SCOTTISH Office

Agriculture Minister Lord Sewel will today call for a more integrated approach to rural development with people at the heart of policy.

The Minister is to use the Cosla conference in Perth on rural policy to signal that agriculture can no longer be the sole avenue for countryside development.

''To define rural development as only agriculturally-related develop-

ment is to take a very narrow view,'' said Lord Sewel, who is also to underline his ''disappointment'' with the context of the European Commission's proposals in Agenda 2000.

He is warning that political pressure has torpedoed integrated rural development strategies, and that the focus remains on

traditional production.

And he is to refer to the ''numerous nods'' in favour of an integrated strategy as a substitute for action. Lord Sewel is to tell his audience that the European Union's Agriculture Council is a ''slow-moving beast'' and ''we are not going to achieve radical reform of the CAP overnight''.

There is no place for those who seek to present rural Scotland as a ''cosy backwater somehow detached from the rest of society,'' he said.

''What we are talking about is a framework which can deliver strategies for rural development appropriate for the different parts of Scotland. Rural policy is not about inventing a

separate set of rural standards, a sort of bucolic index. That is the road to marginalisation,'' he is to warn.