Beckett plans radical change for farming

The future of agriculture - Emphasis to shift from mass food production to conservation and more local, organic produce

Ministers are preparing to draw up plans for the most fundamental change of direction in farming for 50 years, following the publication of a landmark report this week.

Margaret Beckett's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will publish a policy document later this year which will recommend switching the main purpose of agriculture from maximising food production to conserving the countryside. Mrs Beckett has already asked Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, for more money to boost organic farming in his long-term public-spending review.

Ministers and environmentalists agree that this week's report, by the Government's policy commission on food and farming, offers the best chance ever for wholesale reform. Mrs Beckett says that the report is a "watershed", while Tony Burton, the policy and strategy director for the National Trust, says: "If there is ever going to be change, this is the year in which it will have to happen."

The report, to be published on Tuesday, will call for a "sea change" away from policies designed to maximise production, which have dominated British agriculture since the end of the Second World War. These have destroyed much of the landscape, including 98 per cent of the country's wildflower meadows, 96 per cent of its bogs and peatlands, and enough hedgerows to encircle the globe five times.

The Environment Agency told the commission that intensive farming was costing the country £1.5bn a year in damage to the air, soil and water. And it has spawned a series of plagues including BSE and foot and mouth.

The commission – set up by Tony Blair as a result of the foot and mouth epidemic – will recommend switching farm subsidies from promoting production to encouraging conservation; call for a dramatic increase in organic farming; and suggest licensing farmers to make sure that they protect the environment. It will encourage producers to set up co-operatives and use farmers' markets; urge supermarkets to sell more local produce; and call for children to receive more education on the origin of their food. But it is weak on consumer and health issues.

The strength of the report is that commissioners representing all interests in the countryside, from the food industry to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, have drawn it up. "For the first time," says the National Trust, another participant, "we have a consensus for change."

Ministers are braced for an angry reaction from the big grain barons who have benefited disproportionately from the old policies, but privately believe that even they will accept licensing if they can be convinced that it will raise standards and protect good farmers from being undercut by unscrupulous ones.

The main obstacle is the Chancellor, who would be asked to fund the change. The Treasury believes that agriculture has already had more than its fair share of public funds, thanks to the enormous cost of the foot and mouth crisis. The Prime Minister's interest in agriculture has also abated since the crisis, but Whitehall sources believe that he would lose too much credibility if he now abandons a process for which he passionately argued at the height of the epidemic.

The Chancellor is thought to be sympathetic to Mrs Beckett's request for more money for organic farming. Over 70 per cent of the organic food eaten in Britain is imported.

Charles Secrett, the executive director of Friends of the Earth, said: "It is absurd that organic food is being flown around the world when much of it could be produced in the UK. The Government must make organic food a central plank in its blueprint for the future of British agriculture."