So, why pay farmers to do their jobs, over and above the profits/losses they make from business operations? My plumber is an important chap in our lives, but I don’t see reasons to pay him a subvention from the public purse. The subsidy junkies of the NFU will predict doom, but NZ proves it can be done.

I wouldn’t argue with any of the goals you’re promoting here, Jean, but … a carefully designed system wouldn’t start from here.

Farming subsidies of the kind you’re suggesting could certainly have a role in a transition to a well designed system but I think the design of them would need to take into account the necessary changes to the underlying legal fabric. The current system is dysfunctional because fundamental laws (particularly on ownership of land) were allowed to become derelict: over a period of centuries, landowners’ rights which were originally administrative morphed into privileges. Those laws need to be reformed, and those reforms would need to be brought into effect over quite a long period, so any transitional subsidy regime would have to be designed to bridge the gap between the two legal regimes.

As I see it, trying to mitigate the ill-effects of derelict primary law by adding layers of secondary law on top of it merely entrenches the underlying flaws. At some point, we have to address the fundamentals – the laws governing land ownership. To my mind, they are actually an easier target, because they are both historically incoherent and blatantly incompatible with modern values.

Whether there’d be any long term role for farming subsidies in a healthy society is something I don’t think we can know from here. My guess is not.

It’s balanced by the first element, which is specifically to support farmers, and hence the active farmer requirement (and I know both people both in Nourish and the Landworkers Alliance have strong opinions on the need for this to be more meaningful and real than the current CAP requirement), but that is not actually the largest pot of funds in the way we’ve envisaged it. And that requirement is only for that element – not for the other two elements.

Does that make sense?

It’s a really useful discussion. What we wanted to do is throw out some proposals that try and get away from just tweaking the existing CAP, and hopefully spark some debate.

My only real disagreement with this is:

“conditional on a meaningful active farmer requirement”

For me, one of the problems with CAP is that it encourages a ‘land management’ approach, which can be hugely destructive to biodiversity, and helps cause flooding. Of course producing healthy food is a public good and I have no problem with it being subsidised where it makes sense. But on some land, in some places, it would be much better if we just let it be. Where I grew up, for example, on the Highland Line, there is a huge amount of hill sheep farming (my dad was a shepherd for about 12 years). Britain eats very small amounts of lamb, yet dedicates a vast amount of our land to growing it, largely because CAP has a requirement similar to this one. It would be much better for all involved, I think, if farmers were allowed to choose whether to continue farming, or to allow land to rewild, rather than having a subsidy regime which requires them to keep farming, even on hill land where it makes little sense to do so.