Change in ‘green’ emphasis welcomed

A change in the British government ’s food strategy has been welcomed as a needed change in policy direction.

Since the Conservative government under Boris Johnson was elected in December 2019 there has been an emphasis on what is broadly described as a ‘green agenda’. For example, a post-Brexit farming payments scheme that encourages farmers to turn fields into wetlands and wildflower meadows through the Landscape Recovery fund.

There has also been a much talked about trend for rewilding, a term that means different things to different people, but has divided opinion, not least in Scotland, where vast tracts of land have been bought by wealthy so-called ‘green lairds’.

And in Wales there has been disquiet over the news that the Welsh government has purchased tranches of land for the purposes of planting trees. A Freedom of Information request by the Countryside Alliance revealed that the government had spent £6 million of taxpayers’ money on this, a story broken by ITV Wales. There is concern that farmland is also being bought by private companies as a way of offsetting carbon emission targets.

However, the ongoing war in Ukraine has focused minds on land use and food production in the UK and the new ‘grow for Britain’ strategy signals a change of policy, returning to farming for its traditional reason – to grow food. The Landscape Recovery scheme fund has been cut down from a proposed £800 million over three years to only £50 million over the same time frame.

The National Gamekeepers’ Organisation has welcomed the new emphasis but said “this change of policy should not be seen as pitting farming against conservation, but rather as a sensible rebalancing of priorities in response to the cost of living crisis”.