Two Metre, Precisely
- September 2004
This Opinion was featured in the September 2004 issue of the the Anglia Farmer
An enlightened approach to the two-metre rule in unlikely, says David Walker.
On 22 July 2004, the Rt Hon. Margaret Beckett, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, announced in a written statement to the House of Commons that amongst other things
"... farmers will be required to protect hedges and ditches by not cultivating, fertilising and spraying within two metres of the centre line. .."
By now most of the 150,000 or so UK farmers will almost certainly have applied a tape measure to at least one of their hedges and realized that their standing crops are already more than two metres from the centre line. And, with two and a half years experience of Ms Beckett, they are no doubt wondering what her game is.
So am I. But I have left others to carry out a Radio 4-style worse case scenario diagnosis of this dementia. Rather, I sought some kind of method in the madness. And, surprisingly, it did not take too much finding. The unlikely source was the wacky world of the WTO - World Trade Organization.
One of the factors used to sell the EU's Single Farm Payment(SFP) system was that it would be regarded in WTO parlance an acceptable "green box" programme, not being in any way trade distorting. But it seems that it missed the top spot being placed by WTO in the blue box - good but not perfect.
The challenge is that area of land farmed is involved in the SFP calculation and land is a factor of production. Hence even though there is no requirement to produce anything from the land, it could conceivably encourage production and thus be trade distorting. As an aside tying the SFP to land is probably necessary to protect the interests of institutions which have lent to farmers on the security of land, so it might seem that there is little chance of changing that.
But it is just possible that some quick witted soul deep in the bowels of DEFRA has realized that hedgerows could be used in SFP calculations in the place of farmed land as is planned. Hedgerows are not a productive resource, so EU's SFP programme would not be barred the hallowed green box status if hedgerows were substituted for farmed land in the calculations. And, of course, the deeds held by farm lenders include hedgerows so their interests would be neatly protected.
All sorts of positive environmental things are purported to happen in hedgerows, so there can hardly be objections from that quarter to an elevation of their status. Indeed, one can envisage that if there is a need to enhance SFP's, perhaps by a future government better disposed to farmers than the current one, it would only be necessary for one of the environmental quangos to find some deserving species that needed a little more hedgerow elbow room. An extra twenty centimetres on the width would add ten percent to the area of hedgerows and ten percent to hedgerow SFP's.
Another advantage is the competitive edge it would provide UK agriculture in an international perspective. Hedgerows in the UK were well developed before the invention and introduction of barbed wire over 150 years ago. While this advantage has probably been eroded somewhat over the years, the superior quality and quantity of UK hedgerows is well and widely documented in tourist literature and, therefore, internationally respected.
Such an enlightened approach, however, seems improbable, so I would advise against farmers taking the trouble to measure the length of their hedgerows.
September 2004
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