Farmers are facing a struggle

4:32pm Friday 4th April 2008

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The Rev Gordon Gatward, the director of the Arthur Rank Centre at Stoneleigh, spoke at an open meeting arranged by Churches Together in Ewyas Harold entitled Farming, Faith and the Future.

He set the scene by giving an over-view as to how he saw the world's future unfolding and the impact on world structures, before describing some of the work of the Arthur Rank Centre.

Dr Gatward told the audience that population growth was increasing the demand for grain by an extra 21 million tonnes each year. This increasing demand for food was against a backdrop of the depletion of world food stocks, climate change, soil degradation and land desertification, which is threatening a third of the world's farmed land.

He touched on the food versus fuel debate by saying the global demand for energy would increase by 60% by 2030, putting even more pressure on land use and food production as world oil production had already reached its peak and there was a growing concern about the impact of farming on climate change and how it could be part of the solution.

Dr Gatward alluded to the poor understanding consumers have of farming and food production in a hard-hitting sentence: "Farming is struggling globally, urban people are not interested in how food is produced and do not understand the role of farming and do not know what country life is about."

Dr Gatward said that pig producers were facing a cost price squeeze and were losing money on every pig they produced. He said the UK pig industry would not survive the market pressures unless producers received higher prices for their pigs and said the poultry industry was in a similar situation.

"Fair Trade should begin at home and our own producers should receive fair prices," he said.

He described how livestock farmers had been hit not only by low profitability, but also by disease outbreaks.

At the end of his talk, he described the role of the Arthur Rank Centre.

The centre helps rural people with financial and stress problems and calls to the organisation are up by 320% - illustrating the increasing number of farmers with serious problems.