Campaigners say NO to sale of local public downland!—Andrew Durling, Co-ordinator, Eastbourne Friends of the Earth, 22 November 2016
There will be a meeting at Eastbourne Town Hall tonight (Tuesday 22nd November) at 6.45pm between Councillor David Tutt, Leader of Eastbourne Borough Council, and campaigners/members of the public who wish to express their deep concerns about the proposed sale by the council of all four farms on the Eastbourne Downland Estate.
These farms are over 3,000 acres, representing 75% of the entire downland estate currently managed by the council with the aid of its tenant farmers. The Keep Our Downs Public campaign, which Eastbourne Friends of the Earth is part of, argues that the sale of the farms will have damaging consequences for the ecological health of the rare chalk grassland habitats on and around those farms and would mean an end to the coherent, long-term, democratically accountable management strategy currently applied to the estate as a whole, and which has gone some way already to successfully reversing the damage inflicted on it by intensive agriculture since the war.
Campaigners have today formally launched a petition to call for the downland farm sales to be stopped: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/stop-the-sell-off-of-eastbournes-public-downland
