Royal Society of Edinburgh critical of Pack Report on agriculture support

The Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) has serious concerns about parts of the interim Pack Report on future support for Agriculture. Its criticisms centre on the proposed focus for support; the lack of support for new entrants to farming; and inadequate and insecure EU funding for Scottish agriculture.

The RSE has drawn on its extensive expertise and evidence, accumulated during its recent major inquiry into Scotland’s Hill and Island Areas to comment on the report.

Purpose of support for Agriculture

While the RSE welcomes the strategic objectives of the interim report, it considers that the report rests its case for continued direct support to agriculture too heavily, indeed almost exclusively, on maintaining agricultural production.

The RSE feels that, for the case to be persuasive to a wider public – in particular to the taxpayer – and to be acceptable in Europe, it needs to be seen to deliver a wide range of public goods, of which the maintenance of agricultural potential for food security is only one. Others include maintenance or enhancement of biodiversity and landscape quality, flood prevention and measures to alleviate climate change.

The proposals do not, at present, appear to the RSE to be fully aligned with the wider Government objectives in its land use strategy for Scotland

Support for new entrants into farming

The RSE accepts the view of the Pack Inquiry that a move from a historical to an area based system of direct support should wait for greater clarity on the type of system to be adopted in Europe after the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in 2013.

However, the Society is deeply concerned that significant amounts of money are being distributed to farmers who have effectively given up farming, while new entrants to the industry get nothing.

The RSE is calling for action to correct this anomaly; and to be taken before 2013.

At the heart of this concern is the issue of the misplaced Single Farm Payment (SFP), currently under Review. This awards a grant, based on a specific farm but paid not to the farm but to the farmer.

This means that a farmer, either moving to another farm or, indeed, going out of farming altogether – as was the case with Argyll’s former MSp, George Lyon who had three farms on Bute, with three Single Farm Payments – is legally entitled to keep the payments, which run annually for a fixed period.

The legal retention of the SFPs leaves the farm for whose needs the grant was given, without that support.

New entrants to farming take over farms for which SFPs have been awarded but are routinely retained personally by the previous farmers. They then have to make a start in their new farm businesses without these payments, for whatever number of years remain in the award.

Scottish share of EU funding

The RSE also consider that it would be a mistake to rely to any greater extent on funding from Pillar 2 of the CAP – which includes the rural development programme – so long as the UK and Scottish allocations of EU money under Pillar 2 are the lowest per hectare in Europe.

For this reason the RSE does not support any greater transfer of funding from Pillar 1 to Pillar 2, other than what is already agreed.

Pillar 1, the Single Farm Payment is directly funded by the EU but Pillar 2 is funded jointly with member states.  The RSE feels that, at present, there is no justification for the wide differences between states in the EU component of this funding.

Its position is that until this is related in some way to objective criteria, it will remain grossly unfair and will not provide a fair competitive basis for agriculture between countries – which from the start has been a principal objective of the CAP.

The full response the RSE has submitted to the Pack Report Inquiry can be found on the Society’s website.