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Southern Europe's vacation economy is not a viable model for scaling down farming in the Britain's countryside. (650 words).

Farmers, who are notoriously poor clients for travel agents, might feel a little smug about news of congestion at airports and on highways leading to tourist destinations in southern Europe.

The press and media call it the silly season. Government and many businesses are in limbo while everybody takes a break and hard news is difficult to come by, so silly stories get printed and aired. If farmers think it is silly because of the lemming like behaviour of those holiday makers they might be missing a point.

Any farmer who had the time and inclination to join the throng would find plenty of interest in northern France. There is a familiarity to the countryside, but enough of a difference from home to busy his thoughts as he crawls south.

But as he approached holiday destinations in the south, the country becomes more broken, farming peters out into little more than sporadic vineyards and tourist attractions mushroom.

These facilities appear well kept, seem to be well enough patronized and provide a superficial gloss to the countryside. But beyond this visual varnish, the wider country side would appear to a farmer run down and in need of much more than a lick of paint.

He might, therefore, return home feeling less dissatisfied with his lot than when he left. He might, however, be overlooking something that could haunt his future.

To the urban dweller the run down state of the southern European countryside is seen as charm. And it may be seen as something of a model for our uncertain future. Prime Minister Blair for one reportedly favours holidaying in Tuscany in northern Italy.

Is the vision of a mass migration from British and even European urban centres to the British countryside viable as an alternative to the farm based rural economy? The real question is whether the British holiday maker can be weaned off his preference for heading to foreign parts.

Rural Britain, of course, is not new to tourism. The list of destinations is long. But they are by and large character destinations and would likely have difficulty in accommodating the kind of onslaught that southern France absorbs.

Unlike southern France most of Britain has a serious commercial agricultural base, which may not be regarded as adding to charm. But, of course, it is not beyond the wit of Westminister to solve that. Indeed a good start has been made with farm incomes already a tenth of what they were five years ago. And increasingly farmers are being encouraged to put visual environmental considerations above sustainable agriculture and to diversify into tourism.

There is no shortage of people with money enough to spend on vacations to create an urban onslaught. In contrast to continental Europe, we are all relatively close to population centres. Continental style summer weekend road congestion could never be matched in Britain, simply because roads are not long enough to match the length of European holiday traffic jambs.

What cannot be engineered, of course, is Mediterranean weather. The most serious challenge, however, may be that those who live and work in the country side do not seem to share the urban vision. Surely they may have it forced upon them, but while this is happening the British countryside will hardly be a happy place to holiday.

The announcement by the Prime Minister Blair that he was spending some of his family holidays in the British countryside was not greeted with much enthusiasm in rural areas. As Blair is reputedly a master of spin, one has to assume the message is for city folk.

While few of them are likely readily to follow the Prime Minister's example, he might just learn while on holiday that any vision of tourism replacing farming as the mainstay of rural Britain will be difficult to achieve.

August 2, 2001