Farmers are "living on borrowed time" if they do not look to the future in the wake of the foot-and-mouth crisis, the Government's rural recovery co-ordinator said yesterday.

At a news conference in Penrith, Cumbria, one of the worst-hit regions, Lord Haskins said turning the clock back was a fantasy.

Asked about the views of the Prince of Wales, who has urged farmers to return to more traditional methods, he said: "I think that the idea of turning the clock back is not the way of dealing with the problems in Cumbria today. We have to turn the clock forward.

"The future is looking at the future, not building up fantasies of the past, like some people might think.

"I am not mentioning any names.

"If farmers want to rely on the past for handouts, they are going to be living on borrowed time."

Lord Haskins said he would be reporting back to Prime Minister Tony Blair by the end of September about some of the "medium term" issues he has identified in Cumbria.

He would be concentrating on key issues such as how quickly the farming community can return to conditions seen before the disease emerged in February.

Lord Haskins said he was in favour of both large and small farms, insisting that he had been misquoted in the media over the weekend.

"The press in August have a hard time filling their pages - they have had a bit of fun," he said. "But this is a serious matter. Alongside the devastation of foot-and-mouth in Cumbria, the region has a fantastic tourist appeal.

"The moment foot-and-mouth is out of the system, tourism will be back with a bang."

Lord Haskins admitted he was worried about remote rural farming communities that do not have a strong tourist trade behind it, such as north Wales.

He met the Cumbria foot-and-mouth task force steering group. Half of all the livestock farms in the region had been wiped out, rising to 70 per cent in some areas.

Lord Haskins, himself a large farmer and chairman of Northern Foods, said he had a strong interest in helping to revive the fortunes of the area. His company is one of the largest employers in Cumbria.

Earlier, in a radio interview, he said: "Farmers need to co-operate more in this country than they do elsewhere.

"We have got a lot to learn from the Americans, from the French, from the Germans in that respect.

"But the message that things have got to change is well accepted by farmers, by environmentalists, by everybody."

Read more about the foot-and-mouth crisis here.