You are what you eat – Market Matters
Hilary Benn: Launching Food 2030 – the UK’s Food Security strategy.
Two rival conferences in snowbound Oxford last month highlighted the dilemmas the Government faces about food production and how it gets onto our dinner tables. The NFU-led Oxford Farming Conference (Guest speaker: Environment Secretary Hilary Benn) fought it out with the rival Friends of the Earth-led Oxford Real Farming Conference down the road, but the only winner seemed to be the badgers (see later).
Hilary’s top priority task as Environment Secretary overseeing DEFRA (The Dept. of Environment Food and Rural Affairs) is to ensure the UK’s Food Security. He lost Energy Security to Ed Miliband’s new Department of Energy and Climate Change but rose to this new task by launching the Government’s Food 2030 strategy at the Oxford Farming Conference. He was backed-up by his chief scientific advisor Prof. John Beddington and kicked-off a debate that is long overdue.
At the root of the problem is world population. The Government is trying to develop a strategy to ensure there is affordable food on UK tables despite rocketing competition from a world population set to soar by 3 billion during that period. The statistics are pretty scary. The current UK population is 22nd in the world league table at 61 million and totally dwarfed by the top three – the USA (307 million) India (1,157 million) and China (a staggering 1,324 million). Add to that a Chinese economy rocketing ahead at 10% growth last year whilst ours shrunk and that is a lot of noodles.
China: Fastest growing economy and consumer demand.
We had a foretaste of things to come in 2008 when soaring prices for basic foods in many third world countries led to food riots, partly caused by droughts and partly by tax- driven incentives for grain producers to shift into bio fuel production. The Government’s concerns are exacerbated by predicted demand for energy and fresh water rising by 50% within 20 years threatening a perfect storm of global catastrophes.
There are some hard political choices to be made. The UK imports three times as much agricultural produce as it
exports and although the threat of German U-boats threatening our food supply may have receded for the moment, Prof. Beddington proposes the use of genetically-modified crops to match demand by increasing yields and exporting surpluses. That would fly in the face of opposition from the EU, Friends of the Earth, organic producers, etc and might exacerbate problems in developing countries where small farmers are forced into poverty by cheap surpluses dumped into their local markets.
Placing the UK’s food supply into the hands of even fewer multinational research companies, producers, wholesalers and retailers is not a nice prospect either for the Markets industry. It’s a pity all the key players were at one or the other conference at Oxford apart from NABMA which missed out on another opportunity to promote the role retail markets can play. But there again, what’s new?
Badgers: Winners - for the moment.
So, what about the badgers? Successive Governments have spent over 25 years researching whether badgers spread tuberculosis amongst cattle, but there is still no end in sight to the cull of 40,000 TB-infected cows per year. The NFU thinks badgers need culling but Hilary and DEFRA propose a vaccine – not ready until 2014. In the meantime the UK continues to waste productive cattle and compensate farmers’ with millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. To ensure our food security we could, of course, eat all the badgers and the population of any countries larger than the UK, but I don’t think Hilary will be proposing that either.
Jonathan Owen is a director of Quarterbridge Project Management – a specialist consultancy providing business advice and design services to market owners and trade associations. He has a keen interest in the politics of retailing, growing vegetables and eating well.
Market Matters, published in Market Trade News magazine
