Labour peer and environmental campaigner

Born: February 24, 1948;

Died: August 29, 2018

LORD Peter Melchett, who has died aged 71, was a Labour peer and organic farmer who eschewed his privileged background to lead a colourful life as an environmental campaigner, famously heading up a group of activists who ripped up a field of genetically modified crops.

Executive director of Greenpeace UK from 1989, Lord Melchett led the group of activists into action at Walnut Tree Farm near Norwich in 1999 and trashed a field of maize that had been developed to be resistant to insects and was grown as part of the Government's GM trials.

Lord Melchett was arrested and spent two nights on remand in jail but, in a surprise verdict, he and his colleagues were acquitted when the jury accepted their defence that they believed the crop would have polluted the environment.

Paying tribute to Lord Melchett, Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said that in his 12 years campaigning at Greenpeace, the peer was fearless in taking on big corporations like BP and Monsanto but also pioneering in supporting solutions like Greenfreeze refrigeration to save the ozone layer. Mr Sauven also cited Lord Melchett's launch of the Food for Life campaign, which aims to improve the quality of food in schools and hospitals and attracted the high-profile support of the chef Jamie Oliver.

In some ways, Lord Melchett's family history was ironic: he was a great-grandson of Sir Alfred Mond, the founder of the chemicals giant ICI, but from a young age he seemed at odds with his aristocratic background. He attended Eton and Cambridge but was an opponent of hunting and became a vegetarian and supporter of the Labour party.

He studied law at Pembroke College, Cambridge and later criminology at the University of Keele. He succeeded to the peerage when he was 25 on the death of his father and, after considering renouncing the title, worked for Labour in the Lords. From the start he pursued his interest in environmental issues (his maiden speech was about cruelty to animals in zoos).

Under Harold Wilson, he became a party whip and a junior environment minister; he was then Northern Ireland minister under Jim Callaghan. After the Tory election victory of 1979, he became an opposition spokesman on the environment.

However, he then became disillusioned with politics and withdrew to become chairman of Greenpeace - much later, he was forced to resign from the board of Greenpeace International after accepting a consultancy with the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, whose clients had included the GM firm Monsanto.

Away from public life, Lord Melchett ran an organic farm in Norfolk. He was also policy director at the Soil Association, where he launched Food for Life.

He is survived by his partner Cassandra and a son and daughter.