Traditional Hops of the UK, a dieing breed?

While judging at BrewNZ I had the opportunity to mix and talk with a wide range of interesting and diverse people from various areas of the beer world. From brewers at lager factories, and owners of yeast companies, to beer writers who chemically analyse beer to deem whether it fits within a style or not. One person who I found very interesting was Richard Watkins, brewer at the Wig and Pen brewpub in Canberra Australia. Richard brews a wide range of beers at the Wig and Pen including several real ales which are cask conditioned and served by handpump. Richard had just returned from 3 weeks in the UK including a visit to the GBBF . One thing that Richard noticed which concerned him was that many of the beers that had made it to the GBBF by winning at regional CAMRA Festivals were made with American hops. He was concerned that the big trend towards using American hops rather than traditonal English ones would be endangering the viability of traditional English hop varieties.

As someone who loves traditional English hop character, particularly Goldings and Fuggels this concerned me and got me thinking. The pages of CAMRA's Beer paper and What’s Brewing are increasingly filled with golden ales that are apparently packed with new world hop character
, this is part of the push to market real ale to young people, lager drinkers and women. None of these are bad things but if the result is the loss of the best hop varieties in world, I’m not happy.
I decided to do a little websearch on the subject and came across an article on National Hop Association of England site, according to the article hop acreage in the UK has dropped 40% in the last 4 years, suddenly Richards opinion seemed awfully real.
The article goes on to point out reasons for the decline as being:

• low alpha acid content of traditional English varieties
• an over supply of American and German hops
• the low price of hops making such farming uneconomic
• the increasing use of pellets, oils and extracts reducing the required quantity of hops
• the trend of mass consumption beers becoming sweeter and less hoppy.

The article also highlighted positives such as the UK micro and regional brewers enduring love for fuggels and goldings, the increasing use of hops in beer designed to match food and the new developments in dwarf hop varieties. I hope that enduring love endures.

Update:

I just noticed that the article on the National Hop Association site was from 2004, so the figures were not particulary up to date.