UK FARMERS TO BLAME FOR MASSIVE FLOODS - THE EU PAYS THEM TO CUT TREES - PICTURES OF FLOOD

Drowned by EU millions: Thought 'extreme weather' was to blame for the floods? Wrong. The real culprit is the European subsidies that pay UK farmers to destroy the very trees that soak up the storm.

Water sinks into the soil under trees at 67 times the rate of soil under grass

Farmers are not eligible for EU payment if the land is covered by trees

As a result, flood-preventing trees are cut down, removing vital protection

Vast amounts, running into billions, are spent every year on policies that make devastating floods inevitable. This is the story that has not been told, a story of destructive perversity.

Flood defence, or so we are told almost everywhere, is about how much concrete you can pour. It’s about not building houses in stupid places on the flood plain and about using clever new engineering techniques to defend those already there. But to listen to the dismal debates of the past fortnight, you could be forgiven for believing that rivers rise in the plains; that there is no such thing as upstream; that mountains, hills, catchments and watersheds are irrelevant to the question of whether or not homes and infrastructure get drowned.

How trees help.  The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows,  deep into the ground. The soil there becomes a sponge, a reservoir that sucks up water and then releases it slowly. In the pastures, by contrast, the small, sharp hooves of the sheep puddle the ground, making it almost impermeable, a hard pan off which the rain gushes. 

The UK governments knows, and advises other countries to plant trees.

For decades the Government has been funding scientists working in  the tropics and using their findings to advise other countries to protect the forests or to replant trees in the hills to prevent communities downstream being swept away. But we forgot to bring the lesson home.

The nub of the problem.  

There is an unbreakable rule laid down by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment  – by far the biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it calls ‘unwanted vegetation’. Land covered by trees is not  eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills. Just as the tree-planting grants have stopped, the land-clearing grants have risen.

In his speech to the Oxford Farming Conference, made during the height of the floods, the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, boasted that hill farmers ‘on the least productive land’ will now receive ‘the same direct payment rate on their upland farmland as their lowland counterparts’.  In other words, even in places where farming makes no sense because the land is so poor, farmers will now be paid more to keep animals there. But to receive this money, they must first remove the trees and scrub that absorb the water falling on the hills.

Read further here - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2541773/Drowned-EU-millions-Thought-extreme-weather-blame-floods-Wrong-The-real-culprit-European-subsidies-pay-UK-farmers-destroy-trees-soak-storm.html



Pictures of flooded homes in Britain - An artistic photographic view
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2542236/An-underwater-world-Somerset-Remarkable-images-homes-businesses-left-ruined-recent-floods-left-four-feet-water.html


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