SIR, Could someone advise me as to what the population of our island nation is to eat in the not too distant future?

We are told there is a housing shortage hence good land is being built upon destroying agricultural fields, trees and hedges. Yet town high streets now host many empty buildings as well as abandoned industrial land and properties.

Yet again, particularly rural areas –. The Lake District, Highlands and coastal areas – around 80% properties are second home or holiday lets. Consequently permanent communities are disappearing with the likes of schools in rural areas closing down. The current news of Spain is local riots due to second homes and the tourist industry where local people cannot afford somewhere to live as well as the environmental damage and refuse.

There is great talk and anger within the residents of South Eastern Dumfriesshire and southern Borders, now in some places being referred to as ‘Lowland Land Clearances’ where large estates are giving notice to tenants, some having farmed or lived in estate properties for up to half a century, to buy or get out.

Much of this land is being sold at top price to be planted with commercial forestry hence acidifying the land and water courses.

We cannot eat trees etc, yet farming is castigated by the environmentalists at every opportunity. Industrial factory farming is seriously questionable and unhealthy. However I can never get my head round the statement ‘conventional farming and organic’.

Organic was conventional farming until the chemical industry moved in.

We are not to have fossil fuelled cars in the future yet communities are swamped with delivery vans and the roads and motorways are burdened with lorries. Yes, using fossil fuel.

On B6357 Newcastleton road to the B7201 Canonbie then to A7, 250 to 500 timber lorries have been recorded travelling a DAY going full, returning empty from early hours in the morning till 10pm. The Lake District roads are blocked with traffic so much so that emergency services cannot get past parked vehicles.

The fells eroded by tramping feet etc. yet sheep are supposedly to blame, yet according to the Herdwick Sheep Society, some years ago stated that there were then only 47% registered flocks remaining. Yet before Henry V111 demolished the religious estates the likes of Furness Abbey were huge sheep owners covering many square miles of land and wildlife still flourished.

Are we really to import the majority of our food, again transported over here using fossil fuels? Global warming protesters, what are your clothes made of and where are they made? Cheap imports possibly made by semi-slave labour made from polyester/acrylic – again oil and coal!

It has been announced that new build houses in Scotland are not to install wood burning stoves due to carbon footprint yet humans have been burning wood since they learned to strike a spark. Yet no one, like no one questions the residue effect of atomic explosions dating back to the bombing of Japan in the first world war, and for many decades experimental explosions including underground testing, nuclear fallout like Sellafield in 1952, the pollution of satellites and space travel and the earth destruction making these machines, the earth destruction mining Lithium, Nickel, Cobalt, Manganese and Graphite to make electric car batteries apart from the danger of them setting on fire.

According to the internet today, there are 110 world conflicts taking place including major wars in the Middle East, Africa and Ukraine, the munitions of this causing pollution. We need to feed our people, like in the WW2 ‘Dig for Britain’.

We need to grow and produce as sustainable and as organic as possible as much food as possible.

Feed our population and get back to basics and what seems to have become obsolete in humanity – common sense.

Christine Hudson