The amount of money which British farmers are borrowing from their creditors is impressive -- £6.4 billion.

That sum is 10% higher than it was last year. And with farmers' incomes falling drastically, it is easy to see why the industry believes itself to be in crisis.

In 1996 farmers in England and Wales earned £4.1bn. Last year they made £2.1bn.

This year, the NFU predicts, net farm incomes will amount to less than £1bn.

The NatWest Bank expects more than 25,000 of Britain's 170,000 full-time farmers will be driven out of the industry by the crisis.

Some will leave altogether, it says, while others may merge their farms into bigger and more profitable units.

Brian Montgomery is NatWest's head of agriculture. He thinks the crisis may last, not for months, but for several years.

"It is very difficult to make forecasts about a global situation", he says. "It is hard to say what will happen over the next six or twelve months in Russia, in China, or even in North America".

"I tend to feel this downturn may continue for some time".

Borrowing Not to Blame

But Mr Montgomery rejects any suggestion that the farmers have brought the crisis on themselves by simply borrowing too much.

Foreign harvests hit British prices

"Farmers' indebtedness fluctuates in line with the weather", he says. "And they have borrowed as well to increase their efficiency, and to improve their environmental standards".

One factor he blames for the farmers' plight is "the totally artificial situation we have with the strength of sterling".

And Mr Montgomery says standards -- of production, welfare and slaughter -- are higher here than in many countries that export food to us.

"At times it is fair to question the quality of food from abroad", he says.

But if Brian Montgomery thinks the farmers are not the cause of the crisis, he is convinced there are things they can do to extricate themselves from it.

He singles out several ways forward:

• more promotion, persuading retailers that British food is healthier and of a higher standard than imports

• more efficiency. This will probably mean fewer and bigger farms, where the land and the animals are worked even more intensively than they are now

• more co-operation between individual farmers. "Co-operatives are very strong in Europe and the US", says Mr Montgomery. "But here the independent spirit remains strong".

Too powerful ? Or the shoppers' friend ?

With farmers now earning less than half what they were getting two years ago, you might expect shop prices for British food to be falling too.

You would be wrong. Prices remain stubbornly unchanged. So who is making a profit ?

Many farmers themselves are deeply suspicious of the supermarkets. They may not actually have caused the crisis, the argument runs, but they are doing very nicely out of it.

Probably they are, says Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at Thames Valley University.

Hidden profits

"I think there is pretty good circumstantial evidence that the supermarkets are getting more than their fair share. But the problem is that there is simply no evidence in the public arena".

Professor Lang says there is no way of knowing what profit margins supermarkets are enjoying.

"Are they, for instance, making money at the point of sale, but losing it somewhere in the distribution chain ?", he asks. "That is the sort of information I should like to see them have to disclose".

Recalling many years of campaigning against what he calls "the overweening power" of the supermarkets, Tim Lang believes they have had things all their own way.

The collapse of the Russian sheepskin market has left farmers stranded

"I have been highly critical of the pathetic nature of the Office of Fair Trading and the Monopolies and Mergers system", he says.

"Time and again it has allowed concentration to continue. It would not have happened in the USA, with its tougher interventionist policy".

And Professor Lang believes that supermarkets should be replaced, over the next ten or twenty years, by a more "user-friendly" system of food distribution.

That, he says, would help those in poverty, and benefit public health. It might also be good for the farmers.

In their defence, the British Retail Consortium says the supermarkets' own costs have been rising, while their profits and returns are comparatively low in the United Kingdom.

The BRC says it is "highly unlikely food retailers are squeezing their suppliers too hard when 70% of products are sourced from ten huge multinational suppliers . . . "