31 May 2011

The National Ecological Assessment, commissioned by Defra and scheduled to be published this week, has sparked controversy among farming unions after its authors make some controversial recommendations for the farming industry.

The comprehensive report, an assessment of Britain's natural landscape compiled by over 400 authors over two years, recommends revolutionary overhauls in the way the countryside is managed. The most controversial recommendation so far has been suggesting farmers in areas where their business is loss-making, resulting in a reliance on subsidies, should instead be paid to convert to recreational woodlands or nature reserves.

The report’s authors look at certain environmental benefits, which they refer to as  ‘ecosystem services,’ thereby converting natural phenomenon into financially quantifiable provisions. These ‘services’ include pollination of crops and clean air, which benefit farmers and carry no cost. Bob Watson, the Assessment’s principal author, claimed that this is a means of attributing value to the hidden benefits provided by the natural environment which, because they are without cost, are often taken for granted.

Professor Watkins explained, "We've increased food production quite significantly but largely at the expense of some of the other regulating services, such as climate control or air-quality control. You can't buy and sell water quality control or pollination services. The things that haven't got market value have tended to degrade [since the Second World War]."

FUW attacks Assessment’s suggestions for loss-making farmers

The most controversial aspect of the report so far has been that suggested by Professor Ian Bateman of the University of East Anglia (UEA). Bateman, a professor of environmental economics, recommends a serious change in European agricultural policies.

He believes that, as most of Wales is covered by farms, where farmers are currently rewarded for producing low-value foods like lamb, if European subsidies instead rewarded farmers for producing high value outputs then both farmers and society at large would reap the benefits. Bateman suggests areas such as North East Wales would be suitable for transforming into recreation areas for nearby cities, carbon storage and wildlife habitats, with farmers being paid to plant woodlands.

However, The Farmers’ Union of Wales reacted strongly to the suggestions. FUW president Gareth Vaughan yesterday said that food production should be the priority for British farmers. Vaughan declared, “We have the prospect of the world’s population doubling over the next 40 to 50 years and we face losing 20% of our most productive land worldwide in the same timescale because of rising sea levels and development. I’m also reading in the papers about concerns the yield of cereal crops in England will be down and it’s the same in France and Germany. The emphasis must be on using and utilising all available land to produce food.”

Bateman qualified his suggestions and defended his position, “I am not anti- farming. We need to produce as much of our own food as possible, if only to ensure our supplies are secure. But in some areas farmers would produce far greater value for society if they were paid to also produce wildlife and recreation as well as food.”

"It is not about having a go at farmers, because they are only doing what we are paying them to do. It is about paying them in more intelligent ways, so that they ultimately deliver more that we enjoy. This might mean that farmers outside the big cities like Cardiff, Wrexham or Liverpool are paid more to give up farming and put their land into recreational woodland, to reflect the real value created. It is about giving them a choice – they can carry on raising sheep as they did before or they can get into multi-purpose woodland and be paid more,".

The report is due to be published on Thursday (2nd June) and looks at several scenarios for the future environment. A Welsh government spokesperson said, “It is very simplistic to pick one element of the report and suggest that it means one use of land is better than another.”