by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

Some people have expressed concern at the effect of declining farm incomes upon small rural communities.

I am not overly concerned myself, because it is quite clear than any farmers driven out of business will be able to get well-paid jobs at the Rural Payments Agency (RPA).

There, they will be able to carry on their occupation as before: produc-ing copious quantities of pure silage.

On January 1 this year, under the “reformed” Common Agricultural Policy, the old farming subsidies were replaced by a single payment scheme, administered by the new RPA.

Out went a bizarre system, founded in the era of post-war food shortages, which encouraged the despoiling of country-side to produce large surpluses of food nobody wanted, and in came a new system to encourage environmentally-friendly land management.

Farmers will, for example, have a financial incentive not to graze their fields in winter. That means less turf breaking up and fewer mud baths.

Less happily, it seems that Britain’s remaining tracts of woodland will have to be sacrificed to provide enough paper for the RPA’s documents.

According to the government, one of the advantages of the new system is that it “simplifies” payments.

Needless to say, what an ordinary mortal regards as simple and what a state bureaucrat regards as simple do not quite align.

In fact, to read through the procedure that farmers must undertake to claim their money is to render the expression “beyond parody” pathetically inadequate.

First, they must fill out an SP5a application form, which runs to 24 pages. But before that, they must read the 112-page booklet Single Payment Scheme: Handbook and Guidance for England 2005.

“Applicants should also read”, the bumf goes on to explain, “the following publications before submitting an application form.”

It goes on to list six documents including Cross Compliance – Guidance for Soil Management and the Set-aside Handbook and Guidance for England 2005. The next task is to obtain a “holding number” for the land, which involves filling out another 15-page form, accompanied by a 40-page guidance booklet.

Finally, if all goes well, they should receive their money – which, in the case of horse-grazing, extends to £8 an acre.

Of course, the government isn’t going to shower this money on just anyone.

To claim a farm payment you must be a “farmer”, which is described as “a natural or legal person, or a group of natural and legal persons, whose holding is situated within community territory as referred to in article 299 of the [European] treaty and who exercises an agricultural activity”.

What these natural or legal people don’t have to do, however, is actually grow anything: “There is no requirement to undertake any production in order to be regarded as a farmer.”

That is perhaps just as well: once you have boned up on the details of cross-compliance for soil and gone through the business of obtaining your holding number, there would hardly be any time left for a spot of ploughing.

The lack of obligation for farmers to do any farming does, however, raise the question: what exactly is the single payment scheme for?

At least the old subsidy scheme supported the farming industry for strategic reasons while Europe was still under threat of war.

The single payment scheme, however, is a subsidy for people to do absolutely nothing. All they have to show is that they’ve kept their land in “agricultural condition”. This isn’t a great challenge, given that cows and pigs can happily graze land, generation after generation, without any human input whatsoever.

The truth is the EU’s new subsidy regime isn’t so much designed to support farmers as to keep bureaucrats in jobs.

The consequences of abandoning agricultural subsidies altogether, and allowing farmers to make their money from growing food rather than filling out forms, would be just too horrible to contemplate.

Can you imagine the wasteland of empty quango offices, doors rattling in the wind, Grapes of Wrath-like, while thousands of starving wretches robbed of their pride are forced to drive off in their spluttering Fords and seek work elsewhere?