Measuring Success
- April 2005
This Opinion was featured in the April 2005 issue of the the Anglia Farmer
Next month's 60th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day means it is timely to reflect on the issue of food security, writes David Walker.
"No weapon ever invented is more deadly than hunger; it can spike guns, destroy courage, and break the will of the most resolute peoples."
So began a 1945 ministry publication titled "Land at War," priced at "1'6 NET," which then went on to describe, with pride, how agriculture had been rejuvenated over five war years to raise the level of the UK food self sufficiency.
While the needs of the nation for food self sufficiency vary with circumstance, there is little doubt that feeding the nation is something in which farmers have taken particular pride. It something that the ministry of agriculture devotes considerable resources in monitoring, no doubt because it was viewed as politically significant.
In the days when the ministry played a leadership role for the industry, data of this nature was a trusted measure of success for both the ministry and the industry. While the specific way in which self sufficiency has been measured has changed over the years, the ministry appeared always to have been careful to maintain an overlap of old and new when it changed its calculations so that longer term trends could be identified.
During the dozen or so years after the UK joined the European Union, or the common market as it was then called, self sufficiency in indigenous food generally improved. The much higher prices for cereals under the CAP generally encouraged output to met self sufficiency particularly for feed grains.
For the ten years from the mid 1980's to the mid 1990's the industry had to struggle with the implication of the BSE epidemic. While in retrospect it is evident that the industry came to grips with this new disease relatively quickly, it was a very significant set back for the industry.
The decade from the mid 1990's to the current might have been expected to be one of recovery. But it hasn’t for a number of reasons. Of these the mishandling of foot and mouth outbreak in February of 2001 is first and foremost. It has had a far more serious impact than the BSE epidemic, because it seems in retrospect to have caused the government to give up on agriculture.
The foot and mouth outbreak, of course, raged as the government campaigned for reelection at the last general election. And when it was reelected one of it first of its acts was to bury agriculture as deep as it could in the department of the environment.
If anybody was now to question the decline in food self sufficiency at Whitehall or Westminsiter, it might be reasonable to expect a response that it was for the best, as it provided the opportunity for rest and recuperation for the countryside. The implication is that the countryside is in some way poorly, if not sick.
In this era of emphasis on business management and good governance, DEFRA and its quango’s have hundreds of objectives and targets. The challenge is that they are designed for internal purposes and none have the acceptance of food self sufficiency of old. And while and until DEFRA finds an objective acceptable on an industry wide basis, it will find it difficult to develop a meaningful leadership role.
The industry will, meanwhile, play the role of the hired hand - doing only what it is paid to do, and even then with some reluctance.
April 2005
top of page