Government considers low carbon farming award

Environment secretary Hilary Benn yesterday urged the UK farming industry to embrace more environmentally sustainable practices, revealing that the government was considering sponsoring a new low carbon farming award to help promote greener agriculture.

Speaking at the Oxford Farming Conference, the MP urged farmers to abandon the misconception that regulatory measures designed to protect the environment resulted in lower levels of productivity.

"The idea that protecting our soil, our water, our habitats, our landscape, and the very climate on which all of these depend, and encouraging production are in competition with each other is to miss the point completely," Benn said. "Why? Because our long-term food security depends on looking after those things. "

He added that the government was willing to sponsor a new low carbon farming award to help promote green best practices.

"There are a lot of farming awards around, but none for sustainable farming, " explained a spokesman for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. "What the minister has said is that if someone wants to put one forward the government would be very interested in sponsoring it."

Benn also gave a boost to growing calls for green labels on food products, calling for supermarkets to adopt clearer country of origin labels to encourage customers to buy home-grown produce.

"When you buy a car you know its service history. When you buy a house you get a detailed survey. So why do we accept knowing so much less about what we are putting into our bodies?" he asked. "Under current European regulations, a pork pie processed in Britain from Danish pork can legitimately be labelled as a British pie. That's a nonsense and it needs to change."

He added that with changes to European legislation likely to take several years, the food industry should move to introduce voluntary country of origin labelling.

The calls were echoed by the Carbon Trust, which is working on a major project to place carbon footprinting labels on a large number of popular products.

"We welcome this call to provide clearer information on the origin of products," said Euan Murray, carbon footprinting general manager at the Carbon Trust. "Through our own work on carbon footprinting, we are working with businesses to measure and communicate the carbon footprint of products. Our research shows that consumers are increasingly demanding this information, so greater transparency across the board can only be a good thing."