Agricultural employment

Nearly two million unemployed. Another 240,000 redundancies already announced over the last couple of months. Heading inexorably towards three million – perhaps even by the middle of the year.

That changes everything. For those at risk, anxiety turns to fear. For those already affected, shock turns to anger. For policy makers, the rules of the game change dramatically. “What contribution will this policy make to protecting existing jobs or creating new jobs?” – that’s the question that now dominates. And that of course is why the prime minister organised his Jobs Summit earlier in the month.

Many commentators have already pointed out that there are not many sectors in the UK economy capable of generating many new jobs – and you can guarantee that the one place the government will not be looking at is agriculture. Having spent the last few decades fixing the system to reduce the people involved in farming and food production (there has been an 80% drop in farm workers over the last50 years, and a 40% decline in the number of farms), I don’t suppose there’s a single person in either Defra or the Treasury with any real concern for employment in this critical sector.

So I suspect the Soil Association’s admirable contribution to the Job Summit will have got very short shrift. That’s a shame, as it makes some telling points, based on extensive research carried out by the University of Essex:

UK organic farms provide, on average, nearly 2.5 times as many full time equivalent jobs as non-organic farms in the UK.Jobs per 100 hectares were 14% higher on organic farms (at 2.49 jobs compared to 2.19 jobs on non-organic farms). Small organic farms with an average size of 36 hectares supported the greatest number of jobs (5.23 jobs per farm).Organic farms arethree times more likely to be involved in direct or local marketing (39%), compared to non-organic farms (13%).Organic farming is attracting younger people into farming compared to the farm industry as a whole. On average, organic farmers in the UK areseven years younger than non-organic farmers (whose average age is 56).If all farming in the UK became organic, over 93,000 new jobs directly employed on farms would be created.

Somewhat forlornly, the report concludes: “Government policy for UK food and farming should explicitly encourage farming systems that provide greater employment in agriculture and in farm-based or local food processing and retailing.”

Fat chance. I suspect that the total pool of talent inside government, looking at this or any other sector of the economy, that is capable of advising on “job generation”, must be very shallow indeed. It’s a very long time since the spectre of very large numbers of people unemployed over very long periods of time was causing ministers sleepless nights.

Indeed, for the best part of 20 years, itsbeen ideological heresy to argue that it’s legitimate to use taxpayers’ money either to protect existing jobs or create new jobs – except in exceptional circumstances. The ruthless pursuit of increased productivity (in terms of per capita Gross Value Added) at almost any social cost ensured that all the brownie points went to those who helped shed jobs rather than create them.

Now that the government has been forced into some kind of rolling, cumulative stimulus package, there is at last a new reality dawning.

Organic Works (Soil Association ISBN 1 904665 12 8)