John Lichfield: If food matters to us, then so must agriculture

We assume that food grows in supermarkets and that God, not farmers, made the Auvergne

When I arrived in my little house in Normandy the other night, there was a mysterious rumbling from the hills all around. Normally, in the summer, all that you hear after dark is the electrical throb of the cicadas and the occasional put-put of a drunken motorcyclist making his way home.

Looking out from the garden, I could see powerful headlights moving over the hillsides. A dimmer light clicked on in my brain. This was harvest time, 2006-style. The rumbling and lights, which continued until 2am, were gigantic combine harvesters bringing in the crops of wheat and barley before storms wandering in off the Atlantic reduced their value. Pierre, a one-eyed local farmer, told me a downpour just before harvest can take 15 per cent off the value of a ripening wheat crop: something even Peter Mandelson, as EU trade commissioner, would not dare to contemplate.

When we bought our house eight years ago, there were fields of cereals in the plains and river valleys but few in the Norman hills. Year by year we have seen the wheat, barley, rape and maize march up the hillsides, ousting many of the dairy and beef cattle which used to graze here on one of the finest natural grasslands in the world.

Despite all the talk of reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and world farm trade, despite set-asides and the deflation of export subsidies, the gigantic, chemical-soaked fields of cereals are still advancing across the French countryside (and not just the French countryside). Officially, French governments in the last 40 years - with one exception - have defended the CAP on the grounds that it protects rural life and traditional production of high-quality food.

Pure hypocrisy. Successive French farm ministers, notably a man called Jacques Chirac in the early 1970s, have defended tooth and nail a high-production, cereals-obsessed EU farm policy which has turned large areas of France into a hedgeless, chemical-polluted green desert. With the brief exception of the Lionel Jospin government in 1997-2002, they have pursued the interests of the larger French farmers, and especially the cereals barons, who dominate the main French farming unions.

Officially, all that has changed. Since the beginning of this year, EU subsidies have been "de-coupled" from production. They are supposed to be concentrated on smaller farms, rewarding protection of the environment and spreading EU largesse like soft butter over different kinds of agriculture. (Previously, cereals received 40 per cent of the whole budget; fruit and vegetable farms got nothing.)

Brussels, at the insistence of Paris and London among others, left it to national governments to work out the details. Surprise, surprise, the French agriculture ministry has worked out an arcane and officially unpublished system which means that the larger cereals growers still hold on to a large part of their loot, smaller farmers get relatively little and fruit and veg producers still get nothing.

Who can blame the remaining Norman farmers for planting more and more cereals, as beef and dairy holdings are squeezed out of business? In my own village, there were eight small dairy holdings in the early 1960s, two when we arrived in 1998 and none today. The land is farmed, partly for beef, mostly for wheat, barley and maize, by two large farms based in nearby villages.

Hypocrisy, however, is not just a traditional French farm product. It was the United States, that bastion of liberty and equality, which refused to budge on its farm subsidies and trade barriers last month and wrecked the attempts to open the world food market to developing countries.

Personally, I do not buy the Oxfam Doctrine that a fully liberal market in world food would help struggling farmers in the poorest countries. The kind of open access to which the World Trade Organisation seems committed would help the big farm exporting nations like Australia and Brazil. It would provide little help for farmers in Kenya or Bangladesh.

This hot, dry summer also raises another question. The French were horrified recently to learn that 80 per cent of all the water used in France in the summer months goes to irrigate crops, mostly maize. As summers get hotter and water scarcer, that will have to change.

For all the constant haggling in Brussels and elsewhere, we seem unable to stop and think intelligently about the future of agriculture. We care about food and we care about the countryside but not about farming. Urbanites or suburbanites that we are, we assume that food grows in supermarkets and that God, not farmers, made the Auvergne and the Cotswolds.

My own hatred of the advancing cereal fields is another form of hypocrisy, I suppose. I prefer to look out and see cows, not triffid-like groves of maize, 10 feet high. For Pierre, and the other remaining local farmers, the choice is a question, not of taste, but of survival.

The removal of trade protections from agriculture is inevitable and, on the whole, correct. However, we would be wrong to assume that a completely liberal market in farm produce will guarantee quality food or stop the advance of chemical-dependent cereals ranching. The approach nominally taken by Brussels - shifting subsidies to smaller, traditional farms - is sensible. In France, at any rate, it is not being applied honestly or fairly.

j.lichfield@independent.co.uk