Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian: European market support for UK agriculture, including the arable sector, is set to diminish over the next three years. The environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, will today call for fundamental reform of the European system of subsidies for farmers.
Landowners who take steps to protect the environment and enhance the countryside should get more rewards, Spelman will say, suggesting that there should be less reliance on giving Britain's farmers direct payments.
Addressing the three-day Oxford Farming Conference, which began yesterday, Spelman will tell farmers that rising global demand for food and increases in food prices make it possible to reduce subsidies and "plan for their abolition".
The subsidy system keeps food prices high, causing high tariffs that block cheap imports. Use of subsidies to export surplus food from the EU also damages production in developing countries. The distortion of trade caused by the common agricultural policy, or Cap, is "morally wrong", Spelman says. The Cap, which governs subsidies across the EU, is to be reviewed, with a new scheme put in place by 2014.
Spelman says that she wants the European commission's plans for reform to be more ambitious.
She says: "We need to make the new Cap fundamentally different. It must be about the new challenges of achieving global food security and tackling and adapting to a changing climate. Now is the time to make very significant progress towards reducing our reliance on direct payments. Rising global demand for food and rising food prices make it possible to reduce subsidies and plan for their abolition.
"Furthermore, we should encourage innovation in the industry, and provide help with environmental measures and combating climate change. Our taxpayers have every right to expect other public goods for the subsidies they pay."
She will also tell the farming conference she wants to see an end to export bans, such as the ban on grain exports from Russia imposed last summer by Putin's government following domestic drought, which contributed to higher world grain prices.
A new government approach to farming, giving more power to local organisations, and encouraging greater collaboration in the development of policy, will also be revealed by the secretary of state.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/05/farmers-agricultural-subsidies-spelman
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