Breadcrumbs
The public’s top priority for the future countryside - the environment - can only be delivered through a new contract with farmers ... the food you buy shapes our countryside – 1 July 2002
While the public put environment top and the threat of suburbanisation next, before proper access to services and then the future of farming, opinion leaders (rural and urban) put farming top, according to Countryside Agency findings.
Yet in reality, the two are the means to each other, the Countryside Agency, England’s leading advisers on rural issues, warns today. The public will not get a better environment or reduce the threat of suburbanisation unless there is a radical overhaul of farming. People do not understand the link between the products they buy and having an attractive, economically vibrant countryside.
Ewen Cameron, Countryside Agency chairman and rural advocate said: “Consumers need to better understand that what they buy has a direct impact on the future of the English countryside; while farmers are paid for producing in a sustainable fashion what the public want - high quality food and a quality environment.”
Speaking at the Royal Agricultural Show in Warwickshire, he urged farmers to re-engage with the public in a new contract to win back their confidence: “Our customers - the taxpaying public - want farmers to continue as producers of high quality food, whilst increasingly delivering other goods and services. But farmers need to earn a decent living for the work they do - so environmental improvements must be paid for by the urban majority, through the public purse or by a public willingness to pay a fair price for food produced in an environmentally sound way.
“The imminent comprehensive spending review (CSR) provides a rare opportunity to give a new direction to agriculture, to restore consumer confidence in their food and meet the public’s desire for conservation of our countryside. By implementing the recommendations of the Curry report*, environmental benefits can be delivered and farmers enabled to move away from quantity to quality production.”
Mr Cameron continued: “Some investment now will not only benefit our landscape and bio-diversity, it will inject much-needed support into the rural economy and give farmers new options to produce what the public want.
“Foot and mouth not only showed that the countryside matters to urban people but demonstrated the huge importance of countryside visitors to the modern rural economy,” he said as he pledged that the Countryside Agency would do its part to strengthen the links between town and country, with much of the work focused on the urban fringe where rural diversification into the recreational, health and local produce markets have the greatest potential to link town and country physically, socially and economically.
“We want the countryside not only to survive but to thrive. I do not want to turn it into a rural playground for ‘townies’. But farmers must adapt to changing social and economic circumstances and work to become ever more relevant to the life and well-being of the nation as a whole,” concluded Ewen Cameron.
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The Countryside Agency is responsible for advising government and taking action on issues relating to the social, economic and environmental well-being of the English countryside. The Countryside Agency set out its vision of sustainable land management in its Strategy for Sustainable Land Management in England last year and in its evidence to the Policy Commission on the Future of Food & Farming.
The survey of people’s expectations of rural change was compiled for the Countryside Agency by Opinion Leader Research during April 2002. They conducted 1600 interviews with the public and 159 with opinion leaders - both national and from rural communities.
* The Policy Commission on the Future of Food & Farming’s report of 29 January 2002, led by Sir Don Curry.
