Food production has widest appeal

4:47pm Thursday 18th September 2008

THE Hereford MP, Paul Keetch, appears to have made rather a schoolboy error in failing to distinguish between a centuries established primary industry that feeds our population and a ball game.

His attempt to equate livestock markets and a football club are at best naive and short-sighted and at worst downright backward and insulting. It is shocking that an elected member of parliament could so misrepresent many of his constituents.

He claims to want to use the freed-up public money to spend “on something with wider appeal or need”. I challenge Mr Keetch to find anything with a “wider appeal or need” than food production and our universal biological imperative to eat that food produced.

After hardships endured, compounded by impossible bureaucracy and loss of so many market sites, farming in this county is a depressed and dispirited industry.

With the imminent loss of a primary market within the city it helped to create, surely the agriculture of this exceptional county is the most appropriate “cause both the city and the county could rally around”. The new market could become the focus of our burgeoning pride in the industry that farms and maintains the landscape that we are all proud to call home.

Without a market, animals would face unacceptably long journeys to market. Fatstock cattle would have to travel beyond the county boundary, which is not only unpalatable to farmers and consumers in terms of welfare but also strips the local economy of valuable revenue.

Does Mr Keetch really need an Act of Parliament to convince him that the new Hereford Market is a worthy, if not essential, requirement in the most rural county in England?

Without question, Mr Keetch more than has a point when it comes to the issue of affordable housing. It is a very important consideration. But surely commercial redevelopment of the current market site would generate both funds and site enough to alleviate the housing needs as well as replacing the lost market to create the greatest good all round.

I do not doubt that Hereford United inspires passion and loyalty in its fans and pride in their emblem of the Hereford bull. Perhaps Mr Keetch would like this removed too?

PHIL POWLES, Wegnalls Farm, Ginhall Lane, Leominster

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