Kendall: farming and the environment must go hand in hand

NFU President Peter Kendall will today insist that a very necessary improvement in the UK’s agricultural productivity should not be at the expense of the natural environment, and challenge the ‘deliberate misunderstanding’ of the issue that has prevailed over the past few days.

Speaking at the Centre for Excellence in UK farming (UKCEF) conference at Kenilworth this afternoon, Mr Kendall will highlight the efforts the farming industry has made to improve the environment, and its commitment to continue doing so in the coming years.

But he will emphasise the pressing need to lift agricultural productivity in the face of rapidly rising global demand for food, and the vital role that science will have to play in enabling British farming to achieve its ambition of ‘producing more, but impacting less’.

“The challenge is more complex and difficult than just lifting agricultural productivity”, Mr Kendall will say. “We have to do it at the same time as reducing our environmental footprint, and from diminishing, and therefore increasingly costly, natural resources.”

“There has been some deliberate misunderstanding of our position on this in recent days. When we say, as we do, that agricultural productivity must be stepped up, that does not mean that we want it stepped up at the expense of the environment.

“And when we say, as we have done, that there is no biodiversity crisis in this country, thanks to the progress which has been made with reducing fertiliser and pesticide use, improving water quality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the success of Environmental Stewardship, it does not mean that biodiversity is not important to us, or that we are in any way complacent or that we are anything less than 100 per cent committed to the Campaign for the Farmed Environment.

“But the fact has to be faced that if, in 40 years’ time, biodiversity in Britain is no worse than it is now, that will be a fair achievement.

“If productivity is no better 40 years from now, we will be in deep trouble.”

Mr Kendall said that science held the key to meeting the challenges that lay ahead, both for food production and the environment, but that a shared vision, allied with continuity of theme and funding, would be essential to convert research in the laboratory into results in the field.

“There is no shortage of world-class agricultural research in the UK, but the pipeline which should carry the results of that research from laboratory to field is fractured, because of the run-down in Defra core funding of applied research over the past 20 years.

“If the aim is to feed 9 billion by 2050 there is a sense of urgency to start dealing with this issue now. There are many time lags we have to consider such as the political lag time to fund research, the scientific lag time to develop ideas and the implementation lag to make an impact on the ground. When you consider all these factors then 2050 really isn’t that far away.”