A couple of miles outside Royston in Cambridgeshire and halfway up the big hill on the A505, there’s an old dilapidated pub. It’s a long time since the The Horse and Groom served any customers but recently planning permission was granted to turn in it into a swanky new two-storey restaurant. No doubt the new menu will boast of having top quality locally sourced produce and they don’t have to look very far for it when they do. Directly opposite is the entrance to Thrift Farm, 3500 acres of sprawling farmland that falls into four counties Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Essex. The farm is owned by Robert Law.
Robert is a rare thing these days, a first generation farmer. Having grown up the son of a lawyer in Newmarket, he spent his school summers working for a local farmer, “I got the farming bug.” He tells me as we bump along in big 4×4 toward the other side of his vast farm, where the sugar beet grows.
Robert is a giant of a man standing well over 6 foot and looks as strong as an ox, but underneath he’s clearly got a soft streak. He is pointing to a newly planted copse that he put down himself a couple of years ago. “In the 1950’s they’d have got a good subsidy for pulling out woodland to plant new crops but I’ve been putting new trees in.” Robert wants something to remain on this land long after he’s gone and he hopes these trees will be his legacy to the land. “And it’s great for the wildlife too.” He grins.
We pull up and hop out into a vast 30 acre field that stretches out down and back up the hill in the distance. The field is planted with thousands of neat rows of knee high sugar beet that looks to me a lot like rhubarb. Around the top of the field is an acre-wide strip of linseed, oats, millet and sawgum. These have been sewn purely for birds to eat. Robert gets money from the EU to do it but he says he’d do it anyway. “Maybe I’m different because I’m not from farming stock, but the wildlife is an important part of life round here.”
Robert is explaining to me how sugar beet in particular, is a good crop for the birds because after it is harvested in the autumn, he leaves the stubble in the ground so the birds can eke a meal out of it throughout the difficult winter. Further north in Norfolk the beet fields are the main habitat of the pink footed goose. Robert has even recently been advocating the importance of sugar beet in the UK to the RSPB. With over 1milion members, the RSPB is one of the biggest activist groups in the UK and Robert feels that it is important they get behind the sugar farmers.
Sugar beet was originally introduced to the UK after WWII. During the war, the UK had run out of vital sugar supplies as German U-boats sunk trading ships carrying sugar cane and so the post war government invested heavily in convincing British farmers to grow sugar beet for processing at several newly built sugar mills. The aim was to ensure that we never found ourselves in a position of dependency again. By 1970, we had eighteen sugar processing mills in UK. Now there are only four.
The EU made an important decision to reform its policy on sugar subsidies in 2005. The two largest sugar producing countries in Europe, France and Germany were pulled up by the WTO for producing more sugar than they needed and then dumping the surplus onto the world market, thereby devastating sugar markets that many Third World countries depended on for selling their own sugar surpluses.
The choice the EU faced was to either scale back subsidies just enough to protect the farmers but prevent the dumping of surpluses or go the whole hog to remove subsidies altogether and create a level playing field between producers in Europe and the rest of the world. Many pro-fair trade campaigns such as Oxfam’s Make Trade Fair advocated this bolder move.
“The problem was that they hadn’t thought it through.” Robert explains to me. “If we opened up the market like that then Brazil would completely dominate. No one in Europe could compete with them on price but neither would most of the other Less Developed Countries that currently produce sugar.” The result could have been a complete disaster for the Brazilian rainforest. If Brazil was given unfettered access to the world’s sugar market place then, who knows how much rainforest could be cleared of trees to create sugar cane fields?
The EU went for the compromise solution. European subsidies have been reduced to prevent the dumpling of cheap sugar onto the world market but maintained enough to ensure to preserve the British sugar industry. For now the pink footed goose and Robert are safe. “People are very fickle.” Says Robert. “It may all be Fairtrade now but it wasn’t long ago that it was all food miles.” He’s right. The ethical consumer must of course be aware of the carbon footprint of what they buy too and Robert’s sugar beet has a footprint of only 120 miles. Compare that to the average tonne of sugar cane sold in the UK with a carbon footprint 15,000 miles long and you have to ask yourself again; which is more ethical? These two choices are mutually exclusive and we as consumers must chose between them.
In fact, Tate & Lyle cane sugar imported from Belize has a very low carbon footprint because so much of the rest of the cane plant not used to make sugar is recycled as fuel and there may very well be no conflict between choosing to support developing world farmers and seeking to minimise your carbon footprint. But then British Sugar make a convincing case for being just as ethical. For example, most of the CO2 and heat that comes from their Wissington processing plant is recycled back into a huge eco-friendly nursery that produces over 80 million tomatoes annually and supports a population of 5000 bumblebees. Ask the bumblebees which sugar they would rather you bought and I’m sure they’ll have a thing or two to say about it.
There is no clear measurement of whether sugar beet or sugar cane has the greatest environmental impact because the clever ways in which all these by-products are recycled is so complex. Yet standing in Robert’s field, I can see the benefits of buying British sugar right there front of me. I can see the birds in the field harvesting the oats and linseed that he has planted for them and I can see the hedgerows and paths that Robert maintains around his farm. I know at least that this 3,500 acres of Great British Countryside is safe under his stewardship and I can feel confident that that will continue as long as Robert is here. I also know that the sugar here could be produced locally and by the time the new owners of the Horse and Groom are ready for opening night, there could be a chocolate pudding on the menu full of Robert’s sugar.
