Friday, 14 June, 2002

John Sheard speculates that a conference in Rome designed to reduce starvation in the Third World could have long-term benefits for the Dales.

THIS has been a quietish week in the British countryside - a blessing, perhaps, after all the dramas of recent years - with people recovering from their Jubilee hangovers and concentrating on football in the Far East (or in my case, cricket at Old Trafford).

But an intriguing press release winged my way from Rome, no less, where various worthies from all over the world were meeting for the World Food Summit. The aim: to discuss ways of reducing starvation and malnutrition in the Third World.

This, on first reading, seemed to have little relevance to the Yorkshire Dales for although our hill farmers are having a pretty rough time, they are not actually facing famine.

I read the announcement, however, because it came from an organisation for which I have a lot of sympathy, Compassion in World Farming, which campaigns against cruelty to farm animals. It's Number One target: factory farming.

The CIWF had been asked to make a submission to the food summit and, in doing so, presented a well-argued case lamenting the growth of factory farming in emerging Third World nations. Apparently, they believe that to copy American and European food production methods will help alleviate hunger.

This, says the CIWF, is in fact complete nonsense. Feeding good vegetable foods to animals to produce meat, it says, is unbelievably wasteful. It would be much healthier to feed those vegetables, corns and legumes directly to the people.

Now I hate - and have always hated - factory farming. But I am not a vegetarian and I love my beef and lamb, although I admit that I am eating much less red meat and many more vegetables in recent times.

But whilst I was reading of the Rome discussions, I remembered a quote given to me by an eminent scientist who had been at the heart of the BSE crisis.

"I've given up beef and battery produced chicken," he whispered. "That means we now have lots and lots of lamb because, when you think about it, sheep are just about the only genuinely free-range animals farmed in Britain today."

We all know that meat sales have plummeted in the West in the past two or three decades as healthy eating became an international obsession. Here in the Dales, we have just launched several marketing exercises to sell fine foods.

Now here's a thought for the marketeers: why not promote our natural free-range lamb and at the same time make factory produced meats even less attractive?

We could be simultaneously politically correct and still tuck into locally produced meat, which is not an easy balance to achieve. And it might give our hill farmers a better chance to make a decent living as they tend the countryside we all love.

Or am I just being naïve to think that agri-business and the big supermarkets would allow such a campaign to prosper?