Fox hunting debate

Do moves to ban fox hunting threaten country life?

This Sunday, tens of thousands of country people will converge on London, for a massive demonstration.

The message is that rural life is under threat.

All week, Breakfast has been looking at the concerns of those who live and work in the country.

This morning, we ran a special Online forum on fox hunting and the rural way of life.

  Click here to watch the forum.  

We also looked specifically at hunting, in our final Breakfast debate of the week on rural issues.

click here to watch Breakfast's debate on fox hunting

All week on Breakfast, we've been looking some of the complaints of those who live in rural areas.

On Monday we focused on the decline of rural services.

Between 1997 and 2000, 546 rural post offices closed. A further 5 percent closed between 2000 and 2001. Twenty nine percent of villages have no access to public transport, and 72 percent of villages don't have a small village shop or general food store. About 100-thousand people are moving every year into rural England. It's pushing house prices up while wages for rural workers remain lower than city workers'.

On Tuesday we looked at the impact of cheap imports on British farmers. We heard from one pig farmer, who makes a loss of £10 on each animal he sells.

On Thursday, we looked at farmers' complaints against supermarkets, who they accuse of driving them to the verge of bankrupty. We talked to a dairy farmer who's losing out badly on milk production.

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To continue the fox hunting debate, we're holding a special interactive forum at 9.15am this morning, on issues afffecting rural life. You can watch on Digital Interactive TV (press the red button and select live plus) or by clicking on the right hand side of this story, where you'll find a Countryside in Crisis button