Exclusive: Farming must get priority warns top scientist

Professor Sir John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, said farming needed to be moved up the policy agenda if the country and planet were to feed themselves in the face of huge projected increases in population.

A recent Government report overseen by Prof Beddington said the world would need to produce 40 per cent more food over the next 20 years in order to cope with swelling populations. And it warned the current world food system was “fundamentally unsustainable” and “failing”.

“In the 19th century we would simply choose to chop down trees and clear forests for arable and livestock production,” he said. “We do not have that choice now. We need to be getting much more from the land than we are now.”

Speaking exclusively to the Yorkshire Post, Professor Beddington said regulation and red tape surrounding farming in the UK should be lessened and more needed to be done to reverse what he called the “disgraceful” cutting back of research.

“Research into agriculture has seen a lamentable decline in recent years,” he said. This needed to be reversed. “One of the tragedies of agriculture has been the cutting back of research in a disgraceful and myopic way.

“There also needs to be a thorough assessment of the regulation surrounding agriculture and research done in to its consequences.”

More should be done to protect rare breeds and livestock farming remained essential to upland areas such as the Yorkshire Dales. Carbon capture also had the potential to help rural communities he said, remarking that “a lot can be done” in Yorkshire in the area.

Professor Beddington also called for more dialogue on the use of genetically modified food but warned it was not the silver bullet to solving world food shortages. “There are huge amounts of crops wasted to due to pests and disease. We can actually get plants that operate in a difficult environment. We are not just talking about GM foods but using different breeding techniques to deal with the issue.”

Regarding food produced using GM technologies, something currently prohibited under European Union law, Professor Beddington said: “We should be able to ask perfectly reasonable questions. Technologies should not be dismissed purely on moral or ethical grounds without a proper debate. That would be profoundly mistaken. But GM is not going to solve the problem in isolation.”

Speaking during a visit to the University of Leeds’s Africa College research group, Professor Beddington said while a strong UK agricultural sector was needed, ending imports and exports was not viable.

“Protectionism is not the answer and would be a disaster, some countries produce food deficits and other produce surpluses and trade is the way to deal with this.”

He said Britain should be prepared for more extreme weather such as the flooding seen in 2007 and the freezing temperatures seen over the winter.

Professor Beddington sounded a positive note for UK farming, however, saying that a variety of factors were likely to mean increased opportunities for farmers in the future.

“We are in a unique time in history. It presents a big opportunity to think about what we can to achieve a sustainable world. The potential for agriculture is terrific.”

Climate change would transform the way Britain produced food, with “productivity in temperate climates such as the U.K. to increase,” and while it was undeniable that farming contributed to climate change, agriculture could play an enormous role in mitigating the effects of greenhouse gases he suggested.

“There are many ways in which we can offset the impact from carbon released from agriculture, there needs to be much better ways in which it is sequestered.”

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