Want a taster? Here are some sentences from the article:
Almost as soon as it took office, this government appointed a task force to investigate farming rules. Its chairman was the former director general of the National Farmers' Union.
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Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated, at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.
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The crop which causes most floods and does most damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.
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We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded.
I propose a new fly-on-the-wall docudrama: 'Benefit Farm', detailing how the feckless, greedy, welfare-guzzling farmers are to blame for "Sunken Britain".
Interesting read. I don't know a heck of a lot about farming in general, but your government's actions in this case sound not too dissimilar from our New Zealand government's attitudes to dairy farming and irrigation - strip away the regulations, environmental consequences be damned (but then, our current government over here has shown nothing but hostility to environmental concerns since they were voted in six years ago - they're granting international corporations mining rights on conservation land, downsizing and reducing funding to regulatory bodies across the board but quite especially those concerned with the environment, etc). It's pretty clear the priority is profits for the affluent rural conservatives who voted them in over any sort of sustainability or preservation of our pretty unique ecosystems.
ReplyDeleteSigh...