Farmers & 'Farmers' - The Great Hide Up

What is not recognised in the above is that the whole question of farm income and farm profits is bedevilled by a false system of land tenure which, in carefully concealed ways, manipulates both the farming and the business scenes.

“The profits to be made in agriculture today are due entirely to the rise in land values” - so said a London merchant banker, addressing a meeting of the Scottish Land-owners Federation in 1979.

• Where does this place the small family-owned farm?

• More pertinently - where does it place those who hold acres surplus to their needs?

• And most importantly - where does it place the tenant-farmer, who has no land to call his own at all?

Little heed was paid at the time to the words of that London merchant banker - (save, of course, by the Scottish Landowners Federation). So no wonder if, some thirty years on, a quantity of unexpected chickens are coming home to roost!

Land Monopoly
The Scottish Landowners Federation has recently assumed the more ‘modern’ title of the Scottish Rural Property and Business Association (SRPBA) - a name of somewhat unblushing confession to a merchant banker’s view of the scene! This view is, of course, for those with surplus acres to their name - that rural property is a business in itself. Therefore, as such, it gears itself - not to the laborious production and marketing of farm produce, but rather to the marketing of those land rental values, which are most unlaboriously (indeed freely!) produced for the landowner, via land monopoly.

Those who have no land to lease, but need all their acres to farm themselves, are naturally rowing a very different boat; and, even more so, those with the misfortune to be landless - the tenant-farmers, liable to be ousted, should rising land rentals propose a better ‘business’ be made, than farming, of the land they occupy. Meanwhile the profits from such changes of use - (higher rental revenues, or a capital reaping from the sale pf these rental prospects) - go entirely to the title-holder of the land: that is, to the passive (or idle) partner in this strange ‘farming’ business.

Are these the workings of an honest society? - where non-producers are allowed to appropriate huge slices of others’ wealth creation, (for the rental value of land is owed entirely to the presence and activities of the surrounding community) - while its productive members are held to ransom - or lightly discarded to the rubbish-heap of the unemployed?

The effects of such profound economic and social injustice are scarcely confined to the world of farming. The society which founds itself upon a concealed and sophisticated form of robbery need not look far for the source of the plethora of social ills that it breeds. “If some people get something for nothing - then it follows that others get nothing for something” - a sure recipe for social discontent on a rising scale. So, is this not a matter that concerns every one of us?

What is sorely needed are some clarion-calls to shake us awake to the truly rotten foundations of our society. But even when these do appear - how many of our local farmers have yet, I wonder, taken the trouble to read Duncan Pickard’s masterly small volume of 2004? Just 68 pages long, of arresting title ‘Lie of the Land: A study in the Culture of Deception’ - and written by a working farmer in Fife who is also a PhD - this book received some notice in an article in Comment in May 2005. Had our local farmers been familiar with its contents, they would undoubtedly have been able to put their finger on the real flaw in Kevin Cahill’s book - for unfortunately this author seems to be entirely ignorant of all but the more obvious workings of land monopoly.

Really, without understanding the mechanics of miscreant land tenure - and how to establish land tenure aright via the workings of the natural Law of Rent* - it is just not possible to make sense of today’s farming scene. For instance, those holding land mainly as an investment, invest also in the stock market. Hence they will tend to favour the business world, (including the supermarkets which are so busily destroying the income of real farmers today**). For they are naturally more concerned with getting a good return for their investments, than with their tenant farmers getting a good return for their labours - e.g , the 19p/17p ratio.

If that really hurt their pockets, we would soon hear about it! - for we have it straight from the horse’s mouth: the chairman of the new SRPBA addressing a recent meeting of that body in Perth, as reported in The Courier of 27 March. “We have been excellent at influencing the Scottish Executive and those that know us… and respect us…” Well! - we may be sure that if those ruling in the SRPBA - (and largely the same interests rule in the NFU) - did not like the present farm price situation, we would soon see some changes in the scene!

As for the subsidies which are so essential to today’s real farmers: for those able to rent out land, what are they but a most welcome hand-out, raising yet further the rental value of their acres and sending them laughing all the way to the bank! - while making life no less harsh for those in the position of tenant farmer, of course. And do we still, in our stupidity, wring our hands over the widening gap between the rich and the poor?

As we can see, so many of our controversies today, which appear to be about farming, or business, or whatever else - and rippling out to embrace the worlds of drugs, violence, even suicides - in reality root back to our society’s hopeless entanglement with a false system of land tenure.

‘Culture of Deception’
If today’s real farmers are truly concerned about their situation, and if they wish to hand on the family farm to their children as a viable concern, then they must take some real responsibility in the matter. They must get to grips with the mechanics of land tenure, and raise the demand for an end to the treatment of land as an investment proposition. That is, they must raise the demand for the return of all land rentals, annually, from every landholder, to the community - from which alone they arise; these revenues to replace entirely the present false system of taxation. For this is the essential step that must be taken, if farming is to be freed from the huge “culture of deception” (Duncan Pickard) in which it is at present caught up.

With land no longer an asset to hold, but a liability on account of the annual rental demand, land will finally cease to be hoarded. “Those who farm the land will own it, and those who own the land will farm it” - to quote Duncan Pickard again. Then farming will become the wholly honest occupation it deserves to be.

As we have seen, it is not genuine farmers alone who are defrauded by our false land tenure. If, then, farmers will take up this challenge, and educate themselves in the land question, they will bless not only themselves, but in due course the whole of society.

Footnotes:

* A more thorough study of this may be made from the classic work by Henry George, “Progress and Poverty”, of which an abridged and recently modernized edition is with the A.K. Bell public library in Perth.

** Again, the supermarkets have built up their empires mainly upon the accumulation of assets in land - which is the root of their ability to undercut the small businesses that must bear the burden of the rental payments on their sites.

Shirley-Anne Hardy