Food attitudes must change

Nicola Currie, regional director of the Country Land and Business Association, asks what the future holds for food production

Chnage in our attitude to food is vital

Now that over half of us live in towns an instinctive understanding of our countryside is no longer second nature. Yet what is going on there is important to every one of us because it is where so much of our food is produced. It is also where nature is nurtured and the two are inextricably linked.

The Government has just published a very important study: the Foresight Report on “The Future of Food and Farming, challenges and choices for global sustainability”. The title doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue I agree, possibly because it is written by an impressive group of international scientists, economists and sociologists. It matters because it sets out to tackle the issues affecting global food supplies for the next half century in the context of climate change and the need to protect our environment.

It is one of the truly shocking facts that tonight, across the world one billion people will go to bed hungry and yet at the same time another billion are already obese. Add to that the 30 per cent of food wasted in this country, not in processing but thrown away because it has lain uneaten in fridges or left on our plates. All this and our global population is set to increase from six to nine billion by 2050.

BBC Radio Four’s flagship “Today” programme gave extensive coverage to the Foresight Report but otherwise it went largely unnoticed by the media. I find this deeply worrying. Clearly its import was completely unappreciated. We are in danger of sleepwalking into what the Government Chief Scientist, Professor John Beddington, describes as the perfect storm: increasing world population, changing world climate which affects water supplies and higher commodity prices with limited land capacity suitable for agriculture.

Supplies of water, that essential ingredient for life, are already causing concern. In the next five years water “footprinting” is set to take over from carbon footprinting on our products. Why? Because, while one per cent of the world’s energy is used in food production, it takes 70 per cent of the world’s water.

Nicola Currie

What is farming doing about this? It is employing the latest technology, striving to produce more food with less resources. Satellite-steered machinery ensures 6mm precision when planting crops, delivering fertilisers or applying disease-preventing sprays.

Alongside that we have some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world and a workforce that is highly skilled. But farming can’t solve these global problems alone.

This country has a history of under-investment in research and development. Just five years ago the then government said home food production was not important; we would always be able to import what we needed. Now it is accepted that instead we may well be the ones responsible for feeding others.

To accomplish that important task we are going to need to research every agricultural element – drought resistant crops, better use of fertilisers, animal feeds that reduce methane, the list is long. And the marketplace cannot tackle this alone; it takes 15 years to breed a new variety of wheat.

The European Common Agricultural Policy needs adapting to ensure sustainable food production and environmental protection in equal measure: what we at the CLA describe as “food and environmental security”.

Managing the environment is something economists call a “market failure”, it cannot be sold; there is no market in which to trade field margins or skylark plots and as commodity prices are set to rise over the next 50 years, so the pressure on the environment will become greater.

If one good thing is to come out of this recession I hope it will be a change in our attitude towards food.

Like it or not prices are rising, so let us make a start by putting an end to food waste, waste in throwing it away uneaten and waste by eating more than is good for us.

Our countryside is so important, both as a space for our wildlife and our food production. The two are inextricably linked and how government policies are shaped matters to all of us.