Even before the foot and mouth epidemic British agriculture was already in its death throes. Struggling under the onslaught of successive crises - the effects of the Common Agricultural Policy and the bureaucratic demands of the EU; food scares from salmonella to BSE; the spread of intensive farming and the concentration of buying power in the hands of the retail giants - British farming has been brought to its knees. Who is to blame? The government, the farmers themselves, supermarkets, the CAP, the EU? In this book Dr Richard North investigates the many causes of farming's imminent demise. His list of suspects is long, and his analysis pinpoints the guilty parties. There may just be a breath of life left in the corpse of British farming, but only if clear and successful policies covering land management, subsidies, government controls and how to deal with scares are formulated.