Countryside Alliance - love the countryside

British farming produces nearly 70% of the food we eat in this country. With CAP reform changing the way land will be managed, we need to ensure that these levels of self-sufficiency are, as far as viable, maintained. Current public policy presumptions of a massive decline in food farming and organic land-use risk becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet it is not given that the UK will be forced to cede its production of all food staples to foreign competition. A sensible and pragmatic policy approach would be twin-track: firstly a commitment, backed by investment, to the long-term domestic production of food staples by helping farmers get in shape to compete effectively in liberalised international markets and to meet continuing and possibly increasing domestic demand; and, in parallel, a complementary programme to extend the productive capacity of land beyond food into replacement crops and land uses, such as biomass and environment products.

The Alliance played a leading role in the campaign to help save the remaining small and medium-sized slaughterhouses, and, also, when new regulations on inspection charges threatened their existence again. However, further regulations from the European Union continue to threaten the remaining small and medium-sized abattoirs. Given the animal welfare and environmental costs - ‘food miles' - created by unnecessary transportation of animals it is vital not only that these should remain functioning but that our small abattoir network should be regenerated. The Pratt Report of 2000, commissioned by the Meat and Livestock Commission, showed that a number of measures allowable under EU regulations, which could have helped smaller abattoirs in the UK reduce the burden of an unsustainably top-heavy inspection regime had not been taken up by DEFRA.

policy recommendations

• The marketing and promotion of specialist food products should be closely integrated into regional tourism strategies.

• Labelling information not only of origin of food but hygiene and welfare standards should be made clearer. The Government should close down the loopholes which still allow foreign produce such as poultry to be marketed as British. Consumers prefer to know exactly where their food is produced. Producers, retailers and caterers should be encouraged to specify local and supplier origin.

• Domestic measures should be introduced to ensure UK public institutions and services to purchase local and national produce.

• The marketing and promotion of specialist food products should be closely integrated into regional tourism strategies.

• Planning and Environmental Health regulations for the processing of produce on-farm should be reviewed – current regulations are presently onerous, ambiguous and inconsistently enforced.