THANKS for publishing letters from Sue Lister (March 29) and Steve Parrott (March 31) about the crisis in British farming. Sympathy for farmers should go along with concern about the plight of the animals.
Some good may emerge from all this horror, and from BSE too, if we are at last shocked into awareness of the destructive gospel of greed. Unfair pressure to produce cheap food, and the inhumane transporting of animals over long distances, shame us.
But this is part of a still larger wrong. Look back 50 years, at home and abroad. Uncaring greed has caused the pollution of land, air, sea, and our food. Decent railway systems have been fragmented on behalf of road lobbies. Politicians have encouraged a global arms industry, so the term "disarmament" has disappeared.
Overblown profit is writ large, and our agriculture is the latest casualty of greed. The struggling, decent farmer is a victim like all of us.
One does not have to be a Communist (I am not) to deplore the inadequacy of contemporary education and religion in coping, or rather not coping, with this gravest of human evils. We are indeed moving to a crisis and should "have done with lesser things". Otherwise mankind will go on digging its own grave.
Roy Stevens,
Willow Bank,
New Earswick, York.
Updated: 10:27 Thursday, April 05, 2001
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