Examination of Witnesses (Questions 71
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 14 JUNE 2006
DR MARK
AVERY, DR
SUE ARMSTRONG-BROWN,
MR TOM
OLIVER AND
MR IAN
WOODHURST
Q71 Chairman: We welcome our second
set of witnesses for this afternoon's inquiry and for the record,
from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Dr Michael
Avery, their Director of Conservation, and Dr Sue Armstrong-Brown,
the Head of Agriculture Policy; and for the Campaign to Protect
Rural England, Tom Oliver, Head of Rural Policy, and Ian Woodhurst,
Senior Rural Policy Officer. You are all very welcome. Can I thank
you for your written evidence and for being here to join us this
afternoon. I would like to ask you the same question I started
with with our previous witnesses, which is, what do you actually
think, in the light of this think-piece and commentary from Europe
now on the changed nature of the Common Agricultural Policy? What
actually is its purpose?
Mr Oliver: Chairman, Mark is very
kindly letting me go first, although I am not sure if it is kind.
I think the purpose henceforth must be to maximise the sustainable
management of land to public benefit, in one sentence. I think
that includes things which have been very thoroughly discussed
already this afternoon, semi-natural habitat, landscape character,
the quality of the environment, which includes the quality of
water, its velocity, its volume, but it also includes the capacity
in the longer run to use land productively.
Q72 Chairman: How does the RSPB see
that?
Dr Avery: I think that is a good
answer. Although we have had a while to think about this, since
you asked the CLA, it is a difficult and probing question. I think
their answer was that you might not start from where we are now
and that the reason for the CAP is changing. We would say that
the future for the CAP has to maintain a farmed countryside, because
I think we do need farmed countryside with farmers in it. Maybe
it is unrealistic to expect the same number of farmers as we have
now, but a farmed countryside, but that the basis for public support
has to switch increasingly towards producing these things which
we call public goods, which are things like wildlife, landscape,
access, clean water. The trick is starting from a system invented
over 40 years ago, which was for one reason, to support the production
of food, and moving it over a period of time to a completely different
system. I do not know whether we are in the middle of it, but
we are in that process still.
Q73 Chairman: I said at the beginning
that the Committee has had the pleasure of visiting Poland to
see how a new Member of the European Union was getting on and
to a possible new Member in the shape of Romania, and you see
in those two countries, particularly in Romania, a very diverse
and different type of agricultural challenge, rural challenge,
than the remarks which you have made, which very much reflect,
if you like, a United Kingdom sophisticated farmed landscape background.
I just wonder if, in terms of the international context which
you have respectively had, you felt there were any other existing
partners within the European Union who might share your vision
of what should be happening to the farmed landscape?
Mr Oliver: The Government made
a very welcome move in February when it signed the European Landscape
Convention, and I hope very much that it is ratified in due course.
We will not be the first country to have signed and ratified it,
and there is a very large number of countries in Europe which
recognise the huge public benefits of landscape, its cultural
and health benefits as well as its biodiversity and aesthetic
benefits. I would suggest that the issue is not so much which
countries share the vision but which interest groups within the
countries control the policy? The interesting thing about Eastern
Europe is that there is such an explosion of enterprise and a
desire for freedom that the movement from, if you like, the most
old-fashioned forms of agriculture, which are often very beneficial
from a biodiversity point of view, is being propelled often by
external investment from Western Europe, while a lot of the collective
farms under the Soviet aegis are actually on land of very little
value in terms of biodiversity. So there is an interesting polarisation,
which in a way matches the polarisation in England between CAP-generated
productive farmland and more traditional farms.
Q74 Chairman: This is the point.
This is, if you like, my own debate churning in my mind for exactly
that reason, that you have in places like Poland large, certainly
hundreds of thousands of hectares of relatively under-exploited
landscape and yet the pressure is exactly, Mr Oliver, as you describe
it. It raises the interesting question as to what should be the
policy objective of the Common Agricultural Policy. Do you actually
want to replace that by modern, efficient farming? For example,
in Romania the minister tells us that he wishes to remove 2 million
of his fellow citizens from farming and he says, "Bigger,
more efficient units, that is the way we have got to go, the end
of subsistence." It does raise some quite interesting questions.
Mr Oliver: At the heart of the
answer rests the critical importance of continuity of management.
I think our analysis—and I think this is true to say of
the RSPB as well, though I am sure they will confirm it if it
is true—is that you can have a coexistence of productive
farming with much better public benefits of the kind we have all
described if the policies are correct and if the funding is adequate
for the purpose. It does not mean it being the same as the funding
today and I think in these circumstances, in particular with the
international influence of RSPB, for example, it is incredibly
valuable to see the value of landscape and habitat across the
Continent as well as England.
Dr Armstrong-Brown: Can I perhaps
come in on that? You may already know that the RSPB is one of
the partner organisations of BirdLife International and we have
the RSPB equivalent in every country in EU25 who share a common
agriculture policy. We work together with our partners and the
view we express in our written evidence to you is that of BirdLife
International. It is interesting in the way in which this links
to the question of a purpose for the Common Agricultural Policy,
because Pillar 1 is in the fairly unique position of not having
any policy objective attached to it any more since decoupling,
whereas Pillar 2 has a number of very important internationally-recognised
policy objectives, including the Lisbon agenda, which does attempt
to address this question of economic and social sustainability
in rural areas, which is particularly important in the new Member
States, as well as the objectives for halting the decline of biodiversity
by 2010, and so on. All these objectives provide a very good and
comprehensive purpose for the Common Agricultural Policy but they
are linked exclusively to Pillar 2, which is where this "Vision"
document comes in, because it starts to move in the direction
of adequately funding those policies and expressing that purpose
but does not in fact flesh out exactly what is needed. There is
no need analysis attached to those policy objectives so far.
Q75 Chairman: Why did they produce
this document?
Mr Oliver: As I understand it,
they produced it in order to make easier their passage through
the negotiations in December in Hong Kong.
Q76 Chairman: That is a new and novel
perspective. What does the RSPB think?
Dr Armstrong-Brown: We cannot
really speak for the Treasury's or Defra's purpose—
Q77 Chairman: No, I want you to speak
for the RSPB. When this thing arrived there was little warning,
it just dropped on the desk. What was your first reaction to it?
Why did you think they had done it?
Dr Armstrong-Brown: My reaction
was that it was an attempt to break the deadlock in Europe over
Pillar 1 and the revision of the CAP policies, but was produced
as a largely English, not even UK document, that will be a start
for debate but a lot of work needs to be done to take that forward
in Europe, as has been discussed earlier today.
Q78 Mr Williams: The RSPB states
that the effects or the implementation of the "Vision"
would depend upon the funding available for Pillar 2 and the way
in which there was integration between the environmental objectives
with mainstream farming and economic policies in the future. Can
you explain what you mean by that exactly?
Dr Armstrong-Brown: Yes, of course.
Much has been made, I think, in the debate (not only today but
since the publication of the document) of the impact of changing
Pillar 1 subsidies, but we must not forget that these are decoupled
subsidies, so any impact they have on farming at the moment is
largely down to the individual choice of the recipient of the
subsidy. If they choose to invest that money in farming operations,
then that has an environmental impact, but a lot of it need not
be. At the moment, we do not really know, to be honest, what the
consequences of decoupling are going to be on a farm by farm scale
because it depends upon the state of denial of the individual
landowner concerned.
Q79 Mr Williams: From the CPRE standpoint,
you say that the effect on the landscape will depend upon the
continued viability of the farm businesses. Can you expand on
that a bit?
Mr Oliver: Yes. I think we all
agree, as I think the CLA has said, that the effects will be variable
and there are all sorts of things in the mix. There is the age
of the farmer running the business. There is the likelihood of
succession if he/she is a tenant and the kind of tenancy. There
is the burden of reinvestment required in order for the farm buildings
and farm machinery to operate effectively. I think one of the
most fundamental questions is the uncertainty which the individual
farm business feels, and of course there are about as many variations
of farm businesses as there are farmers and most of them have
now diversified in some shape or other. So for all these reasons—and
that (diversification) partly depends upon the planning regime
in the local authority, where they are, it partly depends upon
whether they are in a nationally protected landscape which gives
them greater access to grants and also greater access to tourist
interests—there is such a range of issues that at the moment
it is very difficult to predict, as Sue has said. I think probably
the crucial point is, though, that there is a sort of philosophical
chaos reigning, which means it is very difficult to have a coherent
vision rolled out across the country. One thing we all are unified
by in particular is that we regard the 9.7 million hectares of
English land to be crucially important. It is just not good enough
for there not to be a clear sense of the value of that land in
all its respects, including natural resource management and climate
change, against a time when we will want it for all sorts of different
reasons.
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