NFU campaign work crucial in reinforcing why farming matters
The NFU’s campaigning work is essential in highlighting the importance of UK agriculture in the face of indifference and inaccurate information, the NFU’s Vice President will tell a major agricultural conference today.
Paul Temple will tell the Oxford Farming Conference that it has taken global events including floods, food riots and collapsing financial markets to get many people to acknowledge agriculture’s importance in meeting some of the major challenges facing the world.
Productive agriculture and the environment are inextricably linked and the NFU will be focusing its campaigning efforts over the next 18 months on highlighting agriculture’s unique ability to deliver both.
Mr Temple will say: "Even now, Defra has started to wake up to food security but all too often it is still preaching the environmental agenda with an evangelical zeal. In the Council that decided the CAP Health Check the British government’s highest priority appears to have been to retain set aside measures, to take one example.
"Of course, if Defra is the preacher, then it has an enthusiastic choir behind it singing from the same hymn sheet. There are all too many single issue bodies, pressure groups and NGOs all too ready to sing the same tired old song on farming’s role in biodiversity loss and crashing farmland bird numbers. Of course it is a concern that the official farmland bird index seems to be falling; but I defy anyone to show how this is linked to farming. The priority should be to find the causes, not leap to conclusions.
"What we believe, and what NFU campaigns for the next 18 months will focus on, is the need for a new balance between productive agriculture and the environment. Telling the public that, actually, productive agriculture and the environment are inextricably linked, indeed complementary, and no other industry but ours can deliver both.
"In that sense, the Why Farming Matters campaign of today has the same aims as it originally did – recognising the fundamental role played by farming in shaping this country at every level of life. It also looked to educate and inform an incredibly diverse audience – everyone from schoolchildren to senior policy makers, and many more in between.
"Reaffirming what is important about UK farming – our farming – our members’ farming, is essential, because if we don’t do it, who will? Not our own Government department, that’s for sure, and certainly not the various NGOs whose agendas often sit in direct conflict to farming’s.
"Only we – both as farmers, and as the NFU – can positively affect the image of our industry. The Why Farming Matters campaign is simply the framework for that to happen."
