British Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey said she hopes to create bonuses in the country’s agriculture subsidies that would encourage farmers to band together to accomplish environmental goals.
(Bloomberg) — British Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey said she hopes to create bonuses in the country’s agriculture subsidies that would encourage farmers to band together to accomplish environmental goals.
“I want to get a premium for where farmers work together, so the sum of their parts is greater,” Coffey said in an interview with Bloomberg News during a visit to the US.
Coffey, whose department also is responsible for agriculture and rural affairs, cited hedgerows in the British countryside as an example of the “symbiotic” power of combined action on the environment.
“You can see that when you have hedgerows,” Coffey said. “Corridors of hedgerows pretty well aligned provides those greater nature corridors.”
The UK is trying to reorient farm subsidies to encourage broader goals, while still promoting food production, said Coffey, who was in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Virginia, to address a national meeting of US state agriculture directors.
“We’re moving away from the EU system, where people are guaranteed a certain amount of payments, largely driven by the amount of land that they own,” Coffey said. “Increasingly, that income will be in response to how we can get public goods for public money.”
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