Don’t let rewilding be an obstacle to progress in British food production

SIR – It was good to read the Countess of Carnarvon’s common-sense arguments about farming and the environment (“Happy farmers keep our environment healthy”, Comment, December 27).

While rewilding is important, the food we eat is even more so, and we need to grow as much as we can to be self-sufficient and not rely on importing from elsewhere – with the consequent effects on the environment. Farmers in this country need our support. Sue Wakelin

Woolton Hill, Hampshire

SIR – I read that the Government is sending £67million of foreign aid to the International Fund for Agricultural Development in order to improve world food supplies (report, December 27).

Meanwhile, it is trying to encourage British farmers – myself included – to plant trees, grow wildflowers, and let the land lie fallow and revert to a wilderness. I would call that illogical.

We should be increasing our self-sufficiency, and reducing food imports and reliance on other nations in a very unstable world. Simon Stracey

Stonor, Oxfordshire

SIR – I agreed with everything the Countess of Carnarvon wrote until she said: “We cannot eat the trees that politicians propose we plant”. While factually correct, it suggests a binary choice between food and nature.

I – and most farmers – can prove that you are able to have both. As the Countess points out, Highclere estate does so. Indeed, the acclaimed Dasgupta Review showed that the quickest way to global starvation and economic chaos would be to continue to degrade our soils and natural capital.

The Countess says “the UK could lose 75 per cent of its wheat production over the next five years”. I’m not sure where she got this figure, but the

Government is committed to maintaining our current levels of food security. It’s written into law in our Agriculture Act, which requires current and future ministers to “encourage the production of food” by farmers and growers, and to report to Parliament on how they are doing. Problems arise when arguments are distilled as if there are either barley barons in the eastern counties or else rewilded land like Knepp. In truth, most of us are somewhere in between.

As we move from the grotesquely unfair area payments to environmental land management schemes, we are seeing farmers look to how they can continue to produce food alongside delivering public goods, such as increasing the abundance of species, locking up more carbon and protecting communities from flooding – and be rewarded for doing so. Lord Benyon (Con)

Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs London SW1