No more Mr Rice Guy: British farmers sell up to make a 'green' profit
British farmers, crippled by the credit crunch and the high price of grain, fertilizer and diesel, will be glad to hear that the with a fix: why not transform your farm into a nature reserve? The birds and the bees will thank you, and what's more, you'll get you claw back from dreaded crop. Who knows, you might even make a profit, the RSPB concludes.
There's a teeny-weeny not-so-greeny catch, of course.
If the British farmer stops growing wheat and other food crops, other countries will have to farm even more land and cut down even more forest to keep us fed. Sure, there's plenty of arable land out there dying to be farmed (take the Black Belt of Ukraine, for instance), but as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations points out , most of it is currently stashed underneath species-brimming, carbon-storing tropical rainforests in South America and Africa:
'By 2030, crop production in the developing countries is projected to be 70 percent higher than in 1995/97. About 80 per cent of this increase will continue to come from intensified crop production ... the rest will come from further expansion of arable land. Arable land in the developing countries is projected to increase by 12 per cent (an additional 120 million hectares), most of it in South America and sub-Saharan Africa, with an unknown but probably considerable part coming from deforestation'. So, farming out Britain's farms may not be such a boon for biodiversity after all.
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