Letter: Down on the farm

Sir: Sean Rickard usefully focuses the arguments on reform of the EU Common Agricultural Policy on to harsh realities of global pressures and technological change. Many in East Anglia, for example, believe those changes will reshape landscapes as significantly as the shift from wool to grain in previous centuries.

UK producers and consumers should view these processes as opportunities rather than threats, but only if greater competitiveness is matched by bolder thinking about its benefits to the whole community rather than the profitability of the few. Rural workers and small businesses are also customers in local economies; the social and environmental consequences of change cannot be divorced from industrial considerations. That is why a genuinely integrated rural development approach is needed both in the Brussels negotiations and the UK government's rural White Paper this year, with a key component being diversion of "bad" wasteful subsidies into "good" environmental, healthy and nutritional encouragement.

UK producers are keen for that, understandably as long as sustainable incomes are likely. They now need arguments to be won abroad and at home in favour of quality rather than quantity of produce.

CLIVE NEEDLE MEP

(Norfolk, Lab)

Brussels