Pippa Bennett is married and works as a project officer for Forum for the Future which promotes sustainable practises.

A. The Green Party supports local food production for local consumption, the maintenance and increase in numbers of small local and mobile abattoirs and the ending of live exports of farm animals.

All these policies would have helped to prevent the current foot-and-mouth crisis in the UK. We have also called consistently for ring vaccination and voluntary vaccination in response to the disease as opposed to the cruel mass slaughter of healthy animals witnessed in the last months.

We call for fundamental reform of CAP with financial control returned to local level. Subsidies should guarantee farmers' incomes not prices.

We would implement an organic targets Bill aimed at achieving 30 per cent organic production by 2010 and re-direct subsidies to support farms in conversion. We promote small and mixed farms and the development of strong local and regional markets for farm produce.

B. To tackle crime, policies and resources must by targeted at the causes of crime. The Green Party would tackle rural poverty and unemployment.

Our agricultural policies would ensure an increase of jobs - organic farming supports 10 to 30 per cent more jobs per hectare than other methods.

Our housing and transport policies would also address these issues. We would ensure 100,000 affordable homes are available annually and invest a further £2bn in rural public transport, helping to avoid people feeling unable to access the leisure facilities in towns and cities.

We would also increase the numbers of rural community police officers who understand the issues affecting their local communities and can work in partnership with public, voluntary and community groups to help prevent crime.

We also promote restorative justice where offenders must make reparation to their communities - shown to reduce young offenders particularly from re-offending significantly more than the youth court system.

C. Ghandi famously noted that you can tell how civilised a nation is by how it treats its animals.

The Green Party calls for in immediate ban on hunting with hounds. We should aim to be leaders in issues of animal welfare and end practices which deliberately cause stress and suffering to other creatures.

The House of Commons has clearly voted for a ban on hunting with hounds and if the credibility of our democracy is to be maintained, this Bill should be implemented as soon as possible in the life of the next Parliament.

Hunting with hounds is not an effective means of protecting farm animals and in terms of the claimed loss of rural employment, resources are better targeted at creating jobs in the production of local foods for local people.