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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] From the UK: Is this the end of food as we know it?
  • Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:27:35 -0700


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.




  • [Livingontheland] From the UK: Is this the end of food as we know it?, Tradingpost, 01/12/2010

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