NORTH Yorkshire farmers fear new Government proposals could put crops at risk from a highly contagious sugar beet disease.

Letters have been sent to sugar beet growers as part of a government consultation on rhizomania, a soil-borne disease which affects beets and infects land for more than 30 years.

North and East Yorkshire is one of the country's most important beet-growing areas, and York's sugar beet factory processes 1.2m tonnes of beet from 1,600 growers across the region each year.

Rhizomania-infected crops must be destroyed and farmers cannot grow sugar beet on the infected land for more than 30 years. There are fears that if the disease spread into North Yorkshire it would have devastating effects on the rural economy.

The Government has been trying to slow the spread of the disease to give the industry time to develop ways of managing it, through the use of improved tolerant varieties.

Now the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is putting forward three different potential changes to its existing disease policy, under which the whole country is considered a "protected zone."

It says the disease hotspots of Suffolk and Norfolk no longer meet the criterion for being part of the protected zone.

The options are: to keep a protected zone excluding Norfolk and Suffolk, to drop the protected zone and all statutory measures, or to keep a limited protected zone for areas which do not grow sugar beet.

But farmers who were sent the official letters have been advised by the National Farmers' Union and British Sugar not to vote for any of the suggested options.

Laurie Norris, policy advisor at York NFU, said the proposals were inadequate. She said: "None of these options are suitable. We want farmers to lobby DEFRA and tell them we want a protection zone keeping across the whole country."

Paul Bee, agriculture communications manager at British Sugar, said they were hoping for a fourth option to be considered.

He said: "They have left out the obvious option which is to continue what we are doing at the moment."

Updated: 09:25 Thursday, December 13, 2001