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Exposing the lie of the land |
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Lie of the Land
Duncan Picard
Land Research Trust and Shepheard-Walwyn, 2004, £6.95
 Fife farmer Duncan Pickard's new book exposes the 21st Century scandals of the countryside, and sets out his radical answer - stop giving farmers EU subsidies, ditch the inland revenue and its red tape - and start taxing the land. The book's official launch was held on Tuesday 11th May at Reformers Bookshop, Edinburgh. In this hard-hitting expose, Dr Pickard describes the culture of deception that underpins the economics of agriculture. Governments and lobbyists manipulate statistics to disguise the real incomes of farmers, in order to justify the subsidies that enrich a few big landowners. In doing so they abuse the interests of consumers and taxpayers.
Dr Pickard, whose family farms 1,100 acres in Scotland, takes no pleasure in revealing the scandal in which farmers are portrayed as living on the breadline when many of them are banking handsome profits from the Common Agricultural Policy. His family intends to reduce dependency on subsidies, so that more time can be spent with the cattle and sheep rather than with the paperwork that disrupts the business of producing food.
Subsidies, he argues, are the result of a tax regime that has crippled rural economies and village communities. Taxes encourage the sacking of employees in favour of capital-intensive methods. And those subsidies become the war chest for the big landowners, who are able to finance the purchase of even more land. That is how family farms are extinguished. The Blair government's plans for UK countryside reform, announced in the House of Commons in February 2004, will add new layers of bureaucracy to preserve a doctrine of economics that will continue to drive people off the land.
Dr Pickard proposes the remedy. Government should tax the value of the 600 acres he owns - and abolish the taxes on people's wages and on the savings which they invest on the land. That, he explains, is the path to sustainable farming and conservation of the environment. It would deliver a fair deal for farmers and consumers, and remove the red tape that engulfs the people who are supposed to produce our food.
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