One planet farming

'One Planet Farming' speech by Rt Hon David Miliband MP Scretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs at the Royal Agricultural Show

Eight weeks ago, when the Prime Minister asked me to lead Defra, I was acutely conscious of how little I knew about farming. In many ways, I still am. But over the last eight weeks I have tried to listen and see and read, and I have learnt a lot.

I've learnt that farming is at the heart of our society, our economy and our cultural heritage. It's about people, food, landscape and the environment. It touches every member of society every day. In a phrase I used in my first week that runs through everything I will have to say today, farming is important not just for the countryside but for the whole country.

I've learnt about the diversity of British agriculture - from the multi-million pound businesses to the hill farmers, from growers of bulk commodities like grain to small independent farmers selling direct to the public.

I have learnt too about the complexity of your lives - compliance with national and European rules, negotiation with supermarkets, understanding new business opportunities.

I have learnt about the skill, creativity and innovative spirit which many of our farmers display. There were some excellent recent examples celebrated in the National Farming Awards last week. Much of what you do is a real British success story, and we need to celebrate that success.

I've learnt that our farming community is a very proud community. For many, farming is a way of life above all else. But I also detect that many farmers feel undervalued and unappreciated by society - even victimised.

I've leant about the difficulties in addressing affordable housing in rural areas, but also the need to do so, and this is an important matter on which Barry Gardiner is working closely with Yvette Cooper at DCLG.

I've also learnt in eight weeks how much I still have to learn.

About the difficulty in achieving a fair balance of power between consumers, retailers, manufacturers and farmers

About how the inter-relationships with the EU and the WTO affect the balance of power between farmers here and farmers abroad.

About how to balance the need to control disease with the need to protect animal welfare.

Goals

In this context, there are two temptations for a new Secretary of State. The first is to come along and say everything is up for grabs and announce the formation of a study group to advise the new Ministerial team. But that would be profoundly to mistake the real time in which you are making decisions about the future - you don't have time for a year's navel-gazing - and to mistake the strong policy base on which we have to build. I think in terms of CAP reform, the entry level environmental stewardship scheme, and some of the RDAs work to promote collaborative local working, there is real progress. A new Ministerial team does not mean year zero; we build on what we inherit, not ignore it.

The second temptation is to come to the Show, announce a new policy, preferably with a new pot of money attached, and get out alive. This is tempting but fundamentally not very serious. I think I do you more respect by coming here to share with you my thinking about our work together, armed with an argument not a spending pledge, and a desire to refine that argument into forward plan of action by listening to you and discussing with you.

My starting point is the Government's ambitions for the country, because I am here as a member of the Government not just a representative of Defra. The Government was re-elected a year ago with three guiding lights at the heart of its manifesto - expanding economic opportunity in a world of change, deepening social justice in strong communities, and promoting environmental sustainability at a time of growing peril for the planet. So the first thing I want to emphasise is that my ambitions for agriculture are aligned with a Government wide strategy for the whole country.

Our goals for farming should be:

* To build a profitable, innovative and competitive industry meeting the needs of consumers;

* To fulfil its unique role in the countryside by making a net positive contribution to the environment, managing its risks, especially animal health risks, effectively

* And to contribute to the long-term sustainability of rural communities

If farming is to achieve these goals, both government and the sector itself must deal with new risks, challenges and opportunities. If you want to encapsulate the challenge and opportunities in a phrase, it is "one planet farming". In other words, farming that reflects the need for us to live within the means of the planet, and farming which helps us live within the needs of the planet.

Thirty years ago, if you said the country was living beyond its means, people would have thought about economics. Now, if you talk about the country, or the planet living beyond its means, you think about the environment. We are taking out more than we are giving back. We are consuming energy, water, and other natural resources in a way that is leading to huge and often irreversible damage to the planet. So too are most other developed nations. And so too will China and India if they follow the same path of economic development as us.

One Planet Farming

WWF have calculated that our carbon footprint is not just a little bit out of sync with the capacity of the planet, it is hugely out of sync - to the tune of a three-fold difference. Put simply, we are living as if we had three planet's worth of resources to live with, rather than just one. So if we are to build a sustainable future economically as well as environmentally - because make no mistake there are huge economic costs from this imbalance as well as environmental costs - we need to cut by about two thirds our ecological footprint.

For that we need 'one planet farming' as well as one planet living - one planet farming which minimises the impact on the environment of patterns of food production and consumption, and farming which maximises its contribution to renewal of the natural environment.

You know the challenge and the opportunity. The most recent study in 2004 concluded that the net environment cost of agriculture was around £400m a year.

- Farming employs around 1 to 2 per cent of our workforce and produces 0.7 per cent of national income. It is responsible for 7 per cent of this country's greenhouse gases, notably nitrous oxide and methane. But the farming sector can also reduce food miles and replace fossil fuels with biomass to power over 4 million homes, saving nearly 4 million of carbon annually. The recent announcement of a new biobutanol plant in Norfolk producing biofuel from sugar beet illustrates this potential.

- Farmers and foresters look after 80 per cent of England's land area. They are the guardians of our natural capital yet also have the capacity to erode them - after all the bill for cleaning up drinking water is £181 million a year.

- And three quarters of our landscapes are managed by farmers, 80% of England's national parks, and nearly 90% of open-access land. Many of our most valued landscape features from stone walls to hedgerows are the result of farming practices over hundreds of years. They are man made.

One planet farming means respecting the limits of our natural resources, and nurturing them. Our goal should be farming as a net contributor to the environment. But the responsibility is not yours alone. We need your entrepreneurship and innovation, and you have a right to expect our help - funds to pay for environmental stewardship, regulation to help promote a profitable sector that shares the burden of preventing and responding to animal health risks, negotiation to deliver a level playing field in Britain, Europe and across the world, and persuasion to promote a higher level of demand for home grown produce. These<