According to the British National Party website the British National Party will try to achieve the following if they gain power at the 2010 general election:
We see a strong, healthy agriculture sector as vital to the country. Britain’s farming industry will be encouraged to produce a much greater part of the nation’s need in food products. Priority will be switched from quantity to quality, as we move from competing in a global economy to maximum self-sufficiency for Britain. We will ensure a major shift to healthier and more sustainable organic farming. We are pledged to ensure the restoration of Britain’s once great fishing industry with the reimposition of the former exclusion zones around our coast.
I would be interested to hear both positive and negative views on BNP’s Agriculture policies in the comments below?
BNP Agriculture Policy is a joke!
How can we as country become more self sustainable in food production.
And
Produce quality organic food over low quality, but high quantity food?
It’s a contradiction with current technology.
As a country we should embrace genetically modified crops, based on the above BNP policy they won’t as GM crops are not generally considered organic farming.
About the only way we could become self sustained food wise and increase the quality of food would be to feed a hell of a lot less people than 60 million. Downsize the country!
David
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“Downsizing” the population through immigrant repatriation is precisely the object through which self-sufficiency in agriculture would partly be achieved.
Current political establishment no jack about farming. We should aim for self-sufficiency in agriculture as well as energy. Most crops we import so cheaply are that way because either 10 year olds have harvested it or great areas of forest have been burned down. The real racism that is going on is the hushed up exploitation of the foriegn poor. I will be voting BNP after reading David’s ^ rubbish
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British agriculture and farming would have to support over 60 million mouths today and probably a lot more than double that sometime in the future (population is not under control and won’t be in our life time). There are far more densely packed countries than Britain, we can theoretically support a lot more people as long as we see ourselves as part of the world and are willing to trade for resources like food.
Food is no different to any other resource, if we didn’t buy in gas from Russia, we’d freeze in winter. We are no longer living in a world where our land can supply most of the raw resources we need to live. Most of the resources under our land and seas have been used up and so we have no choice but to trade for them until (if ever) we replace them with renewable sources (like energy from the sun, sea and air).
I’m sure as a BNP voter you are completely against immigration, OK fair enough, imagine we’ve stopped immigration completely, we’ll still get to a population amount that this country can not sustain (stopping immigration just slows population growth, it doesn’t reverse it) without importing food from other countries, we have to see ourselves as part of the world and trade in a way where we are so closely linked with our neighbours (and them with us) we can not ever go to serious conflict with each other.
Reading what the BNP says this is the exact opposite of what they want.
We do not have the land like the USA and Russia have for mass agriculture and though I’m sure over time we’ll have better farming techniques (like farming on more than one level, GM crops if we ever grow up and embrace the technology), we live on a relatively small island and will struggle to feed us all, just like we can no longer supply our energy needs.
If you’ve looked into mass farming on the scale they use in places like the USA and Brazil you’d understand it’s part of the solution. Enormous farms that stretch as far as the eye can see producing relatively cheap food on almost a factory scale. There’s no way we could do anything like that in Britain, we’ve already cut down the majority of our forests and already use the majority of our fertile land for farming, we have no where to expand further farming into!
Imagine what we could do with a continent like Africa if it were managed better and technology was embraced.
As a side note: in Britain people break into land growing genetically modified test crops to destroy them, in Africa people break into farms growing genetically modified test crops to steal them so they can grow them on their farms! The difference is we don’t perceive a need for GM crops, a continent like Africa does.
The future will be mass farming on the large continents with fertile land and we’ll trade for what we need. Yes we should maximise our own farm production, but unless we had a substantial decrease in the number of people living on our island AND that number won’t increase significantly, we can not produce all our own food.
Fortunately we live in a global economy, so as long as we have many stable trading partners we’ll not starve or go cold in winter.
BTW although I don’t think we’ll be able to produce all our food needs I do believe with technology advances we’ll be able to supply all out energy needs. Reality is we’ll have to supply our own energy needs since fossil fuels are running out. Sooner we get on with it the better.
David
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I have been arguing for increased energy production through the building of nuclear reactors since the 1970s. Its the Anti-Nuclear Lobby and the Greens who have, along with governments of various hues, been more interested in promoting the petroleum industry in the North Sea and the production of cars along with the axing of railways under Beeching and the building of motorways under Marple that have prevented the construction of nuclear reactors and the building of a wider rail network, this along with the self-interested attitudes of the supermarkets who have promoted foreign food imports, not to mention the ruination of the coal industry and the areas in which the coal was mined and the men who mined it.
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I’m only 14 so i won’t be gatting as technical as some of you guys but i think switching to organic is good as some of the ways the keep animals, like the battery chikens, is disgusting. And I’d like to see more coming out of our farms.