Media centre

Press releases

Wildlife could benefit from change to farming

16 February 2009

Davey Fitch
Media Officer
E-mail: davey.fitch@rspb.org.uk

RSPB Scotland is urging the Scottish Government to make a really positive change for wildlife in the countryside, by reinstating the system of set-aside farmland, as England looks set to do.  The UK Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has announced proposals for a consultation on set-aside in England, which would have a wide range of beneficial effects for the rural environment.

 
Set-aside - a compulsory scheme which paid farmers to leave a part of their land uncultivated, originally as a means to limit over-production - was abandoned in 2007 with reforms to the CAP.  Environmentalists in Scotland have been worried by the loss of the beneficial side-effects which included habitat for insects, birds and mammals, access for walkers and reduction of the volume of fertilisers entering watercourses.
 
In Scotland, the amount of land in the scheme fell by 71% (from 63,000 to 18,000ha) over the course of the past year, which is a huge amount of valuable and undisturbed habitat for declining farmland birds. The scheme announced by Benn today will apply only to farmers in England, so we're keen to see something similar in Scotland.  The Scottish Government is currently consulting interested parties on the options available to them.
 
Katrina Marsden, Agricultural Policy officer with RSPB Scotland said:
"Set-aside had a massive environmental function, providing nesting and feeding habitat for many declining farmland birds.  Forty five thousand hectares of previous set aside has been lost in a year, and this is likely to have negative effects on a range of species."   
 
"The corn bunting in particular may be seriously threatened by the loss of habitat, and the Scottish government needs to replicate some of the lost benefits through new measures.  This needn't involve such large amounts of land as set-aside did - for instance, a requirement that a small percentage of cultivated land be managed for environmental purposes, without necessarily taking it out of production completely, could achieve massive benefits."

Other resources

We can provide the following additional resources to support this story

  • Interview

For more information about how to obtain these resources, use the contactat the bottom of the article.