Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Is this the end of food as we know it?
A new film paints an apocalyptic picture of a world reduced to tinned goods. 
But could it ever happen here, asks Bee Wilson
Published: 7:00AM GMT 10 Jan 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/6958025/Is-this-the-end-of-food-as-we-know-it.html

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, (the film of which is out this weekend), the 
only food left is in cans. In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a father and son 
scavenge for tinned goods. "Chili, corn, stew, soup, spaghetti sauce. The 
richness of a vanished world."

Is this a vision of our not-too-distant future? Will we soon be stockpiling 
canned mandarin segments and clawing one another's eyes out for the last tin 
of powdered milk in Tesco? It's not a nice thought, but it's one that food 
campaigners have been begging us to face up to for some time now. In this 
uncertain world, we can no longer take our food supply for granted. For 
years, academics such as Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City 
University, gave warning that we were "sleepwalking" into a future where our 
food security was likely to be seriously undermined, whether by natural 
disasters, rising fuel costs, climate change or the massive pressures placed 
on the global food system by a rising population. We shrugged it off, setting 
off in our cars for another wasteful trolley of ready-meals.

n 2008, American pundit Paul Roberts published The End of Food. Roberts 
argued that the "bullet" attacking the world's food system could come from 
any number of sources: avian flu, "a sharp spike in the price of oil, a 
series of extreme weather conditions, an outbreak of some new plant disease". 
Any one of these, and we'll be scrabbling in the canned goods aisles. More 
than one at once, and there might be no canned good aisles left to scrabble 
in. In April 2008, when spiralling food prices led to riots around the globe, 
people in Haiti were reduced to eating mud cakes.

At least that level of food anxiety could never happen in Britain. Or could 
it? For years, the Government told us everything was fine. This was a land of 
plenty. Only four years ago, Gordon Brown's Treasury assured us that food 
security in Britain was not an issue because we were a rich country, and 
could buy food from wherever we chose, as if the world were our personal 
larder. Now, finally, as The Sunday Telegraph reported last week, the 
Government has woken up to the problem. A new report launched on Tuesday 
entitled Food 2030 gives a warning that Britain can no longer afford to be 
complacent. "We need to think differently about food," said Gordon Brown in 
his foreword to the report, produced by the Department for Environment, Food 
and Rural Affairs (Defra). Setting out a new food strategy for the next two 
decades, the report says that the industry needs to prepare for "sudden 
shocks" such as natural disasters or price spikes. Britain will need to 
produce more food, we are told, but will have to do so sustainably, "without 
damaging the air, soil, water and marine resources, biodiversity and climate 
that we all depend on".

Here was a long overdue acknowledgment that farming is actually pretty 
essential. Unlike Gordon Brown, food is something we can't do without. Labour 
has hardly been the countryside's best friend. But at last, the "2030" report 
tells us the obvious truth that "the natural environment and the economy are 
intrinsically linked". The food and farming sector employs 3.6 million 
people. It is in everyone's interests to see this sector thrive. Britain will 
never be 100 per cent self-sufficient: life would be miserable without the 
imported pleasures of coffee, tea or spice. But the more food we can produce 
locally, the more secure our food supply will be in the event of sudden blips 
in the supply chain. UK farming, states the Defra report, "should produce as 
much food as possible, as long as it is responsive to demand".

Well said! Except that very little in the report suggests that this dying 
Labour government is going to take any serious steps to make the necessary 
renaissance in British farming come about. The Government wants us all to eat 
a "healthy and sustainable diet". Yet instead of any real reform, we are 
directed to "an enhanced eat-well website". There is a pointed lack of any 
mention of organic food. The report blethers about such things as the "milk 
roadmap" and the "fruit and vegetable task force". But there is no serious 
new injection of either money or laws to aid farmers. Sustain, a lobbying 
alliance for better food and farming, has already attacked the report as 
"soft", complaining that it constitutes a "series of minor tweaks to our 
fundamentally unsustainable food system".

By raising the idea of improving self-sufficiency, the "2030" report only 
brings home the extent to which we have moved in the opposite direction in 
recent years. The problem of food security goes far beyond this country, but 
even by the standards of our European neighbours, Britain performs badly.

Look at fruit. In 1963, we grew around 30 per cent of our own fruit; now it 
is closer to 5 per cent. Compare this with France, which in 1963 grew enough 
fruit to feed 90 per cent of the population and still produces enough to feed 
80 per cent; or Italy which produced around 110 per cent of its fruit needs 
in 1963 and still does today. We may not have Italy's sun-kissed orange 
groves, but we could still do better with the land we have. Over the past 13 
years, our self-sufficiency in food overall has plummeted from 75 per cent to 
60 per cent.

Take dairy. Our milk and cream are among the best in the world. Give a 
spoonful of British double cream to a Frenchman and he will swoon. Yet our 
dairy farmers are in a quandary, unable to sell their delicious product for 
more than it costs them to produce it. A litre of milk costs the consumer 
70-80p, of which the farmer gets only 21-28p, the same as it costs to 
produce. No wonder countless dairy farmers leave the industry.

There is a similar predicament in the honey industry. There is huge demand 
for British honey, boosted partly by awareness of the worrying collapse in 
honeybee colonies. Yet in many shops, all native honey is gone by halfway 
through the year. Of the 400g of honey per person we consume every year, only 
80g is British. The reason? We currently have a mere 300 professional 
beekeepers in this country, many of them nearing retirement age. It will only 
get worse unless something is done. When I attended a forum on the future of 
honeybees at No 10 Downing Street last September, many well-intentioned words 
were spoken about saving British bees and honey. Yet when I suggested to a 
Government advisor that they might think of subsidising honey farmers, he 
laughed nervously.

It is all too easy to attack the "2030" report for its typical Brownian mix 
of hypocrisy and impotence. I wonder, though, how many of us really have the 
stomach for root-and-branch reforms of our farming system. The Conservatives 
have said that they want action on sustainable food "with a supermarket 
ombudsman and legislation to enforce honest labelling if the retailers won't 
act". But David Cameron has stopped short of spelling out what the 
"sustainable farming" he favours might really entail.

Biologist Colin Tudge, organiser of the Campaign for Real Farming, says that 
our politicians are "dangerously deluded" about farming. "Feeding people is 
easy," says Tudge, but only if our farmers switch to a "maximum variety" 
system of agriculture which puts plants first and meat second. This would 
involve a complete redesign of agriculture.

The odds are, we won't get the crisis measures we need for our food system 
until the crisis has already hit. So let's hope that The Road is just a scary 
story, not a prophecy.