Free Is It Really Too Much to Ask? by Jeremy Clarkson Page B

various laws. One solution is to package the hay in bales so large they won’t fit in the back of a Volvo but there’s a danger, if you do this, that the enormous
barrel could roll down a hill and kill one of the early members of the Electric Light Orchestra.
    And so here we are. It’s 2010. And such is the pressure on space that perfectly decent women called Arabella are stealing grass from farmers to feed their pets. What’s it going to be like when it’s not food for horses that becomes scarce but food for people?
    As you may have heard, the harvests in Russia and Ukraine failed this year and now, with the biggest grain shortage for twenty-six years, the price of a ton of wheat has doubled to about £200. A bit of wonky weather in a couple of countries and suddenly a loaf of bread costs about the same as a pound of myrrh.
    Without wishing to sound like an A-level politics student, it’s easy to see what’s gone wrong. There is simply not enough space on earth to grow food for the planet’s ever-increasing population. And the consequences of this will be dire. Because if a woman with clipped vowels and a hairdo is prepared to become a thief to feed her horse, how low will she stoop when she needs to feed her child? For sure, there will be hair-pulling at the bakery. Maybe even some biting.
    It’s hard to know what to do. Even if we manage to inject some family-planning sense into the Roman Catholic Church, the population will continue to grow and this means that, one day, people are going to start to get hungry. And then they are going to start to starve. And then many will die. It’s a fact. Genetically modified crops may delay the moment but it’s coming. It’s a mathematical certainty.
    Unless, of course, we can find more land on which to grow stuff. You may think this is unlikely. We’ve been to the moon and it seems entirely unsuitable. Mars appears to be a dead loss as well, which means we have to look closer to home. And guess what. I’ve found some. Lots of it.
    Mile upon mile of juicy soil, ready and able to produce millions of tons of delicious food for all the world. It’s called the English countryside.
    Last year I bought a farm in Oxfordshire and was delighted to discover that the government would pay me to grow nothing at all on about 400 acres. I can also get money to keep stubble in the ground for a bit longer than is sensible and for planting hedgerows. That’s right. You work all day. Pay your tax. And the government then gives it to me so I can plant a nice hedge.
    This is because of the skylark. Or the lapwing. Or some other whistling, chirruping airborne rat that doesn’t matter. I like a bird. I’m even a member of the RSPB. But the notion that more than half my farm is a government-subsidized sanctuary for linnets while the world goes hungry is just stupid.
    Especially as there’s plenty of evidence to suggest it doesn’t work. Examination of the latest environmental stewardship programme suggests that the only birds to benefit are the starling and lapwing. Which means the government is proposing to spend £2.9 billion on a programme, at a time of hardship and hunger, even though it knows one of the few beneficiaries is the starling – a bird that can knock down buildings with its urine and eat a whole tree in one go.
    Now it may well be that this bird business is just a cover story to mask an undeniable truth – that, left to its own devices, farming would cease to be a viable industry. I must say I’m staggered by the smallness of the returns you get. You’d be better off spending your money on a powerboat.
    However, I find it morally reprehensible that the previous government stated that it wanted 70 per cent of Britain’s utilizable agricultural land to be in an environmental stewardship scheme by 2011. Did it not have calculators? Could
it not see there’s going to be a global food shortage soon and that setting aside nearly three-quarters of Britain for the benefit of a