The Hushings - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 181

£20,000 a year, though this gap may diminish if the price of lamb
continues to rise. But, under the Common Agricultural Policy, if you
want your subsidy payment, one of the few things you are forbidden
to do is nothing. The Good Agricultural and Environmental Condi-
tion rules specify that if you do not keep the land clear, you forfeit
everything. There is no requirement to produce anything; you must
merely stop the land from reverting to nature, by either ploughing it,
grazing it or simply cutting the resurgent vegetation. The purpose is to
prevent the restoration of the ecosystem.
So here, perhaps, is the resolution of the conundrum that caused me
such trouble: this rule should be dropped. Those farmers who are in
it only for the money would quickly discover that they would earn
more by lying on a beach than by chasing sheep over rain-sodden
hills. Those who, like Dafydd and Delyth, believe in what they are
doing, and have wider aims than just the maximization of profit,
would keep farming. Where the life and community associated with
raising sheep are highly valued, farming will continue. Where they are
not, it will stop. Large areas of land would be rewilded, and the farm-
ers who owned it could receive, as well as their main payments,
genuinely green subsidies for the planting, reintroductions and other
tasks required to permit a functioning ecosystem to recover. The alter-
native is the system we have at present: compulsory farming, enforced
by the subsidy regime.
There is, I think, a necessary refinement of this simple idea. At
present the subsidy system is deeply regressive. While it is funded by
the taxes extracted from everyone, rich and poor, the money is dispro-
portionately harvested by the biggest landowners. This, under the
current system, is inevitable, as farmers are paid according to their
acreage. According to Kevin Cahill, the author of Who Owns Britain ,
69 per cent of the land here is owned by 0.6 per cent of the popula-
tion. 13 It is profoundly wrong, I believe, that people struggling to
support their families should be forced to extend alms to dukes,
sheikhs and sharks: the absentee landlords, speculators and assorted
millionaires who own much of the farmland of Britain and other
parts of Europe.
To address this injustice, I would like to see the European Union