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I am very impressed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’
Conservation Review for 1991. The quality of the RSPB’s research and scholarship
is evident. My particular interest is the corncrake, one of three species
nesting in Britain that face the threat of global extinction.

There is a paper on this in the review, written by Gwyn Williams, from
the RSPB’s Conservation Planning Department, Tim Stowe, its regional officer
in the north of Scotland, and Anne Newton of Stirling University, outlining
the situation in some detail. These scholars say that the future of the
corncrake depends on the conservation of its habitat, which primarily means
continuing to produce hay in a way sympathetic to the corncrake’s needs.

The authors of the paper point out that these pressures are not unique
to Britain. They are to be found throughout Europe, and may underlie the
reason for the corncrake’s decline throughout its European range. The management
prescriptions being tested in Britain should have wider application, for
ultimately the corncrake’s survival will depend on continued international
effort.

Across the whole of Europe, farmers keen to increase their production
of livestock have been turning to silage. But this change has been detrimental
to a number of birds: the little and great bustards and breeding waders,
as well as the corncrake.

This is why I strongly support the RSPB’s promotion of a ‘Hay Premium
Scheme’. Under the Common Agricultural Policy, the European Commission and
the national agricultural ministries can already target guarantee payments
on selected producers whose method of production, or whose product, is of
premium quality. These measures have principally been applied for social
reasons, and we now need a premium payment to farmers who undertake to grow
hay instead of silage – provided, of course that the cutting date is appropriate
for breeding birds. Such a system would also, I believe, benefit small producers.

This use of differential prices under the Common Agricultural Policy
has been termed ‘green modulation’. I am enthusiastically behind the RSPB
in this cause.

MPs have been concerned about the Guyana rainforest ever since the Guardian
of 1 November last year, under the headline ‘How peer’s money grew on Guyana
trees’, commented on a transaction by the former trade minister Lord Beaverbrook.
We have become aware that the Guyana Shield is among the most fragile ecosystems
on the face of the planet.

It was my colleague, Maria Fyfe, who put the point succinctly in the
Commons in a question to the current trade minister, Tim Sainsbury, as the
Hansard record recalls: ‘Surely the minister feels some embarrassment about
the fact that a former minister at his department bought a Guyanese asset
for £9.7 million and sold it a few months later for £62 million
worth of shares?’

Sainsbury insisted that ‘the financial details of the transaction were,
as I understand them, nothing like those suggested’.

On the matter of Guyanan rainforest in general, Foreign Office minister
Lynda Chalker tells me that Britain is ready to take on the ‘lead donor
role in the preparation of Guyana’s Tropical Forestry Action Plan but have
been held up by the Guyanan government’s ‘inability to convene the donors
round-table needed to begin the process’. I hope that 1992 will see some
progress.