“No country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility” Michael Gove said the year after Brexit in 2017. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was making our soils unhealthy, leaving our food security, nature and farmers exposed. In their place, the Environmental Land Management schemes (ELMs), are helping to restore our soil health, yet this new Labour government is deciding not to back them.
Labour has said they will restore nature, back British farmers and that food security is national security. Though by failing to commit to these schemes long term and by not providing them with enough funding, they will fall far short of their promises.
With 95% of food coming from the ground, soil health underpins food security. This inevitably affects our farmers, their ability to grow food and create a livelihood off the land. It takes over a hundred years for just a millimetre of soil to form, therefore requiring intergenerational efforts and long term sustainable management. Instead we are losing soil 50 to 100 times faster than it takes to rebuild. This is not only an existential threat to farmers and food security, but to nature as well. As the bedrock of the food chain, the loss of biodiversity below ground will directly impact the biodiversity above.
The CAP’s Basic Payment Scheme distributed payments based on the amount of land managed. Prioritising agricultural productivity, it caused a rapid intensification in the way we managed our land. Farmers were encouraged to create monocultures that deplete soil fertility by continuously taking the same nutrients from the soil without replenishing them. Bigger and heavier farm machinery would cause soil compaction, whilst the excessive use of chemical inputs disrupted and harmed soil organisms that are vital for soil structure and nutrient cycling. As a result, 60%-70% of EU soil is unhealthy, posing a risk to food security and farmers livelihoods whilst causing declines in biodiversity too.
Brexit created a once in a generation opportunity to restore our farmlands natural resilience. With food already rewarded on the market, ELM schemes spend public money on the provision of public goods that the market does not reward, such as improving the quality of water and soil. Farmers are therefore incentivised to take on more regenerative farming practices such as the planting of a cover crop to put nutrients back in the soil or using alternative inputs that do not cause the loss of soil fertility, compaction, erosion and degradation of our soils.
These schemes are designed to help to restore nature, and with biodiversity loss seen as one of the two (the other being climate change) most serious medium and long term threats to food security, they will be vital for farmers too.
With 70% of our land in agricultural use, the ELMs are crucial to meet our national objectives and legal commitments on biodiversity. If we want to halt wildlife decline by 2030 the £2.4 billion budget needs to increase in real terms to £3.1 billion at least. Yet Labour has decided not to raise the budget, which puts their promises to restore nature in doubt.
As well as failing to back ELMs, Labour has also made changes to the Agricultural Property Relief (APR) which protects family farms from inheritance tax, preventing them from being broken up upon death. With family farms no longer being passed down the generations tax-free, it could damage incentives for long-term environmental stewardship and protection of the soil.
APR offered farmers the generational security of their family farm whilst ELMs would enable these generations to manage it in a way that could be sustainable in the long term. Now, by failing to commit to ELMs long term in particular, Labour has undermined this vision and created financial uncertainty amongst farmers across the country.
Without healthy soil, we leave our food security, nature and farmers exposed. If Labour really cared about farmers, food security and nature, they would stand by their promises and increase the ELMs budget and commit to it long term.
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