THIS is a good time to be away from England. With rainstorms lashing the British Isles since December, and with large areas under water, I’m glad to be in Sri Lanka where the sun has been shining for weeks, and where we could do with some rain.

Visitors from the UK speak of the endless wet, soggy weather, with no relief in sight: forecasts talk of more rain throughout February. In the midst of these nasty conditions, the talk in the media is full of climate change and global warming. And while Brits have generally got on with life with the traditional stiff upper lip, there is a blame game going on with farmers blaming the Environment Agency for not dredging rivers in time, and environmentalists accusing farmers of causing the flooding in the first place by changing cropping patterns. Both blame the government for cutting back the budget for the environment.

Train services and flights have been cancelled, and motorways paralysed. Passengers have been warned to postpone trips unless they are absolutely essential. In the midst of this transport crisis has come a very unwelcome Tube strike that stranded tens of thousands of commuters in London.

In the firing line has been Lord Smith, chairman of the Environment Agency (EA), a Labour appointee. The hardest hit county has been Somerset, where the ancient Levels, a large swampy area, has been drained and managed for centuries. Now, the Levels are under water, and hundreds of farms and homes submerged. Furious farmers blame the EA for not dredging the rivers that would have drained the low-lying area. In fact, this is the third year in a row that the Levels have been flooded.

But as the environmentalist George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian recently, it is the farmers who are to blame for the floods: “Six weeks before the floods arrived, a scientific journal called Soil Use and Management published a paper warning that disaster was brewing. Surface water run-off in south-west England, where the Somerset Levels are situated, was reaching a critical point. Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38 per cent of the sites the researchers investigated, the water — instead of percolating into the ground — is now pouring off the fields.

“Farmers have been ploughing land that was previously untilled and switching from spring to winter sowing, leaving the soil bare during the rainy season. Worst of all is the shift towards growing maize, whose cultivated area in this country has risen from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 hectares since 1970.”

Monbiot goes on to explain that in fields where maize is grown, “the soil structure has broken down to the extent that they contribute to flooding.” This increase in maize production is not to feed people, but as animal feed and for biofuels.

To make matters worse, this government has dropped previous conservation guidelines about maize production. Thus, explains Monbiot: “The crop which causes the most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.”

Clearly, the farming lobby has a lot of clout with the Conservative Party, and the result is before us in the form of massive flooding. Farmers, of course, assert that the resources of the EA have been diverted towards protecting villages and towns, leaving them to the mercy of floods that have inundated thousands of acres of arable land.

The insurance industry is bracing for huge claims from thousands of home-owners and farmers. The chief of the insurance association recently criticised Ed Milliband, leader of the opposition, for urging companies to settle claims “within weeks”. The fear is that insurance premiums will go up as a result of the payouts that will be made.

Property values, too, will be affected. Thus far, riverside houses were sought after for their views; now, prospective buyers will check their flood history. The British economy, slowly limping out of a long and severe recession, is bound to take a hit as a result of the adverse weather these last couple of months.

Farming in Britain is heavily subsidised, so the government can direct cropping patterns quite easily through incentives. But as Monbiot concludes: “You might have entertained the naïve belief that in handing out billions [in subsidies] to wealthy landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless whining from the National Farmers Union. But so successfully has policy been captured in this country that … We pay 3.6 billion pounds a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.”

In Pakistan, something similar has happened over the years: the Indus traditionally flooded during the monsoons to bring rich silt to farms; then the waters would recede and return to the river as its level subsided. But years of building restraining walls, canals and dams have prevented the flood waters from draining back to the river bed, thus causing them to inundate fields for weeks and months. In addition, millions of acres of arable land have been rendered unproductive due to water-logging and salinity caused by canals and dams.

In our arrogance, we think we have mastered the forces of nature, but tampering with it carries a big price tag.