You Must Be From Away

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In response to this article

I am a beekeeper and have farmed organically for a quarter of a century. There is no chance of the chemicals you mention affecting my remaining colony of bees as no cereals are grown within ten miles. In the winter of 2009/10 at least half the colonies of bees in my valley were killed by nosema. Now, I have only one colony of native Welsh black bees and I won’t build up again.

The half dozen beekeepers within a couple of miles are now only keeping bees for their own supplies of honey. Why? Well the octogenarian beekeeper who had been selling his honey in the village shop for more than half a century had to stop a couple of years ago. The way the UK implemented EU legislation prevented the village shop from selling his honey. His apiary had dozens of hives and now has just two.

Villagers used to donate their surplus garden produce to the village “community” shop, run by volunteers. UK implemented EU legislation put a stop to that too.

The whole web of unnecessary regulation is stifling food production. As I approach retirement, I am in tick-over mode. I am not uncommon. The average age of a Welsh farmer is over sixty. You see it in the markets. Sons and daughters don’t want all the hassle that government has added to what is already too tough a life. My son teaches in a F.E. college and has a full social life.

Soon, you will all be eating Frankenstein foods. The backlash to the proposals to introduce GM lasted a short while but now the government and supermarkets have given the green light. I know this because a friend who manages a vast food production facility has been told by his supplier that by the end of this year he will have to personally import non-gm soya from Brazil, hundreds of tons at a time, to remain non GM, because his supplier has had to bend to the major customers.

Good luck to you all. You live in a country in which producers of good food are unappreciated and expected to produce at a loss. You are happy to pay huge sums for food when you go out to restaurants, so it isn’t that you won’t pay for food. The current situation is not sustainable. It is so obvious. Better not be a scaremonger though. Just look on from the sidelines and wonder whether the controls existing during WWII will be re-introduced when we just can’t feed the population any more and other economies will pay more than us for what is available on the world market.