Bittersweet Brexit: The Future of Food, Farming, Land and Labour

The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was originally designed in 1962 to build an integrated agricultural market through subsidies, the removal of tariffs, and other programs of financial intervention. Though reformed many times over the past five decades, the CAP has been widely criticized for its high cost and uneven distribution of benefits as well as for its environmental and humanitarian impacts.

But in Britain, in spite of its shortcomings, the CAP did at least afford farmers a degree of financial and structural support. Post-Brexit, that support will vanish, to be replaced by a woefully misconceived agricultural export drive. Bittersweet Brexit dissects the problems of the post-CAP plan and proposes a simple yet impactful solution: paying workers decent wages. A leading expert on agribusiness, Charlie Clutterbuck argues that increasing wages for laborers in the agricultural sector would radically transform the nature of farming in Britain—increasing sustainability, improving yields, and ensuring greater self-sufficiency at a time when food security is gravely imperiled. This timely book calls for a progressive future for food and farming in Britain, and will prove illuminating to students of environmental studies and policy makers alike.