Pantomime time: Oh yes it is!

From today's Times*:

Residents say that vast sheds for South American alpacas and free-range chickens now fill fields once occupied by sheep and cows. A new track wider than the lane it runs alongside has been built without planning permission and excavators are digging “stock ponds” and land drains in a boggy meadow once filled with wild flowers.... They have put a mobile home on the site for two agricultural workers and converted a neighbouring barn into offices....

The Cotswolds stone farmhouse of Deborah Jones, an illustrator, was damaged when the mobile home was taken along the narrow lane on the back of a lorry. She said: “We are not just worried about what their ultimate intentions are for this land, it is not suitable for the sort of intense agricultural use they claim to want to put it.”

Dude, WTF?

I'd strongly suspect that these people have bought the land precisely because it was suitable for more 'intense agricultural use' than the rather more picturesque sheep and cows. If they can make more money from alpacas and free-range chickens that sheep and cows, then why should they be prevented from doing so?

NIMBYs can of course never admit that what they do is out of naked self-interest, and one of their favourite excuses is that they want to protect 'Britain's food security'. They cheerfully ignore that barely one-tenth of the UK is developed and that eight or ninety per cent is agricultural land; or that with all the improvements in agricultural methods we have made, the UK could easily be self-sufficient in food (assuming a slightly more monotonous diet); or that if we used more land for industrial purposes, the value of the additional industrial output would enable us to buy ten times as much food from abroad as we would lose in domestic food production capacity etc etc.

But these new owners are doing their bit for 'food security' and what thanks do they get?

Another of the NIMBYs' mantras is that 'Britain is a crowded island'. I wish they could lift their gaze to across the North Sea to to The Netherlands, which is rather more densely populated; is a net food exporter and where people have larger and cheaper houses. Sure, their countryside is covered in poly-tunnels and greenhouses, so what? What's better - greenhouses and poly-tunnels and 'food security' or a stifled economy and 'food miles'?

Finally, I do not dispute for a second that amenity value is important. Of course we should have parks and playgrounds in urban areas rather than selling them off for housing or factories, but reserving ten per cent of urban land for parks and playgrounds is rather a different matter to small groups of rural Home-Owner-Ists, who might only own a few acres between them, dictating the uses to which the thousands of acres which surround them may be put.

So why not let him who pays the piper call the tune? If they don't want the land to be used for alpacas and free-range chickens, then they should club together and buy up the land and accept the lower rental income from a farmer who is restricted to sheep and cows only.

(Of course, Land Value Tax would sort this out much more efficiently, but that is another topic.)

* See also Tim W.
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UPDATE: Joseph Takagi in the comments links to this fine article of four years ago:

Bill Wiggin, MP for Leominster, Herefordshire, and the party's agriculture spokesman, said it was "unfair" that his constituents had no say over where polytunnels for growing strawberries and other fruit and vegetables were put up... He refuses to eat strawberries grown in polytunnels because he says that every strawberry bought adds to the amount produced under seas of plastic that have become a problem for his constituents, some of whom have lost 25 to 30 per cent from the value of their homes.

Some 'agriculture spokesman'. eh?