Food, Farming and the Environment

I agree with my hon. Friend. There is a danger in allowing relatively fragile parts of the agricultural sector, including the dairy industry, to face these difficulties. If we continued to lose them, it would be very hard to restore the agricultural infrastructure that would allow us to rise to the challenges that we face. It is highly desirable that we should retain the means to grow the foods that it is possible to grow domestically. Our food security ultimately depends on healthy and diverse eco-systems. That is why I do not believe that there is a conflict between the environment and food production. In the past, it was largely the fault of successive Governments of all parties sending out the wrong signals about what they wanted agriculture to do. Violent swings between production at all costs and the environment as the first priority of farming are, in my view, unhelpful. The stop-go approach—payments to rip out hedgerows one moment and incentives to replant them the next—has been enormously damaging, and has fostered the equally damaging notion that farming and the environment are at odds. What we need to pursue is a balanced agriculture.