Archived press release

A real future for our countryside - a green alternative to Countryside Alliance

28 February 1998

Friends of the Earth, Britain's leading green pressure group, has described as "dangerously misleading" claims by some of the supporters of the Countryside March of a town against country political crisis.

FOE says that the major threats to the countryside come from developers,agribusiness multinationals, and some large landowners. Town dwellers have as much to gain from protecting the environment as those who live in rural areas. A recent MORI poll for the Countryside Protection Group showed that the most important issues for country people included transport, wildlife conservation, pollution, crime and unemployment. But key backers of Sunday's march oppose the green policies that are now needed.

Backing its claims, FOE has published a "checklist of shame" to show the damage that development and intensive farming have done to the countryside (attached). FOE has also warned that protecting the future of the countryside is vital to the quality of life of town dwellers, as well as to the economy of rural areas. There are more than 1,600 million trips to the countryside every year. Visiting the countryside is Britain's favourite outdoor pastime. £12.4 billion was spent by visitors on countryside trips in 1990 [1].

FOE is calling for:

• a target for new housing of 75% on brownfield sites(as proposed by the UK Roundtable on Sustainable Development)

• radical reform of the Common Agricultural Policy,and direction of support for farmers towards environmental protection and land management. The agri-environment budget should rise to 10% by 2000 and 25% by 2010.

• a new Wildlife Bill, aimed at protection of habitats and Sites of Special Scientific Interest

• a shift to organic food production, with a target of 10% by 2005 (from less than 1% today)

• a tax on aggregates of £1 per tonne rising by £1 pa to £13 in 2010, and a presumption against opencast coalmining in planning policy.

Commenting, FOE Executive Director Charles Secrett said:
"We share many of the concerns of people who will be marching on Sunday. But to think that this is an issue of town versus country is dangerously misleading. We want a sustainable future based on a positive deal for our countryside. Not one based on massive wasteful subsidies to agribusiness, or on dreary new box housing schemes in the green belt, but one based on secure jobs, the local production of safe and good quality food, and the management of the land for future generations.Greens can live in towns or in the country. And the enemies of our environment are to be found in rural as well as urban areas. We want an alliance for the future between greens everywhere, not division based on where we live."

Habitat Loss [2]

• 95% of wildflower meadows lost since 1945 typically hay meadows. Mostly replaced by rye grass or ploughed

• 50% of chalk grasslands (such as downland) lost since 1945. Less than 6% of the South Downs are now ancient chalk grassland(mostly ploughed and turned to scrub)

• 50% of ancient lowland woodlands lost since 1945(mostly cleared for agriculture)

• 50% of wetlands lost since 1945 (mostly drained and ploughed)

• 94% of lowland raised bog destroyed since 1945(mostly through peat extraction and transformation into arable land) [3]

• 70% of lowland heathland lost since 1830 (mostly turned to arable land)

• 300,000km of hedgerows lost since 1947 (cleared for arable land)

Protected Wildlife Sites [4]

• Over 300 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs)are damaged every year

• One in five SSSIs have been damaged at least once between 1991-92 and 1995-96. 400 of these were damaged by agricultural activity

Check Out Our SSSI Database and Web Site

Species in Decline [5]

• Water vole have declined 70% in last ten years

• Pipistrelle bat have declined by 60% between 1978-1986

• Grey partridge have declined by 75% since 1970

• Silver spotted skipper butterfly have declined by 74% between 1950s-1984

Agriculture and Land [6 & 7]

• Agriculture employs just 2.4%of the workforce in the UK, compared to 7.4% average in the EU)

• Only 4% of Great Britain's agricultural land is in smallholdings (of less than 20 hectares). Around half is in farms greater than 200 hectares in area

• 87% of Britain's land is privately owned

• 600 or so titled families own nearly a third of Great Britain's land

While the number of farmers has declined, the number of farm workers has crashed over ten years - at a time when farm incomes have risen

.Less than 3% of agricultural subsidies go for agri-environment schemes.

Only 0.3% of land is organically farmed.

Housing [8]

• Since 1945 an area greater than the combined total of Greater London, Berkshire, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire has been urbanised.

• The current target is that 60% per cent of new housing should be provided on reused land. Up to 2 million new dwellings could have to be built in the countryside, equivalent to about four new cities the size of Birmingham.

• According to the DETR "just over 169,000 hectares...are projected to change from rural uses to urban uses between 1991 and 2016... equivalent... to about 6,800 hectares per year".This is greater than the entire area of the county of Surrey.

Open Cast Mining [9]
Opencast coal now accounts for over a third of the UK's total coal output, due to the decrease in deep-mining as a result of the pit closures in the 1980s. Opencast coal activities currently take up over 12,000 hectares of land - the equivalent of a hole 50 square miles wide and 100 metres deep. Of the 17,300 jobs in the coal industry, 3,719 are in opencast. Key sites under threat include the Nant Helen extension (Swansea Valley), Brynhenllys(S Wales), Breck (NE Derbyshire), Windsor Site (W Yorkshire), Broughton Moor (Cumbria)

Mineral Extraction [9]

Many community groups are fighting plans for quarrying on their doorstep.Recently RMC were forced to withdraw plans to extract minerals at Longstone Edge in the Peak National Park after fierce local opposition.

Sources
[1] Countryside Commission (1992). Enjoying the Countryside: Policies for People. Countryside Commission, Cheltenham.
[2] Nature Conservancy Council (1984). Nature Conservation in Great Britain. NCC, Peterborough.
[3] Scottish Natural Heritage National Peatland Resouce Inventory
[4] According to the official statistics of the Government's wildlife agencies, English Nature, the Countryside Council for Wales and Scottish Natural Heritage.
[5] Biodiversity Challenge (1995). Biodiversity Challenge: an agenda for conservation in the UK, second edition. RSPB, Sandy, Bedfordshire.
[6] MAFF.
[7] Shoard, M (1997). This Land is Our Land. Gaia Books Ltd,London.
[8] DETR. Urbanization in England Projections. 1991-2016. HMSO, London.
[9] CPRE guide to minerals Feb 1996.

If you're a journalist looking for press information please contact the Friends of the Earth media team on 020 7566 1649.

Published by Friends of the Earth Trust