The NFU clashed with the WWF at this year’s Nuffield Conference, accusing the organisation of unfairly spreading bad news about British agriculture.
In a panel debate at the event, the NFU’s vice president Guy Smith accused the organisation of ignoring the work done by British farmers to promote biodiversity and instead focusing on a perceived lack of wildlife.
“We pick up some bad habits from the green NGOs who have something to sell when it comes to spreading bad news,” Smith said. “I’ve got no issue with this but the WWF like to point to the things we haven’t got on our farms in terms of wildlife and frequently ignore what we have got. That sometimes irritates me.”
In response, WWF-UK’s food policy manager Duncan Williamson said: “I completely think that’s wrong. We celebrate the good farmers, we work with farmers all over the world… We work with farmers in East Anglia and with farmers along the River Itchen [in Hampshire] who are doing fantastic work to get the chalk streams back up to a really good level.”
Williamson stressed that declining biodiversity is a global issue, claiming that 60 per cent of the world’s biodiversity loss can be attributed to the food system.
Meanwhile, 50 per cent of the global population is malnourished (either under- or over-nourished), he said, with 795 million people hungry, two billion obese and almost two billion suffering from micronutrient deficiency – a lack of certain vitamins and minerals.
“What we have here is a conservation issue, a climate issue, a health and nutrition issue, and a farming issue,” Williamson said.
“We know that if we carry on like this, we’re not going to have any biodiversity left; we’re going to go way beyond the climate change extremes; we’re all going to be fat and what are we going to feed the livestock when we run out of land?”
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