Anyone who wants to find out could start by visiting New Zealand. The New Zealand dollar looks like an English pound. It buys about the same in New Zealand, as the pound does in the UK. You can buy the same full English breakfast for three dollars, as you can, in England for three pounds. A salary of 30,000 New Zealand dollars provides about the same standard of living as a salary of £30,000 in North Yorkshire - but international exchange rates give the New Zealand dollar the value of about one third of a UK pound. So, when you exchange your pounds for dollars in New Zealand, you can buy your full English breakfast for a pound and rent a hire car for £15.00 a day.

I never saw a Tesco or Sainsbury's superstore in New Zealand, but all New Zealand farmers know these companies as the main buyers of their produce. So they sell New Zealand lamb for what is a reasonable price to them, but a very cheap price for Tesco and Sainsburys. New Zealand lamb is no better nor worse than English lamb, and the UK farmer has to compete with New Zealand prices, artificially and unfairly adjusted, to his disadvantage, by international currency exchange rates. So UK farmers are not able to compete on the same level playing field as New Zealand farmers. A town like Timaru with a population of about 30,000 has a harbour three times the size of Scarborough harbour, with quays stacked high with refrigerated containers full of meat bound for the UK.

In 1999, Euroland adopted the Euro - with dramatic consequences for the UK. Superstores have found that, because the pound is high against the Euro, it is cheaper to buy food in bulk from Euroland than home grown produce. It is as though the UK is surrounded by something like a giant New Zealand. So, in effect, we buy food with our high pounds at low Euroland prices, just as we buy New Zealand lamb with our pounds at low New Zealand prices. So, our own agriculture and industry are forced to compete with their continental rivals on a playing field which is anything but level, because of the unfair and artificial effects of international exchange rates between the pound and the Euro.

And so the tragedy unfolds. British farming is still the most efficient in Europe, but is being ruined by the combined effects of the "reform" of the Common Agricultural Policy (implemented at the behest of the UK government in the 1980's), the excessive cost of regulation, our failure to join the Euro at an acceptable exchange rate, and the monopolistic exploitation of the superstores. When farmers ask politicians for a fair reward for their labour, they are merely told to "diversify" - to provide bed and breakfast, caravan sites, or to sell their own produce - as if they were not working hard enough already.

And now we have the Foot and Mouth epidemic. Farm incomes have become so depressed that more money seems to be made from tourism than from farming. So, the officials and the politicians they advise seem to have come to the strange conclusion that the tourist industry is more valuable than the agriculture which produces the food we eat. So, while farmers are reviled for "inappropriate movements of personnel" or animals, tourists are encouraged to to visit "uninfected" countryside, whether they come from infected areas or not. Meanwhile, vast areas (like the tens of square miles North of Hawes) are bereft of all farm animals. The officials may think they have made the land desease free: in fact they have created the kind of desolation which is unlikely to appeal to tourists. When vaccination of only a limited kind presents a possible compromise between the interests of tourism and the protection of agriculture, the stubborn resistance of the NFU is perhaps surprising.

MAFF has been blamed for its incompetence in not preventing and not controlling the desease, but that does not stop its senior officials from coming up with ideas for the future. Our farmers have become an underclass - a hard working minority who work long hours for less than the minimum wage - often in Summer between 6.00am and dusk - and later. Most cannot afford to pay the minimum wage to agricultural workers, and so the wife has to share the work instead. Rather than find a way of giving farmers a fair reward for their labour, MAFF sees a "restructuring" of the farming "industry" as the answer. Sadly, the officials do not understand that agriculture cannot be reorganised like local government. For most farmers, farming is not an "agri-business" or "farming industry": it is a way of life which has evolved over the centuries, and the UK will be very much the poorer without it. Without farming as we know it, the character of the countryside will change for ever, and conservation and tourism will be the greatest losers.