Farmers’ beef

There would have been a time when food production and farming would have featured relatively prominently in an election campaign since we all have to eat. Now, farmers are likely to be the whipping boys for politicians anxious to burnish their environmental credentials. This is particularly so for livestock farmers who have a hard enough time of it without having to justify their existence against the power and reach of a BBC documentary effectively urging people not to buy their products. On Monday, the programme Meat: A Threat to Our Planet, purported to show the damage inflicted on the global environment by livestock practices.

The film showed how the Amazonian rainforest had been felled in places for grazing and said British consumers were contributing to this state of affairs by eating Brazilian beef. But imports from Brazil amount to just one per cent of the total, with more than 90 per cent from the EU, mainly Ireland.

The fact is that British farmers, as Minette Batters argues on these pages, have a very good, sustainable story to tell that risks being completely undermined by the BBC. In our increasingly urbanised society, many viewers will imagine that the intensive farming methods depicted in the documentary are used here when they aren’t. Many British farmers are producing local food in an environmentally friendly way and should be encouraged – not vilified.

The presenter Liz Bonnin and the BBC said the aim was to help consumers make “an informed choice” but this sort of alarmism will help no one if it puts sustainable producers out of business. The political parties should do more in this campaign to speak up for our farmers.