Originally from: David
                        
Farmers will 'soon not grow food' Source: FWi 30 April 2003

By Farmers Weekly staff

TONY BLAIR'S rural advocate has told British farmers that food production could become a thing of the past in some areas.

Countryside Agency chairman Ewen Cameron said farmers had to become more broadly based rural entrepreneurs.

"In many parts of England, food production could become a thing of the past,\x{201D} he said.

"I suspect that in 10 or 20 years time people, and particularly politicians and policy makers, will no longer equate the countryside with farming for food."

Sir Ewen, a Somerset farmer and past president of the Country Landowners' Association, was speaking at the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester.

His comments echo an agency report called the State of the Countryside 2020.

A triple track approach to agriculture would emerge in the future, he told his audience of former students.

Some farmers would choose to continue to produce basic commodities but they would be exposed to the world market place and its volatility, he said.

This meant they would have to become highly organised businessmen who perhaps co-operated with their neighbours to grow crops over the optimum area of land.

"Anything less than three or four thousand acres for each crop grown will probably not be sufficient," he warned.

"It probably means taking a block of 20,000 acres and planning out the cropping and responsibilities in a very precise and maybe hardhearted way."

Others farmers would decide to keep working on a smaller scale and turn to niche or local markets, said Sir Ewen.

Many of these would probably combine their farming with some kind of alternative enterprise such as tourism.

But the third way forward would involve farmers concentrating on land management with food production becoming very much secondary, he said.

Producers would look at opportunities such as leisure, crops for industry and biomass and land stewardship contracts.

These contracts need not necessarily be with central government or the EU, he said.

"They could be with your local councils or even the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds," he said.

"But very definitely a contract and not a subsidy."

Sir Ewen said if food production did become a thing of the past them it would transform the appearance of the countryside as well as its social makeup.

But farmers and land managers would be at the heart of rural economies.

"In such a brave new world there will be losers as well as winners. Many farmers will find it very hard to become business men and women.

"We must do all we can to ease the pain from the inevitable and essential restructuring of agriculture."

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