Sir, Ross Clark is right to draw attention to the sad decline in agricultural production in Britain over the past decade (“Get farmers to farm? How very radical,” April 24) and the need to reverse it if Britain’s food security is to be guaranteed. However, this has had very little to do with the Common Agricultural Policy. The recent reforms to the policy have had no significant impact on levels of production, and rewarding farmers for countryside management makes a lot more sense than distorting markets through ill-conceived production subsidies.

The problems in farming, not just in Britain but around the world, have been caused by years of low prices, and you can be quite sure that farmers will respond to the recent improvement in prices by stepping up production.

What they need from the Government to assist that process is not a return to production subsidies so much as less red tape, a big increase in investment in research and development and some long overdue words of support and encouragement.

Anthony Gibson
NFU Director of Communications
Stoneleigh Park, Warks

Sir, You report (April 23) that Mr Brown wants to bring about an agricultural revolution in developing countries to increase crop yields.

Given the unaffordable price of food in many parts of the world, should he advocate also a revolution in patterns of consumption in developed countries? At the risk of incurring the ire of animal lovers, I hesitate to point out that one pound of pure meat daily fed to dogs and cats requires seven pounds of maize to produce. Irrespective of the numbers, a change in eating habits of domestic animals can contribute to reducing starvation.

Robert Gutfreund-Walmsley
Manchester

Sir, Just over five years ago, you printed a Thunderer column by Anthony Browne, in which he described farming as “an economically insignificant industry of mass destruction, not just wiping out most of our natural habitat, poisoning the land with pesticides”, but also “ploughing up hedgerows and killing off badgers”. He urged us to give up farming, and let the countryside revert to woodland.

You very kindly printed my letter in reply to Mr Browne, in which I pointed out that I had pinned a copy of his piece to my office wall, ready to be taken down, shredded and added to the muck-heap as soon as the plea arrived for an increase in domestic food production.

I have just enjoyed carrying out this act more than Mr Browne could ever imagine.

Charlie Flindt
Alresford, Hants

Sir, There is now the possibility of producing biofuels from seawater-irrigated crops, which do not compete for fresh water-irrigated land. This revolutionary seawater-farming concept, developed over recent years in the US, East Africa and Mexico, will not drive up basic food prices and uses three of the world’s most underutilised resources, seawater, newly productive desert coasts and sunlight, to produce biofuels from the oil-rich seeds of vast new croplands of saltwater-loving plants.

This would create new farmland equivalent to more than half of all of the freshwater-irrigated agricultural land mass in North America.

Karl A. Ziegler & James Anderson
London SW1

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