Sir, The issue of food security is not one of simple self-sufficiency (report, March 7) — it is a far more complex problem.

The competing demands for land use grow inexorably upward. Land must capture, channel and store our water; it must provide a base for our homes, schools and places of work; it must carry our transport routes, provide habitats for our wildlife, timber for our buildings, playing fields for our sportsmen and women and, increasingly, land must supply more of our energy through the use of sophisticated bio technologies.

Without knowledgeably managed land, we would simply not have the countryside we cherish or the places to visit that give us spiritual uplift, and, in spite of the Defra view to the contrary, land has to feed us.

The demand for food grown in the northern temperate zones of the world, including the UK, will continue to rise as climate change takes its grip on land nearer the Equator and as populations rise. We need a government department equipped with the knowledge and funding to ensure that the land our children and grandchildren will need to feed themselves is still available to them — and that the skills required to farm and produce food are not lost from the land forever.

Henry Aubrey-Fletcher
President, Country Land & Business Association Ltd
London SW1

Sir, How we deal with a large, increasingly affluent global population certainly requires more attention than it currently receives but it is nonsense to claim that demand for biofuels is “threatening world food production and the lives of billions of people”.

Current production of biofuels uses about 1 per cent of global land available for agriculture. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that by 2030 this might double. According to a report by the European Environment Agency published earlier this week biofuels provided only 1.2 per cent of the EU’s fuel for transport in 2005. If biofuels are causing starvation, where are they being produced and where are they being used? Certainly not in Europe, and even less so in the UK.

There is a real danger that blaming biofuels will become a kneejerk reaction that stops us from dealing with the much larger issue of food and energy needs for the next 50 years.

Clare Wenner
Head of Transport Biofuels
Renewable Energy Association
London SW1

Sir, More than 14,000 people lobbied the Transport Minister Ruth Kelly last week after the publication of an RSPB advert in The Times, which cautioned that some biofuel manufacture increases rather than cuts greenhouse gas emissions.

The Government must delay legislation forcing us to buy more biofuel until there is proof that production is not harming wildlife and is helping to tackle climate change.

Dr Mark Avery
Director of Conservation
RSPB
Sandy, Beds

Sir, There is no need, it seems, to spend taxpayers’ money fighting the problem of obesity. We are all going to starve to death while heating our homes with biofuels.

Mary-Ellen Westwood
London SW15

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