Farmers and landowners will be paid to plant pollinator-friendly flowers and crops under a new package in the National Pollinator Strategy, the government announced today.
The £900 million Countryside Stewardship Scheme, which will provide funding to farmers that “take steps to protect pollinators”, has been described as the most important part of the ten-year strategy by environment secretary Liz Truss.
It will incentivise farmers to maintain hedges and areas of wildlife habitats at the edges of fields.
'The most important part of the strategy is the stewardship scheme, which has a specific pollinator element incentivising farmers to plant wild flowers, have pollinator friendly crops, and to carry out their activities in a pollinator-friendly way,' Truss told BBC News.
Motorway verges, railway embankments and forests will be turned into “insect-friendly paradises”, according to Truss, who also announced that Network Rail, Highways Agency and the National Trust, which together manage more than 800,000 hectares of land in England, have pledged to plant more bee-friendly wild flowers and allow grass to grow longer.
The government said it will also support the Prince of Wales’s Coronation Meadows project to restore 97 per cent of meadows lost since the 1930s, and said it will make its own contribution by installing beehives on the rooftop of the Defra’s headquarters in central London.
But critics have slammed the strategy for failing to tackle the damagaing impact of pesticides on pollinators, and instead suggesting weaker measures such as encouraging the public to leave lawns to grow longer to protect vital pollen from daisies and lavender.
Andrew Pendleton, head of campaigning at Friends of the Earth, told the Guardian: “This action plan is an important step towards safeguarding Britain’s bees and other pollinators. But unless it properly tackles the impact of pesticides and helps all farmers to develop bee-friendly practices, its effectiveness will be significantly undermined.”
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