RECENTLY the Foreign Secretary devoted a whole national newspaper article to defending the globalisation of trade. However, in the case of food production, globalisation has arguably gone badly off the rails and is now an uneconomic, anti-social force.

The recent domestic crisis in livestock farming from BSE and foot and mouth disease has shown that in relation to food production, bigger is rarely better.

Consumers look at supermarket prices and conclude that British food is cheap, but this is largely an illusion. Neither the subsidies nor the health and environmental costs of intensive farming and food importing practices are included in the retail price. So we are, in fact, paying a high price indeed for our food. To break this vicious cycle, we need to find a route back to localisation of food production and distribution, encouraging both consumers and retailers to buy locally-produced food.

National-scale intensive farming should be discouraged in favour of support for the localisation of food production and distribution and far from raising retail prices this could in fact reduce them.

By relocalising we could bring British food to the consumer more cheaply, trim the distorting power of the supermarkets and help a far greater range of home food producers fend off unnecessary competition from food imports.

DAVID STOCKER, North West Area public relations officer, Countryside Alliance, Dallas Road, Lancaster.