Farm discipline
Sir: Ferdinand Mount's blueprint for 'rural revolution' (`The new Song of the Land, 10 January) could logically be taken a little further. If taxpayers' subsidisation of agri- culture is henceforth to be justified on grounds of environmental protection and public amenity rather than the encourage- ment of over-production, they surely have the right to a return on their investment in appropriate coinage. Farmers and landowners should, for example, be subject to the same aesthetic discipline in respect of permanent and temporary structures as other would-be developers, especially in areas of outstand- ing natural beauty.
They should, moreover, not only be obliged, on pain of prosecution, to take more seriously their duty to maintain public rights of way, which for decades the less scrupulous have been doing their best to obstruct. There should also be powers to promote the creation, in reasonable mea- sure, of new rights of way or the revival of lapsed ones, as a condition of the bestowal of grants and tax relief.
Peter Foster
Rew Cottage, Abinger Common, Dorking, Surrey
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