Forced transition in UK farming

The history of the last sixty years of UK agriculture makes for interesting analysis when considering the implications of the planned single global dominant elite and the coming enslavement of the mass of population. In post war Britain of the 1950's there was a drive for national self sufficiency in agriculture driven by the forced rationing of the years through World War II, and a standard British farm across much of the agricultural regions of the country were an average of one hundred acres of mix arable and livestock farming with some additional specialist regions based on soil type and climate producing fruit and vegetables. This was an effective and reasonably efficient system that had worked well for several hundred years and had a capacity to provide the basic food needs of a population in excess of thirty five million people. The system was self sufficient for fertiliser, with animal waste providing nitrogen rich nutrients to the soil, and maintained a relatively high level of employment in rural areas and minimal artificial inputs including fuel. This system remained in place until the early 1960's at which point there was a transition in UK policy to come into line with European practices.

The move towards integration with Europe both politically and in terms of agriculture was hailed by much of the media as a positive step but it had significant consequences for the farming community. One of the principles of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was that the European Union would organise production across Europe, and organise the management of subsidy payments to create a price protected block within Europe against imports from outside the European Economic Community (EEC). These management controls and subsidies encouraged farmers to specialise in single crops or livestock types to maximise production of individual crops, and led to media reports of milk lakes, butter mountains and so on. This was a created situation specifically designed to create an anti-farming atmosphere in the general public, the implication being that farmers were creating this excess through greed rather than because that was the instruction they were receiving. The images of vast warehouses filled with food produce going to waste were highly prevalent in the 1960's and early '70's.

The next step in this transition was to create a European legislation that would further alienate the public. This came in the form of a series of farm subsidies aimed at encouraging farmers to take land out of production to reduce surpluses. The most infamous of these was the set-aside scheme, portrayed by the mainstream media as farmers being paid to do nothing. Of course this was nonsense, and individual farmers had no option in this anyway, but the atmosphere of antagonism was enhanced and farmers were again marginalised. This process continued through the 1980's when a new pressure was added in the form of government approved supermarket monopoly buying strategies that over the next decade and a half consistently reduced prices for agricultural products to a point considerably below cost price. Over the last twenty five years this has led to a loss for individual farmers to the industry of fifty five percent, and a rapid decline in production, and a shift towards ever larger farms owned as investment land and managed for subsidy rather than production.

As a nation we are now less than twenty percent self sufficient for food in the UK and that figure is falling year on year, and we are now at a point where we already have two generations of farmers who have never farmed an efficient mixed farm and who would be largely unable to return to that style without considerable difficulty. We have also largely lost many of the breeds of crops and livestock that could function in this style of farming, the current breeds being specifically designed for high yield intensive production. What this means is that as a nation we are almost completely at the mercy of the global elite to keep us supplied with out daily essential foodstuffs, and this makes us totally vulnerable, and unable to fight against the system without risking our food supply being cut off. Seems a strange state of affairs given that we are capable of being self sufficient if we really want to be. I wonder why we chose not to.