Paul Stephens: Farmers receive yet another recipe for chaos

The UK isn't alone in subsidy regimes. Worldwide, most of the large corn-producing countries have subsidised farmers. Unfortunately, the regimes in England, especially of late, have been very badly handled and caused farmers immense problems. It seems they have also alienated the British public against the receivers of these handouts.

Governments want cheap food policies and one way to do this is to subsidise the farmer, who puts food on the supermarket shelves at a cost below production (without the aid). All the public hear in the Press is that farmers have been given yet another handout.

If truth be known, it is actually the housewife who ultimately gets the subsidy through cheap food. If food was sold at the true cost of production, the farmer would be no worse off if he didn't receive the payments.

But if there were no subsidies and food prices did rise, and as long as other countries continue to subsidise their own farmers, then foreign food would flood in. There are too many trade agreements to impose import tariffs to stop this, so for the time being we are stuck with subsidies to keep farmers viable.

In recent times, following the 1947 Agriculture Act when we were still rationed after the war, the Deficiency Payment Scheme was introduced

to make up a guaranteed corn price for farmers.

In 1973, the UK joined the EEC and farmers were faced with a whole new regime of subsidy payments – the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS). From that moment on, applying for the subsidies became extremely complicated. But the payments were there to be had and it was worth getting to grips with the system to claim the money.

Farmers did an excellent job of food production, doing all that

governments asked of them. The trouble is, government targets were

being overrun and we ended up with grain mountains, milk lakes and set aside to curb production.

So the powers-that-be tried to make amends and the inference of the subsidy was swung from a production basis, to the present area basis where even if you don't grow anything, you still receive a payment.

The Single Payment Scheme, as it is now known, is tackled in such a complicated way that even a multi-million pound computer system, plus

an army of staff at the Rural Payments Agency, cannot cope.

Despite modern technology, the RPA started missing targets set by the European Union on timeliness of payments and are now forced to pay a 160m fine to the EU (England being the worst offender in the whole of Europe).

A lot of this was due to their mapping problems, but have they learnt by this?

When the scheme came in, farmers spent hours, if not weeks, gathering Ordnance Survey maps of their farms, making sure that they weren't claiming more than they should. With the help and expense of land

agents and crop consultants, every little corner not in production was measured and marked on the maps.

This was all agreed and spot checks carried out to make sure there were no further errors.

Then, the RPA decided to change all the maps to a digital system. The whole system fell apart as these new maps nearly all contained errors with some farms losing whole parcels of land.

Personally, up until this point, I had been lucky to have had a fairly easy ride. But then, just when we started harvesting and the office

work had to wait for a wet day, a bundle of papers landed on my desk from the RPA full of maps, forms and instructions and a deadline of two weeks to complete.

This is Remote Sensing – in other words, another means of measuring the fields, this time by satellite. So, despite agreeing first the OS maps, then the digital maps, we now have another system that finds further differences.

They want me to merge fields that don't have a hedge between them, even though I farm them separately. They have found very slight variances in the boundaries which they measure to 11 decimal places! Worst of all, they now have some of my neighbour's land included in mine.

I have been selected at random and they already make a warning that

this will lead to delays in payments – again. Worst of all, this reveals the waste of money going on at the RPA making a complicated system totally ludicrous, when they are supposed to be making cutbacks.

If we ran our farms like the RPA run their business, we would have been bust years ago. It is unbelievable.

Paul Stephens is an arable farmer near Malton.