort of price that means anything for them
at all and therefore they are in very serious trouble as a result of that.
Now presumably you've not been banging on Gordon Brown's door saying 'Do
something about the value of the pound' because that's by and large not
something that industry ministers are paid to do and you'd need to be a
very brave man indeed, perhaps you are a very brave man indeed and perhaps
that's what you've been doing, but in the absence of that then it has to
be a restructuring of the industry doesn't it?
BROWN: Yeah. Well I do favour
a restructuring of the industry regardless of the exchange rate position.
The fact of the matter is that world markets are liberalising, the CAP
is bound to reform, there are enormous pressures upon it, we need to get
ahead of the game not run behind it and make British agriculture much more
market orientated. There are a range of different ways of doing that:
The choices for the individual farmers who are running individual private
sector businesses the government is there to help and that was the purpose
of the summit on Thursday and the range of announcements that followed.
HUMPHRYS: Let's be clear what we
mean when we talk about restructuring. What it actually means is a cut
in the number of people working in agriculture, that's effectively what
it's all about isn't it?
BROWN: I'm not sure that that is
so. I mean there's been a steady movement for farms to amalgamate and
to get larger in the United Kingdom.....
HUMPHRYS: Which means fewer people
BROWN: Well, that's nothing new.
I mean that's been going on ....
HUMPHRYS: Absolutely!
BROWN: I mean since the Second
World War that has been a discernible trend. Another discernible trend
is a steady decline in the numbers of people employed in agricultural production,
but that is a trend that may be bottoming out now, and may even reverse
with some speciality markets. Organic farming is one obvious example,
it's labour intensive, but....
HUMPHRYS: ... described as a speciality
market, but...
BROWN: I know, well we can quarrel
about that later, but the developments of the farmers' markets movement
as well is a great way forward for the small and medium sized farmer, and
that also is labour intensive. So it doesn't mean that there has to be
a steady move towards agri-business as you would put it without any countervailing
factors.
HUMPHRYS: Well, then it's odd in
that case that one of the documents that was published by your Department
on Thursday after the summit talked about, and I quote from it 'a faster
restructuring would result in a faster run-down of the number of farms
and the number of people working in farming', and that was accepted
BROWN: All of that is true, but
it doesn't mean that the total numbers of people employed will necessarily
go down.
HUMPHRYS: Of course it does. A
faster restructuring, a faster run-down on the farms, and the number of
people working in farming.
BROWN: Because the jobs move downstream.
I mean is running a farmers' market working in farming?
HUMPHRYS: The reduction of rundown
- faster rundown in the number of people working in farming.
BROWN: Well, that is a steady discernible
trend. The point I'm trying to make is there may be new jobs coming in
farm businesses which are not what you'd call conventional agriculture.
Running a farmers' market is one such thing, running a riding stable for
example, is that agriculture? It's certainly a farm business.
HUMPHRYS: But we're talking about
a hundred thousand people over the next five years. That's the sort of
figures that we're talking about. They're not all going to run farmers'
markets, and I went through the document that you produced with a reasonably
fine tooth-comb and the only thing that I could see that it really offered
them was talk about the horse industry. Well, for heaven's sake how many
people are going to be able to run pony trekking operations. Not too many
in west Wales or Cornwall I can tell you, or Cumbria for that matter.
BROWN: I think you're actually
wrong to speak prejudicially about that. It is actually quite a strong
sector and one of the things that came out of the summit were new moves
to encourage it. We're talking about...
HUMPHRYS: A hundred thousand people,
let's be realistic.
BROWN: ..farm business diversification
more generally, and the areas that are always pointed to are farm-gate
businesses, are the potential for tourism, their potential for converting
agricultural businesses to other economically....
HUMPHRYS: This has been going on
for year and years and years.
BROWN: ...viable uses. And the
government wants to encourage that trend.
HUMPHRYS: There is a limit to....
BROWN: What we cannot...
HUMPHRYS: .. how everybody can
take in paying guests. There aren't enough to go round, you know. It
just doesn't work like that.
BROWN: It is a necessity for those
running farm businesses to focus on the income streams and to make sure
they've got enough income streams to make a living. What you cannot ask
the Government to do is to pay the problem up, and that's the message we're
giving loud and clear, and what we're trying to do is to put money behind
alternative routes, and you can say: oh well each individual route doesn't
amount to very much, but the sum total of them does.
HUMPHRYS: What a hundred thousand
jobs?.
BROWN: Well, you know. Yes.
HUMPHRYS : Because that's the figure
you're talking about isn't it?
BROWN: Who knows how many jobs.
Uniquely in the United Kingdom there is a drift from urban societies to
rural ones. A pattern world wide in developed societies is the other way
round. There is something quite special going on in our country, that
most of the people who go to live in the countryside now don't do it to
get employment in farming.
HUMPHRYS: No. Because they work
in the cities. They come and work in the cities. Most people who go and
live in that nice little village a hundred miles away or sixty miles away
or something, go to work in the nearby town. They're not working in the
country - it's a great myth that they're working in the countryside, they're
not.
BROWN: That's not entirely true
either. I mean with the growth of new technologies and the growth of home-working
you find a lot of people working in the service sector ...
HUMPHRYS: But they're not creating
jobs are they. You can be sitting there playing with your ... or doing
something terribly important maybe with your word-processor or your little
internet operation - you're not creating jobs.
BROWN: Well, I fundamentally disagree
with that. Economic activity is economic activity and not all work involves
you know, manual work on a farm.
HUMPHRYS: Of course it doesn't
all involve manual work on a farm, but I repeat, we're talking about a
hundred thousand jobs. We're talking about a major restructuring, and
when the Dutch looked at their problem, as they looked for instance as
you very well know at their pig industry of which there is too much, too
many pigs, not enough people buying the bacon and all of that, so they
said, well now we've got to get a lot of people at fifteen per cent of
cut back, which is more or less what you are envisaging as I understand
it, and they said: we're going to put a lot of money into this. They put
five hundred million pounds into it. Well what are we talking about?
We're talking about twenty-six million pounds.
BROWN: The Dutch example is not
a good one because as you know they've had a recent outbreak of classic
swine fever. The industry had to run right down in order to control the
disease, it then built up again very fast indeed and arrived at substantial
over-production just as the whole market crashed. So they've had to take
pretty radical surgery....
HUMPHRYS: But the end result is
the same. They had as it were, to buy out those jobs because they didn't
want massive depression in there, so they spent five hundred million quid,
we're spending for the same sort of job and the figures are comparable,
the figures are roughly comparable. We're spending twenty-six million.
BROWN: But the correct analogy
with the Dutch pig industry would be with our BSE crisis. Remember it's
how they respond to things that have gone wrong in the industry after a
dramatic disease. It's not how you respond to things that have gone wrong
in the industry after a dramatic swing in the classic industry cycle which
is what is the case here in the United Kingdom. There was huge over-production
in nineteen-ninety-six because people were getting a decent price for the
product and so they....
HUMPHRYS: ... I understand that...
BROWN: The European Union market
then fell away largely because exports to eastern Europe collapsed so there
was an enormous amount of surplus product, some intended for the domestic
market, some displaced from overseas markets and the prices came crashing
down.
HUMPHRYS: But in this country.....
BROWN: It has probably been the
deepest downturn in what is called the classic pig cycle ever, and the
Government has taken countervailing measures inasmuch as it is for government,
but what a lot of people don't understand is that pig farmers, unlike sheep
and dairy and beef, are not covered by aid programmes from the Common Agricultural
Policy, so devising a policy involving public money to help the sector
isn't an easy thing to do.
HUMPHRYS: But it is going to get
worse in this country isn't it, I mean, competition is going to get worse.
The Americans are pressing very hard, in the end what the Americans want
the Americans tend to get, so that we are not going to be able to subsidise
it in those areas that we can subsidise, beef and sheep and so on, we are
not going to be able to as much of that in the long run as, as we are at
the moment, so the upshot of all this is that we are going to see a very,
very changing rural Britain, aren't we? And we are going to see many fewer
jobs and we are going to see many fewer farms.
BROWN: We are going to see changing
agricultural businesses. I agree with you long-term trends in employment
are downwards in direct production although I don't agree that that necessarily
means that the related jobs will go, in fact, I think they might even increase.
The key issue for the government is to make sure that we take the supports
from the supply side supports, the production supports that we pay now,
and that we pay rural supports, use public money to preserve the countryside
in the way we want to keep it, but to make sure that those payments to
farm businesses, buy in environmental goods and are decoupled from agricultural
production.
HUMPHRYS: Let's try and make that
a bit more simple so that we follow what we are saying here. In other
words, you will not in future pay farmers to grow things, particularly
those things that we don't want and we can't sell and we put into store
or whatever it happens to be or sell cheaply somewhere else, we will not
do that, we will pay them to manage the countryside, in effect.
BROWN: That's the road down which
we're travelling. Now, it's not going to change overnight, but we are
remorselessly in a period of change. It means that farm business have
to be more market focused and that the government supports in the future
are much more likely to come for purchasing valuable public goods, like
the landscape, like the shape of the countryside, and not subsidising
food production.
HUMPHRYS: But that in itself, the
way you describe it, is very, very expensive and we are not at the moment
putting in anything like enough to keep the farmers doing, or to get more
farmers more specifically to do that sort of job, and that's the crucial
thing isn't it.
BROWN: No, but last December I
announced a sixty per cent increase on the resources that the government
were going to apply....
HUMPHRYS: ....on a very small figure....
BROWN: No, that's true, but I got
a thirty per cent increase in the amount of money that comes from Europe
to our country, you're right, on a very small base, but it is an extra
three-hundred million pounds over seven years, and that's new money, real
new money, for England alone.
HUMPHRYS: But there's got to be
much more hasn't there, ultimately.
BROWN: My view is, that in reshaping
the Common Agricultural Policy, we should put more money behind the instrument
I am just describing and put less money into direct Agricultural supports
or compensation for price cuts.
HUMPHRYS: And we'll see a different
Britain in fifty years time, twenty years time, ten years time.
BROWN: I think it will be on a
much shorter time-scale than that, but the key thing is to reform the Common
Agricultural Policy.
HUMPHRYS: Nick Brown, thank you
very much indeed.
BROWN: You're very welcome, as
always.
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