Farmers should be encouraged to make the country 100 per cent self-sufficient in food production, according to one of Britain’s leading businessmen, who says it would create jobs and reduce carbon emissions.

In a letter to the Financial Times on Thursday, Sir Anthony Bamford, chairman and owner of JCB, the excavator manufacturer, says ministers are complacent about the decline in food self-sufficiency from 68 to 61 per cent in the past 10 years.