The government’s new land-use policy will fail both nature and food production, an agriculture and conservation expert warned.
dr Alastair Leake says the government’s fixation on land abandonment, or “rewilding,” risks undermining important opportunities to benefit nature, food production and society.
Defra is also at risk of giving up land that could continue to be used for food production, which Dr. Leake will be a “waste of money and time with no gain”.
As a member of the new Science for Sustainable Agriculture advisory group launched in May, he says Defra ignores scientific evidence that high-yield agriculture and conservation can coexist.
He describes successful practical examples where agricultural research has shown that high-yield crop production can be combined with increased biodiversity.
These include the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Allerton project in Leicestershire, where “extraordinary” things have been done to shatter the myth that intensive farming and biodiversity can’t be reconciled.
“By converting less productive agricultural land and creating bird-friendly habitat on farmland, songbird numbers doubled while crop yields increased,” writes Dr. leake
He notes that “other sites have taken very targeted and specialized actions to successfully restore populations of Lapwing, Curlew and Partridge.”
“The key to success is an interventionist approach by those on the ground, and there are similar recent examples of butterflies and moths,” he says.
dr Leake said he hoped lessons from the Allerton Project and others would have found their way into policy thinking as the government set targets to reverse biodiversity decline by 2030 after meeting the action plan’s two previous targets for biodiversity and habitat had already missed.
But despite the lack of scientific evidence that giving up land will help reverse the decline, the government’s pilot access program for the new stage of “landscape recovery” effectively requires farmers to give up farming their land, with exceptions of some animals that provide “conservation pastures”.
“That farmers might even want to give up their job and their culture to become a ‘re-wilder’ is an unlikely assumption,” says Dr. leake
“If our experience shows that the human hand is needed more, not less, and 30% of the environmental budget is allocated to landscape restoration, we may give up land that could continue to be used for food production.”
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