Insurance back on the agenda

European farm commissioner Dacian Ciolos is considering plans for a publicly-funded insurance scheme for farmers' incomes. His view is that it is needed to give a minimum income to farmers after the disapperance of most market support mechanisms.

An alternative view would be that either these farmers would be better off exiting the industry or they should be funded by income support schemes for the least well off, although admittedly these vary substantially as they are a member state matter.

Economists tend to favour insurance schemes and consider that not enough has been done to promote them in the debate in the UK about cost and responsibility sharing in animal health. The difficulty in practice is that the pool is not big enough or lucrative enough to interest insurance companies.

You are then back to state subsidies, albeit delivered by a possibly more efficient policy instrument. EU farmers' group Copa-Cogeca states that average incomes in agriculture were about 50 per cent less than those in other sectors, with two-thirds of farmers' income coming from direct payments from the CAP.

An original objective of the CAP was to narrow the gap between urban and rural incomes and this has never been achieved as far as farmers are concerned. This suggests that for some people farming is simply not a viable activity, at least as a full-time occupation. If one considers that one needs people to remain in remoter areas, a subsidy should be paid specifically for that.

What one really wants is a more diverse rural economy and in the UK, and I suspect elesewhere, the absence of rural broadbrand or a service that is slow (as on the Isles of Scilly) is a real constraint.

A friend runs an agriculturally related consultancy business in a rural area. Recently her provider said that it could no longer offer a broadband service. There are mechanisms to complain, but it will all take too long. She is going to have to move. Action on infrastructure of this kind would help rural areas more than additional payments to farmers.

Scottish Government cracks down on sofa farmers

The Scottish Government is planning to crack down on so-called 'sofa' or 'slipper' farmers who use barren hillsides to claim Single Farm Payments. This proposal follows the short-term recommendations of the Pack Inquiry into Future Support for Agriculture in Scotland.

The proposals do not require EU approval and could be put in place by January. Minimum stocking rates would be established and farms that fell below them would find an inspector calling. They would then have 60 days to put things right. The Scottish NFU endorsed the plan as the best way forward.

It is also hoped that Scotland will secure a devolved animal health budget by next April which should help a number of innovations in policy that the Scottish Government has been pursuing in this area. Their policy experiments could provide lessons for the rest of the UK, although the fact that the UK is a single epidemiological unit poses some challenges.