WITH DEFRA reporting today that there had been no new cases of foot and mouth reported in the whole of the UK since Saturday, clues were emerging about Government thinking on the future of British farming.

Lord Haskins, the Labour peer who is both a Yorkshire farmer and a major supplier of food products to supermarkets via his successful Northern Foods business, has been appointed a key member of the committee exploring ideas about future agricultural development.

And on radio today, he said that he was studying two lines of thought: that the subsidy system should be reformed to ensure that more help went to "small family farms" and that these farmers should concentrate of providing more quality produce for local markets.

These ideas have been aired before but coming from Lord Haskins, they are of some significance because, of the face of it, they compete with his own interests: he is a major cereal grower in the East Riding and in his business career, he built up Northern Foods into one of Britain's most successful providers of "added-value" food products to the big supermarket chains.

Cereal farmers have been under bitter attack for some years for taking the lion's share of farm subsidy payments - and the supermarkets are regularly criticised for "ripping off" their suppliers.