Letter to the Editor: I must take issue with some of the inaccurate and dangerously misleading statements in your Farming matters with the FUW column (Cambrian News, 1 March)

The writer asserts:“Proposed agricultural and rural policies and funding mechanisms have increasingly become focussed on environmental benefits, eclipsing the importance of maintaining food production” as if the two objectives were somehow in conflict.

The complete reverse is true. As the new UN Chatham House report reminds us: “Biodiversity is critical for safeguarding global food security, underpinning healthy and nutritious diets, improving rural livelihoods, and enhancing the resilience of people and communities. We need to use biodiversity in a sustainable way, so that we can better respond to rising climate change challenges and produce food in a way that doesn’t harm our environment. Less biodiversity means that plants and animals are more vulnerable to pests and diseases. Compounded by our reliance on fewer and fewer species to feed ourselves, the increasing loss of biodiversity for food and agriculture puts food security and nutrition at risk.. The foundation of our food systems is under severe threat.... from changes in land use and intensified agriculture.”

However the writer of your column goes on: “The FUW will continue its lobbying efforts to ensure that food production and the protection of our family farms and rural communities is placed on an equal footing with environmental objectives in order to maintain and enhance UK food.”

This again appears to suggest that ‘environmental objectives’ may threaten, or compete with ‘food production and the protection of our family farms and rural communities’ when all the evidence shows the exact opposite.

Of course we all sympathise with farmers’ needs to diversify and adapt in the face of increasingly difficult conditions. Indeed, there are many examples of regenerative and environmentally friendly forms of diversification right here in Ceredigion which we are I believe all very happy to support.

None of this however justifies practises, and forms of intensive agriculture, that further destroy an already fragile ecosystem.

As the UN report stresses,  “in the last decades our food systems have been following the “cheaper food paradigm”, with a goal of producing more food at lower costs through increasing inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, energy, land and water. This paradigm leads to a vicious circle... through more intensification and further land clearance”.

An excellent and very topical example of this is the highly damaging proliferation of Intensive Poultry Units across the border counties and Powys – and now threatening to spread into Ceredigion. This is leading to not only devastating impacts on our rivers and watercourses (the Wye has been given a year to live primarily because of chicken manure pollution, the Usk is also seriously degraded) but also blighting local rural communities and their environment.

I live in Talybont, where we are threatened by two huge intensive poultry sheds in our village. When canvassed, 95 per cent of our local residents here were against this proposal and there were more than 300 formal objections to the planning application. Only one local farming family will benefit economically, while the whole community will suffer (including demonstrated impacts on tourism). Yet there has been no community consultation whatsoever.

We recently heard that the application had been ‘passed to Powys’. When we wrote to the Planning Dept to clarify this, we were told that “owing to unprecedented workload and staff vacancies... enquiries such as this will not be accepted and not responded to.”

What price democracy, transparency or accountability?

Sarah Reisz,

Talybont