No-one is starving, so pay our farmers properly
The Davies family’s 4lb 10oz red cabbage, pictured sheltering from the rain in the bottom of their log store. It cost Robert’s wife just 19p.
By Robert J Davies
TODAY, news broke that UNICEF will pay for the distribution of free meals over Christmas to apparently needy children here in Britain, sixth richest nation on Earth.
UNICEF, the United Nations agency responsible for providing humanitarian aid to poverty-stricken children worldwide, will hand over £25,000 to the charity School Food Matters to supply thousands of breakfast boxes in the south London borough of Southwark.
As Jacob Rees-Mogg puts it, this is a “political stunt of the lowest order”. The message it sends out, loud and clear, is that our country is now dependent on food aid to keep its own youngsters from starving. If that isn’t a grotesquely inappropriate, mendacious piece of political chicanery, it is hard to know what is. And it comes, of course, just as we seek to gear up for Brexit proper on January 1st.
No children are starving in this country - and decent quality food has never been cheaper. If anyone is on the poverty line, it isn’t families in urban areas where state subsidies are more than sufficient to keep roofs over heads and bellies full - it is our hard-pressed, exhausted farmers. The picture accompanying this article is of a shiny big red cabbage weighing 4lb 10oz which my wife has just bought from Lidl supermarket in the Wrexham area of North Wales. Now, housewives love a bargain and my wife is no different. But this was a bargain too far - even for her. That cabbage cost a mere 19 pence. NINETEEN PENCE! If we were starving in our house and food was in short supply, that cabbage alone would keep our family of four going for several days.
And there were numerous other vegetables too in Lidl which were ultra cheap - including Brussels sprouts which frankly ought to fetch a premium in the run up to Christmas. The meat and cheese counters also groaned with plenty of cut-price produce. With quality, nutritious food priced so low it must be literally impossible for anyone to receive so piffling a sum in state benefits (assuming they have no other income) to be at the remotest risk of malnutrition.
Yet such is the impression that UNICEF will have created - undoubtedly on purpose - by their apparent generosity. As a consequence, there will be less cash available for the genuinely starving people of the world, living amid famine and civil war.
It doesn’t help matters, of course, that we continue to use the obscene term “relative poverty” in Britain to agitate for greater redistribution of wealth to poorer families. The OECD define relative poverty as a level of income set at 60% of median household income. We even talk, with a straight face, of “eradicating relative poverty”. Yet that is a mathematical impossibility, since any chosen percentage of median household income will always exist regardless of how big a TV one can afford and how many cabbages one can acquire at 19p a time.
The only measure of poverty we need to concern ourselves with is absolute poverty and we absolutely don’t have that problem in Britain. We could all afford to pay a good deal more for a cabbage than 19p and not go hungry. It is an insult to farmers to sell produce that cheap and one can only guess at the paltry income they must make from their produce if that is all supermarkets see fit to charge customers. And if our farmers go out of business, then as a country we will be more dependent than ever on imported food which for an island nation is never a good idea - particularly if supply chains are threatened by a vengeful EU after we leave properly on January 1st.
