It’s the new buzzword in agriculture, confirmed by proceedings at the 2011 annual conference of the UK’s National Farmers Union, where delegates were often found to be talking about ‘how to get more from less’.

The term ’sustainable intensification’ began to gain real currency following a report by the UK’s Royal Society, Reaping the benefits: Science and the sustainable intensification of global agriculture. The thrust of the argument is that the old ways of increasing global food production – bring more land under the plough and adopt the high input, high output technologies of the green revolution – will not work in the 21st century.

It is said that bringing more land into use will have more negative impacts than positive. It will accelerating climate change, loss of biodiversity, social dislocation of people living on the land. Likewise, the high input high output model of the green revolution is said to result in unsustainable pressure on water and soils and a model of farming that is heavily reliant on the extravagent and ultimately unsustainble use of fossil fuels. What’s more, this approach has had significant negative externalities in terms of pollution and loss of wildlife habitats.

As the climate continues to change, the problems associated with high input / high output will only become more acute.

So, what’s to be done? The Royal Society is ‘a fellowship of the world’s most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence’. Not surprisingly, their chief recommendation is for more research into the agricultural sciences, as a global effort, oriented around the idea of ’sustainable intensification’ – getting more food out of a fixed amount of land, but using less water, agrochemicals and fossil fuels. Some have interpreted the emphasis on science research as code for more genetic engineering in agriculture, and this has provoked a hostile response from opponents of GE/GMO technologies.

Of course, those involved in the ‘alternative agriculture’ movement would say they’ve been working towards sustainable intensification for decades. Perhaps the most well known iteration of the ideas of getting more for less is the One Straw Revolution by the Japanese farmer and agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka.

A low input model based around smallholder agriculture, working with natural processes and an emphasis on human development rather than technological revolution was proposed by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development in 2008. The initiative was directed by Robert Watson, chief scientific advisor to the UK Government’s agriculture department.

There are clearly divergent visions for what sustainable intensificaiton really means.

Sustainable intensification also featured heavily in the UK Government Office for Science’s gargantuan study The Future of Food and Farming, published last month. So far, I’ve only read the 200 page final project report but that’s just the tip of an iceberg of analysis, case studies, even a list of The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture (PDF).

It is clear that many fine minds are thinking about how humanity will feed itself in the 21st century, and there’s much that needs to be done, here in Europe as well as globally. The European Commission’s consultation on the future of the common agricultural policy alludes to some of the key issues at stake.

It is therefore rather disheartening that the vast majority of polticians in the European Parliament who are responsible for ‘reforming’ Europe’s common agricultural policy remain entirely committed to a defence of the status quo.

David Cameron, leader of a British Conservative Party that is well ahead in the opinion polls just weeks ahead of a General Election, has already ruffled feathers across La Manche, with reported jibes about the diminutive stature of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who is reeling from personal life scandals and a drubbing in regional elections. The remarks provoked a reaction from Paris, which accused the British Opposion leader of lacking respect for the French Head of State.

Such a trifling spat may be just the start of a tricky Anglo-French relationship over the future of EU budget, in particular the €60 billion common agricultural policy and Britain’s special budget rebate. The rebate or “chèque Britannique”, as it is sometimes known, rankles with France, which feels Britain is too often a semi-detatched member of the European club: free riding on the benefits of the common market while resisting ‘ever deeper union’ and refusing to pay its way. The rebate was won in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher who swung her handback and demanded ‘my money back’. It has since entered into Conservative Party political iconography of a by-gone ‘golden age’ when Mrs T. defeated Argentina in a war over the Falklands, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Ronald Reagan against the Soviet ‘Evil Empire’, took on striking coal miners and unleashed a wave of privatisation and deregulation that transformed the British economy. It is hard to imagine a Conservative government ever agreeing to give up such a totemic symbol as the EU budget rebate, the effect of which is to ensure Britain gets almost the same from the EU budget as it puts in.

In policy terms, the rebate is only really necessary because the EU budget is dominated by agricultural spending (nearly half of the budget goes on the CAP) and Britain is a relatively wealthy country with a relatively small farm sector. This gives rise to the structural budget imbalance that Mrs Thatcher sought to address with the rebate. If the CAP were scaled back then Britain would not need a rebate. Or so the argument goes. This was the case made by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair during the EU budget negotiations of 2005 and 2006. In the end he was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by President Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, giving up a portion of the rebate in exchange for a ‘budget review’ that has yet to bear any fruit.

There is irony in the fact that that Nicolas Sarkozy, the man who most wants to see the end to the British rebate, has only this week declared himself to be a powerful opponent of downsizing the CAP, the most natural way of achieving that goal. Earlier today, in his first public comments after his UMP party’s defeat in regional elections, President Sarkozy declared:

“I am ready to confront a crisis on a European level, rather than to accept the dismantlement of the Common Agricultural Policy… I will not let our agriculture die.”

Could this put Nicolas Sarkozy, defending the CAP, on collision course with David Cameron, defending the British rebate? Perhaps, but there is an important twist and a possible solution. British farmers and landowners, who get around €4 billion a year from the CAP, largely vote Conservative. At heart they’re anti-EU but when they think with their heads they don’t want to see an end to the EU subsidies that they would be very unlikely to win from the British Treasury. Conservative politicians find it easy to talk tough on the CAP but there would be political hell to pay if they actually succeeded in abolishing subsidies for British agriculture.

Meanwhile, as President Sarkozy talks tough on preserving the CAP, the enlargement of the EU to 27 member states means France is on course to become a net payer into the CAP, rather than a net beneficiary. This will not have gone unnoticed in the French Ministry of Finance which has traditionally formed a strong alliance with the Agriculture Ministry and French farming, regarding the CAP as bringing ‘good German money to rural France’. When he sees the turning of the fiscal tide, and French taxpayers start paying to support Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian farmers, President Sarkozy may revise his view. There is a single solution to both dilemmas: cofinancing of the CAP. Rather than a CAP funded from a common European pot, with all that means for politically difficult budget imbalances, each country will meet a much larger share of its own farm subsidy bill. Of course this will go down very badly with the new member states, who will have to fund their own farm subsidies, but in the face of an Anglo-French alliance, with large net payers Germany and the Netherlands also likely to lend their support, they may have no choice. One man who may find himself in a rather tricky position is Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos, who will find it difficult to sell such a policy to his Romanian countrymen.

A Farm For the Future is a documentary that aired on the BBC last year. It explains just how oil-dependent our agriculture is: every calorie of food produced in the western world requires ten calories of fossil fuel energy. The film looks at the challenge of dwindling oil supplies and tries to find out what kind of farming – and food – might we be expected to see in a post-peak oil world. The answer? Permaculture and more nuts.

The film is available on Youtube in five parts.

Britain’s National Farmers’ Union is noted for its strategic, long-term view of agricultural issues. Its officials have a sophsiticated, well informed view of developments and it was therefore interesting to read an interview in the latest edition of Farmers Weekly with the NFU’s head of economics and international affairs, Tom Hind. He was at one time acting head of the NFU’s office in Brussels.

Not surprisingly, he takes the NFU line that farmers need to continue to receive the single farm payment (SFP) to give them a degree of income stability, especially faced with volatile markets. A basic tenet of agricultural economics is that markets for farm commodities are relatively unstable: to put it at its simplest, even with modern agronomy, the weather remains a factor which can disrupt such markets. If one accepts the view that farmers as a category require market stabilisation measures (which is not quite the same thing as income stabilisation), there is still room for a debate about whether the SFP is a particularly efficient or fair policy instrument, but it could be argued that we have to work with what we have.

In any event, he is confident that the long-term legitimacy of direct payments will be strengthened during the upcoming debate about the future of the CAP. He is emphatic that decision-makers in the UK ‘must move away from ideologically entrenched positions, especially on phasing-out direct payments.’ Not surprisingly, he is heartened by the declaration made by 22 EU governments in Paris in favour of a strong CAP. It’s a document short on specifics, but it really represents a political commitment, rather than a set of policy recommendations.

It is interesting that he does fear some further renationalisation of the CAP which many member states pushed during the health check. He notes that in recent weeks several governments have resorted to state aids to give support to their farmers. He is correct to point out that such activities can lead to competitive distortions between member states and hence undermine the single market. What particularly concerns him is the possibility of national co-financing of direct aids. With justification, he fears that UK farmers would lost out as the Treasury would not be keen to top up direct support.

He does oppose direct payment schemes that used farm size or turnover for determining levels of support. He says that such criteria are ‘woolly’ and they are certainly difficult to interpret and apply in practice given the legal and other issues surrounding what constitutes ‘a farm’. However, the real objection is that Britain is one of the countries that would lose out. If one is going to have farm subsidies, and one wants European agriculture to be competitive, should they be denied to the farmers best placed to compete on international markets?

Where I have particular sympathy with him is when he says that what is wanted is a policy focused on the market. This does not mean just decoupling, but also correcting market failures such as excessive retail power. Whether the EU can do much about this is another question. In large part it falls within the competition policy remit of member state governments, but they are often reluctant to rein in retailers who keep down inflation by delivering cheap food to voters, albeit by usually contractual and other tactics that are arguably unfair and not in the long-run interests of an efficient and effective food chain.

Clearly someone like Tom Hind is looking at these issues with the needs of his members in mind: that is what he is paid to do. Most of us wouldn’t start from where we are and a sudden withdrawal of subsidies could have substantial negative impacts on the agricultural economy.

Nevertheless, modern farmers are much more market oriented and are aware that they have to deliver products that the consumers want: hence the proliferation of farm shops and small-scale processing businesses serving niche markets with value added products. Hopefully, they can eventually be weaned off subsidies, particularly if competition policy is used to remove unfair practices.