Project to keep record of crisis

23 March 2001




Project to keep record of crisis

MORE than 100 photographers, film-makers, writers and artists have pledged their support for a project to record the crisis on Britains farms.

The project will be launched in London next Thursday (Mar 29) by the Hill Farming Initiative (HFI), the Small and Family Farms Alliance and the arts organisation Projects Environment. It is backed by the Arts Council, the NFU and other leading farming, local and regional arts organisations.

HFI spokesman Alistair Davy said he hoped the five-year project would create a true record which reflected the radical changes in rural Britain. "One of the difficulties facing farmers is getting wider realisation of what is actually happening in the countryside at grass roots level."

The idea was inspired by a successful eight-year project that documented the suffering of US farmers driven from the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Pictures such as Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother (above) have since become world famous. &#42


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