Britain’s farms are less productive than our major competitors and fewer animals should be bred for meat.

That’s the view of John Selwyn Gummer, now Lord Deben, Chairman of the UK’s independent Climate Change Committee. In an exclusive interview with The Scottish Farmer, Lord Deben said: “We believe there should be fewer animals bred for meat, not because we are opposed to meat, because we should eat less meat.

“We should eat British meat because it has the lowest carbon footprint in the world,” he added.

Lord Deben argued that if there is to be lower meat consumption, then a number of things needed to happen, including increasing the speed of work done on animal health so that if animals were generally healthy, then fewer animals would be required because the same production is achieved out of healthy animals.

“If you work, as we are working, on the way we feed animals, then we can reduce the emissions because of the way the feed is manipulated. If we make sure the animals we produce are produced on grassland and are produced in a more traditional way, and we seek for people to eat less meat, but better meat, but you can only do that if the government stops signing trade deals which allow countries to export into this country which do not meet the same standards,” he argued.

Lord Deben said the committee had 'strongly attacked the government for that part of the Australian and New Zealand deal and why he had written to the Defra agriculture minister to say that it was just not possible for us to import meat from Mexico, which has a high carbon footprint and it is against agreements made by Parliament.

“You have to make sure there is fair trade and that our farmers aren’t asked to do something which we don’t ask people who are importing,” he said.

The former Tory Agriculture Minister said that there was 'no doubt we are going to have border arrangements' across different industries, adding 'we have to have a system that where the carbon has not been controlled, there is a reciprocal price as a result.'

“Because what you can’t do is to allow for carbon leakage from the country simply because we have tough rules and some other countries don’t. The government has accepted that as a principle.

“In the meantime, we should not be signing international agreements just because this government is desperate to show that somehow or other Brexit was a good thing, because manifestly it wasn’t and to do that it’s been signing up quite unnecessarily open agreements which is very damaging for farming.”

In terms of carbon calculations, Lord Deben said: “You have to have proper, measurable and dependable rules for measurements. Government has not so far – either the national government or the Scottish government – yet made those decisions, but we continue to demand it because it is essential for farmers to make decisions about the future.

“What has been so damaging over the past few years is the failure of both the UK and devolved governments, in so many areas, is not to give people certainty. Farmers need as much certainty as possible, because everything in a farmer's life is uncertain.

“The government really does have to remove as much uncertainties as it can and I’m afraid neither the UK government, nor the Scottish government have been anything like good enough on that,” he added.

Turning to potentially limiting tree planting in Scotland and the use of non-native species such as Sitka, Lord Deben said: “The reality is that we are nowhere near where we ought to be because we are off track of the Scottish Government’s target of 18,000 ha per year by 2025 – we are not anywhere near that, so we are not in a position yet to be concerned about tree planting.

“It is important to plant and care for trees in the right place and I’m not one of those who believes we should plant them everywhere and you have to make the right balance. We are nowhere near using all the particular places it would be good to plant trees yet.

“The government is off track because the rates have plateaued and the problems are not so much that there aren’t places to plant them, it’s the contract restrictions on tenant farmers and the skilled workforce capacity needed.”

Lord Deben said the automatic belief that because something is non-native, it is 'somehow or other inferior.' “This must be more objective than that. There are all sorts of arguments about where you shouldn’t have Sitka spruce, but saying it’s non-native isn’t helpful because there are a lot of non-native things that we’re perfectly happy with.

“No-one complains about the rabbit because it’s non-native, although I complain about the rabbit because it eats my lettuces."