JOHN Mills, Defra's director of rural policy, announced at the NFU agm with some pleasure and satisfaction that eight times more civil servants live in the countryside than farmers.

I have been convinced for some time that these people really run rural policy. Now I think I'm right. Politicians of any colour play very little part. They try but, in reality, the programme being rolled across Green Britain has been devised, hatched over a long time and now, in civil service-speak, is being "delivered". It has no regard for long-term sustainability in the rural community, which is just what Mr Mills claims it does.

Government, or should I say civil service, policy is placating a mass of special interest groups; answering medium-term problems of the Treasury and allowing the thoughts and theories of a lot of London-based suits to run wild.

One quarter of rural inhabitants work in rural administration - you are sure to find one or two in your own community. There are more civil servants than any other profession. Whoopee! Is that economic success or just a string of costly overheads?

Mr Mills has three priorities:

Natural resource protection. More of Green Britain is being squandered and more derelict land being neglected than ever before. CAP reform in England is set to reduce cattle numbers in pastoral and moorland areas, with a very substantial impact on our unique landscapes. This will have a serious effect on the number of farmers, inevitably opening up the country to a sea of bracken and white grass, losing habitat and creating a fire hazard. Natural resource ruination.

Sustainable rural development. UK food production is to be run down, when the FAO tells us that, by 2025, the global population will have risen 50pc to 8.5bn, requiring world food production to double. It has taken a long time to develop farming. Is now the time to run it down? This has to be unsustainable rural policy.

Eighty per cent of this country is privately owned and managed; no other business has its economic and environmental balances taken out of its hands in this way.

If Mr Mills is thinking of other developments, such as redundant building cconversions or creating even more diversified farmers, he should think again. He claims 56pc are now diversified; show me half the farms in any area and I know he is wrong. What I do know is that many who have followed this route to salvation are regretting it.

Many of these developments simply put a strain on existing resources, reduce rural quality and fail to answer the main problem. Farmers, foresters, gamekeepers and those who support them simply wish to do what they are good at, with a fair return for their efforts.

Achieving a sustainable food and farming industry. The record of country workers in creating the countryside and feeding the nation is second to none. That is sustainability.

Government policies over 150 years have never considered sustainability. International economics, influencing overseas countries and political dogma have been the guiding lights of agricultural policies. From the Corn Laws through the Twenties' wheat quota and two World Wars to the 1947 Agriculture Act, pressures have thrown farming hither and thither, but we have survived - and only just, for the cracks are beginning to show.

Yorkshire's own Irishman, Lord Haskins, promises a new department to unite English Nature and that white elephant the Countryside Agency. We will have an organisation with more clout. For whom?

It will spend a fortune achieving the good Lord's objectives but, by the time those civil servants have had the new logo designed, found new and grander quarters and realised they don't understand the problem, those cracks will be even bigger.

It is difficult for the NFU to bite the hand that tries to force-feed it, but it must be pointed out that a combination of CAP reform and agri-environmental policies are in part paying farmers not to farm while dropping great dollops of taxpayers' money into capital improvements on farms no longer in commercial food production, as well as into grouse moor improvement, thanks to Mrs Beckett's division of England into SDAs and non-SDAs.

While agri-environmental annual spending has risen from £32m to £247m over ten years, compensation for the destruction of TB-infected cows in the same period has gone from£2m to £31m - and rising very steeply. Ignorance and placating powerful pressure groups is not sustainable. The time has come for an agricultural alliance to be commissioned to ask the public what they want of rural Britain for their grandchildren in 2025. This is not a job for either Government or its cohorts nor, sadly, could it be done by the NFU, for we have been forced into highly-focused groups to try to protect our futures.

I, for one, have had enough of being told by civil servants what the public wants of the countryside because it doesn't tie up with what I hear from people I meet, whether on our footpath or at the 20 or so shows I work at.