BRITAIN HAS NO AGRICULTURAL POLICY The usual glib statement made by government ministers and MPs to complaints about the impending farm inheritance tax, is that British farmers need to "increase their productivity". The last century of monetary policy is ample evidence that the Bank of England has been completely incapable of eliminating inflation. The average inflation rate since 1945 has been a rate of 5%. This represents a 40% currency depreciation each decade as a result of rising prices. For agriculture in particular, this has created a state of affairs that cancels the constant rises in farm productivity of around 2% p.a. (average since 1945) resulting from better production techniques, larger average farm sizes and gains from advances in animal and plant breeding. Associated with an unproductive monetary policy has been the failure to prevent agricultural land prices from rising to inaccessible levels. Agriculture faces a particularly difficult terms of trade with constantly rising input costs and stagnant output prices in a buyers' market. There is an obvious downward pressure on farm gate prices maintained by the government being more responsive to the food processing industry and supermarket lobbies than to the urgent needs of farmers. As a result of a failure to design an agricultural policy that assists the sector's commercial production we have had payments for no production and now a farm inheritance tax which makes raising productivity virtually impossible because 25% of farms representing the more efficient units will be forced to reduce their productive areas forcing them into the counter-productivity state of higher operational costs, lower production capacity and lower income and margins. A long-established agricultural economics imperative is that EACH GENERATION, FARMS SHOULD NEVER REDUCE THEIR AREAS, INCREASING THEM IS THE IMPERATIVE This is a fundamental step in increasing output capacity which can lever productivity to secure more efficient production so as to maintain their real income. The highly destructive farm inheritance arrangements proposed undermine this long-established principle destroying the prospects of higher productivity. This government clearly lacks an understanding of the economics of agriculture and the technocrats in the Treasury, Bank of England and Defra demonstrate an inability to shift policy to suppott a strategic agricultural economic policy geared to improving the sector's sustainable growth so as to guarantee future accessible good quality food for the nation. After over 60 years since my first association the British agriculture I seriously wonder about farmer representation. Several think tanks and NGOs seem to think it is their job to curry favour with the Treasury by coming up with alternative proposals all of which contain different levels of farm decaptalisation. This is unacceptable. One of the sigificant problems is that economic advisers tend to hold representatives of the Treasury or Bank of England in high esteem and they bend over backwards to attempt to maintain a "good working relationship" with these entities. Many economists see these entities as desirable end points in their careers so will do nothing that might prejudice this desire for status and a higher pay packet. Clearly where such personal ambitions exist one can expect advice given to farmer organizations could become tendentious coming up with weak proposals which all include decapitalization via taxation, even on sales, which will still end up prejudicing future productivity of the sector. A first step towards increased productivity is to abandon the ill-conceived farm inheritance tax and to set up a land consolidation scheme to help smaller farms increase their areas.