British Countryside Under Pressure

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Friday, 16 December 2005

The countryside is now under intense pressure just to vanish. Single farm payments are the right answer, but they have come late. They will require adjustments beyond the tolerance of many farm families, not to mention their successors. Thousands will give up and sell for development. It will require all the ingenuity of planners and subsidisers to hold back a rampant suburban sprawl.
The implementation of single farm payments is thus critical to more than the fate of British farming. It will decide whether the countryside, at least in southern Britain, remains in a remotely rural form. Not only must the money be sufficient to keep farmers on the land but the rules must change. A new planning regime has to award rural Britain the same statutory protection long granted to urban Britain. Landscape must be listed and conserved. Otherwise, outside national parks, all is gone. There is no mystery about what this means: look along the coast of New England, round Los Angeles or on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Britain is rightly vilifying France's selfishness on food-trade reform. But the irony is that France has at least found a means of protecting long-term what may yet be unique in western Europe, an extensive countryside. It is an irreplaceable asset to which millions of Europeans will one day flock for leisure and escape, having destroyed their own. Britons will re-enact D-day not just every holiday but every weekend, with attendant pollution, hassle and expense.
Source: Simon Jenkins; The Guardian - for full story goto http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1668523,00.html