Opinion: Protectionism is a millstone around our neck
© Andrew Wilson / Scottish Viewpoint/Rex Shutterstock
“Groupthink” is a collective delusion that works like this: If enough seemingly intelligent people tell themselves the same thing often enough, then it becomes their truth.
Harmless enough, one might imagine, until you consider its unintended consequences, such as the rise of Islamic State in the vacuum of post-Saddam Iraq or the potential threat to public health posed by the media demonisation of the MMR jab.
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Yet, even within our beloved industry, groupthink still enjoys rude health in the quasi-religious dogma of subsidy justification.
There are many who for years have espoused the view that farming in the UK simply cannot survive without government support.
In a recent opinion piece (Opinion, 28 August) my esteemed colleague David Richardson gave us a fascinating insight into the folly of daring to think that we might possibly prosper without it.
David Alvis is managing director of Yorkshire Dairy Goats, based in the East Riding. He is a Nuffield Scholar and formerly co-managed the Technology Strategy Board’s sustainable agriculture and food innovation platform
I fundamentally disagree with this position. Protectionism has become a millstone around our neck and is failing both the industry and the taxpayers who fund it.
Far from guaranteeing a supply of affordable food, in the longer-term protectionism merely fosters inefficiency, driving up prices of inputs and outputs and concentrating wealth in the hands of a few already wealthy individuals through its inflationary effect on land rents.
It is like the stabilisers on a child’s bicycle; essential when learning to ride and guaranteed to keep any rider upright, but once you’ve got the hang of it, they soon become an embarrassing anachronism.
The Corn Laws and milk quotas were two prime examples of this. Both may well have been born out of apparent necessity (quotas were, after all, introduced to curb overproduction caused by previous protectionist intervention) but over time they simply undermined the fundamental competitiveness of the industry they were intended to protect. Taking the stabilisers off was always going to result in a few wobbles and the odd crash – but however painful, it had to happen eventually.
More recently, New Zealand has experienced what was in its case an unavoidable transition from supported to free-market agriculture and, as a consequence, its farming industry is now in better shape than ever. It is able to weather the current downturn in commodity prices and is well placed to compete with all-comers in terms of production efficiency and industry resilience.
Ironically, what was clearly apparent in the same edition of Farmers Weekly as Mr Richardson’s polemic against the free market, was that the best of Britain’s farmers are as technically competent as any in New Zealand or elsewhere and, despite the gradual scaling back of protectionism, as an industry we are producing more food, more cheaply than ever before. This is something we should be justifiably proud of.
The elephant in the room, however, and one that has been there since the dawn of civilisation, is that while advances in agricultural productivity have resulted in ever-cheaper, more abundant food, they also have the unerring knack of freeing people for other endeavours. It is the fear of this, rather than any concern over imploding national production, that lies at the heart of the contemporary protectionist agenda.
Invoking the spectre of future food shortages or global conflict to justify a regressive tax on society merely to preserve the status quo is as morally questionable as it is economically unjustified.
True efficiency and resilience are forged in the white heat of the market and are not without casualties.
To paraphrase Anthony Rosen, an agricultural visionary far ahead of his time: “What is in the best long-term interest of UK agriculture may not always be what is best for all of the UK’s farmers.”