At last, a cull that might do some good!

I will take a moment this week to celebrate the passing of Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary shuffled out of the government as David Cameron tries to freshen his cabinet in preparation for next year’s general election by culling the 'old white men in suits'.

Education Secretary, Michael Gove, was allegedly removed because he had become ‘toxic’ after taking on the teaching unions.  Personally I feel Paterson’s toxicity level should be even higher than Gove’s, but there are no unions defending our wildlife.

Paterson is the man who ignored scientific advice to proceed with the disastrous badger cull, and when that exercise was seen to have failed on both criteria of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘humaneness’ he ludicrously accused badgers of ‘moving the goalposts’!

He is the minister responsible for Britain’s wildlife who set traps for squirrels on his estate in Shropshire and then gleefully posed for photos with the dead animals. He is the man who lectured Africans about the need to protect elephants, while his department sanctioned the destruction of protected buzzard nests to protect pheasants reared for game shooting.

In his two year tenure in charge of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs he tried but failed to block EU plans to ban neonicotinoid pesticides, widely held to be responsible for devastating bees and other pollinators.

He watered down Natural England’s call for new Marine Conservation Zones.  This wide reaching consultation was set up by his own department at a cost of £8 million to look at safeguarding England’s marine environment,  but when the results indicated 127 different conservation areas were needed DEFRA announced it would take action on only 31 of them.

Paterson was the man in charge of farming who led a personal crusade in the face of public opinion to legalise GMOs. He even reneged on a deal struck with the Scottish government to represent their separate and opposite view at EU meetings.  But then he is also the minister who tried to dismiss the horse meat scandal as a simple issue of mislabeling rather than public safety, missing the point that if you don’t actually know what’s in your food you cannot possibly say it’s safe to eat!

He is the climate change denier who slashed 550 jobs at the Environment Agency dealing with flood prevention, and then presided over the worst floods in a generation in the winter of 2014. He even came in for criticism by the NFU for being too glib about the effects of global warming after suggesting a longer growing season might be good for UK agriculture.

There is barely a corner of Britain’s natural environment or food industry that has not been touched by this most appalling Secretary of State.   The wonder is that Cameron left him in the post for so long.

Paterson might reflect with some sense of irony that he and other big beasts of the party such as Gove, Clarke and Hague have all been culled to improve the electoral health of the Tory herd.   Instead his friends have been calling it a victory for the animal rights brigade.  He has left warning that he will not go quietly and will continue to voice his beliefs from the backbenches, but what of his replacement?

Liz Truss does not come from a farming background and unlike Paterson, or his former Under Secretary Richard Benyon, she does not own a country estate, however she does represent a rural constituency in South West Norfolk.

The suspicion will hang over her until she proves otherwise that her promotion owes more to being young and female than any special aptitude for the job.  In the past she has been a keen supporter of the badger cull, but there is little other evidence to indicate what kind of Environment Secretary she will be.  Time alone will tell, but it is hard to believe she could be any worse than her predecessor!

Here Comes The Rain Again!

I think we may now definitively say that the Monsoons have arrived.  Frankly I’m a bit disappointed; I thought the arrival would be more dramatic. It’s true that for the first couple of months after I arrived here in Bangalore we experienced almost no rain whatsoever, whereas now the likelihood of rain is ever-present. But I expected the change to be more black and white.  In old books I’ve read it was normal for characters to recall the exact date the rains started in any given year.

In reality it has been getting progressively cooler, wetter and windier for some weeks.  Although locally it has been fashionable to state with some sense of anticipation that the rain falling outside was just a precursor, ‘you wait; the real thing is yet to come!’ The truth is the change in the weather has been a gradual transformation.

I believe down by the coast, or even in some northern cities it is possible to mark a specific day as the start of the Monsoon. Up here on the Deccan plateau our weather is more complicated.  Right now the prevailing winds come from the west and no doubt much of the rain falls on the Western Ghats, the range of mountains that run from Gujarat in the north to Kerala in the south and separate the interior from the coastal strip.

And that’s another thing.  I’ve seen tropical or sub-tropical rain systems in Africa, Singapore and China.  In Guilin in Southern China, where I spent most of last year, it was officially named “The year of two Aprils” on account of the heavy Spring rains which persisted through  May and June and even into July.  In one memorable typhoon in Hong Kong a few years back, I saw the city’s famous red taxis floating down the streets of Wan Chai on flash floods.  I know what heavy rain is.  Yet so far I’ve seen nothing here that would be unusual in an English summer.  Actually I quite enjoy it, but rather than the torrential downpours I was expecting, we have had several days of soft light drizzle.

The thing is the Monsoon is a big talking point in India.  Even among the urbane coffee set and expats that I have mainly met, it is a regular topic of conversation.  The rains will be late this year. No they will be on time but lighter than usual.  No this is going to be a normal year.  And so on.  When the western Monsoon did finally arrive in Kerala on the southwest coast, Saturday June 1st for those who are interested, the country’s press trumpeted it loudly. “Southwest Monsoon Arrives in Kerala” said The Hindu, “Monsoon Rains Hit Southern Kerala Coast: Weather Official” beamed the Times of India.  From there the rains will now advance progressively up the country to Delhi

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It matters.  In fact it matters enormously to the people here and to the whole Indian economy.  For me it places a question mark over my weekly game of golf and means that I no longer need to sleep with the aircon on.  Mid day temperatures in Bangalore now hover around 25 degrees Celsius instead of the high thirties which was standard back in April. But for almost a billion people it is literally the difference between feast and famine.

Around 70% of India’s population depends directly or indirectly on farming.  Agriculture makes up 14.5% of the country’s GDP.  In global terms India is both one of the biggest producers and consumers of food.  Most farms are rain-fed and have no other form of irrigation, yet 75% of the annual rainfall will come between June and September.  A weak monsoon or even drought damages the rural economy, affecting the country’s bottom line growth figures; it causes suffering among agricultural communities and can lead to civil unrest and political turbulence at national level.

No wonder then that so much national energy is spent on trying to mitigate the effects of the Monsoon.  The government’s Indian Council of Agricultural Research, including its facility here in Bangalore, puts a lot of effort into developing drought resistant strains of staple crops.  The Indian Meteorological Department is constantly tasked with developing better forecasting tools and producing early warning systems for droughts, which are now expected to occur at roughly five yearly intervals. No doubt much could also be done to conserve what precious supply of water exists.

In the long run however India needs to reduce its dependency on this annual event which is both unpredictable and outside its control.  India is proud of its status as a BRIC nation, and Indians are fond of announcing that this is the First World.  Yet surely, whatever development means it has to imply that a country has advanced to a level where political, social and economic success are not left to the caprice of the weather?

[P.S. Since I published this post almost 1,000 people have been killed in some of the worst flooding North India has experienced in years.  In Bangalore however, we are still waiting for some proper rain.]

Plight of the Humble Bee

Right around the world there we are currently experiencing a collapse in the numbers of bees.  The decline of bee populations has been noticed in Europe and North America since the 1960s, but has really accelerated in the last twenty years.  Of course most pollinator species are wild and frankly we do not have data on their populations, but for managed bee colonies, figures across Europe show an approximate 50% drop in honey bee numbers since about 1990. 

Other studies provide corroborating evidence.  For instance in the UK there has been a 70% drop in the numbers of wild flowers requiring animal pollination over the same period, and butterfly numbers are similarly affected.  These statistics are sad in themselves but it’s bees that really matter.

The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) warns that on current trends, bees could be extinct in Britain within a decade.  This is not only bad news for honey enthusiasts, but it poses a serious potential threat to us all.  Many people today like to promote the idea that humans have escaped from nature, that we have the technological nouse to control our environment.  The truth is we are completely dependent on nature and the humble bee is a case in point.

Almost one third of total farm output depends on animal pollination, mainly by bees.  The list of plants affected includes:  nuts; nearly all fruit; brassicas such as cabbage, broccoli and sprouts; tomatoes; peppers, chilies and other spices; cucumbers; melons; marrows; courgettes;  aubergines; avocados; coconuts; tea and coffee.  Collectively these crops account for roughly 35% of all calories consumed globally.

Bee keepers have long suspected that agricultural (and horticultural) pesticides were to blame for the mysterious disappearance of bees from hives in a phenomenon labeled Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).  However the chemical companies which produce the pesticides naturally refuted this and preferred to look for evidence of viruses or parasites, which would presumably need yet more pharmacological solutions.

Bees do have a variety of problems to contend with.  Disease does play its part, and man made problems such as industrial pollution and habitat loss are significant factors too.  But for some years now there has been clear evidence indicating that the use of systemic pesticides, known collectively as neonicotinoids could be having a devastating impact on bee populations.

Development of these products only began in the late eighties.  Today many seeds are pretreated with neonicotinoids.  They are designed to travel through the plant’s sap and protect the leaves, stems and shoots against harmful insects that munch upon them.  However, they also find their way in to the flowers, pollen and nectar.

Manufacturers of products such as Gaucho, Cruiser, Poncho, Merit and Flagship have conducted laboratory trials which demonstrate that the doses absorbed by bees through nectar are sub-lethal, but several other recent studies have shown that these chemicals affect the pollinators in unsuspected ways.  They specifically target the insects’ central nervous systems causing their internal navigation systems and memories to malfunction.  French beekeepers describe this as ’mad bee disease’.  The bees simply go out to forage and forget how to get back to the hive, which eventually dies of starvation.  These chemicals also weaken the animals’ immune system leaving them vulnerable to lethal fungal infections.  In both cases it is difficult to prove such deaths are caused by pesticides, but they are.

Last year, the European Commission asked The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) to look at the impact of three such neonicotinoids: Imidacloprid, Clothianidin and Thiamethoxam, on bees, and on 16^th January this year EFSA published their findings.  The report found unacceptably high risks to honey bees from pollen, nectar and dust particles and where bees were exposed to sap through guttation (many plants naturally express sap through their leaves), the effect was ’acute ’.

Accordingly the EU Commissioner for Health & Consumer Policy, Tonio Borg, asked for a two year ban on the use of these three neonicotinoids across all member states.  A YouGov poll conducted for the online campaigning organization Avaaz found that over 70% of the UK public supported such a ban and Avaaz amassed over 2.5 million signatures from across Europe.

Despite a wealth of scientific data supporting the ban, the proposal was defeated on March 15^th in The Standing Committee on Food Chain and Animal Health made up of representatives from Member States within the European Union.   Thirteen countries supported the ban including: France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Poland.  Nine opposed, led by Romania and Bulgaria, and five, including the UK and Germany abstained.

The UK Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson ,says there was insufficient evidence.  His own department, DEFRA, has commissioned separate research in to the issue and will now wait for the results.  Privately it is widely believed that the big pharma manufacturers, especially Bayer and Syngenta, who dominate this market,  lobbied hard to avoid the ban.

So far so bad, but there is a glimmer of hope for the bees.  Since there was no overall majority in the European vote, it falls to the Commission itself to decide what to do next.  If the nations do not agree a compromise in the coming weeks, the Commissioner can implement the policy for them.  Mr Borg is currently considering what his next steps should be.

This would be a good time to make your opinion heard either by writing to the Commissioner directly, or by lobbying your MEP.  Alternatively, if you live in the UK you can sign the attached ePetition requiring the government to allow a Parliamentary debate on the subject.  The bees need all the help they can get!

 Lord Deben, better known perhaps as John Selwyn Gummer, was the Conservative farms minister in the nineties who famously fed beef burgers to his daughter to calm public nerves over BSE.  He is clearly not a man averse to taking the odd risk.  Yet he believes "If ever there were an issue where the precautionary principle ought to guide our actions, it is in the use of neonicotinoids. Bees are too important to our crops to continue to take this risk.”  I couldn’t put it better myself

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Are we saddled with the meat we deserve?

The current food scare in the UK concerning the presence of horse meat in the human food chain is a perfect scandal for our time. Here in Britain there is no tradition of eating horse, and the average person regards it as something akin to cannibalism to tuck in to dear old Neddy.  In this country, after all, charities find it easier to raise money for donkeys than for starving children.  Of course horse meat per se is perfectly safe for human consumption and it is widely sold and eaten elsewhere in Europe.   That’s why the government has been keen to paint this as a ‘food labeling’ issue rather than a concern over ‘food safety’.  The trouble with that argument is that if you don’t know what’s going in to your food you really can’t claim that it’s perfectly safe to eat can you?

But what makes this story perfect is the cast of potential villains. They chime perfectly with current social and political prejudices.

Owen Patterson, Secretary of State
for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs

To start with, the Eurosceptic Secretary of State for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson, initially tried to put the blame on our European partners and therefore somehow obliquely on the EU itself.

First he pointed the finger of blame at France, a well-known nation  of horse munchers. Then the search for a culprit spread to Romania, already in the spotlight as we brace ourselves for a new wave, or is a tsunami, of East European immigration.  First we get Romanian horse meat, he seemed to be implying, and then next year we get Romanian benefit scroungers!  He talked darkly of ‘an international criminal conspiracy’.  Europe’s a dangerous place. See what happens when we lose control of our borders?  This line of argument ended abruptly when horse meat was subsequently found entering the food chain at two British abattoirs.

Next up for blame was the dreaded quango.  Paterson has been quick to use the Food Standards Agency (FSA) as a shield.  The Tories have a long standing and non-specific antipathy to quangos, which undoubtedly includes the FSA.  Despite the fact that the number of FSA food inspectors has been halved since this government came to power, the minister has been quick to put primary responsibility for tackling the problem at their door.  In effect he has tried to use the agency to deflect attention from himself and the ministry.  Of course if the FSA fails to provide a solution, then it is just another indictment of quangos.

For the opposition, his Labour shadow Mary Creagh, has seen her profile boosted by the story.  She can rightly point out that this issue affects poor and low paid people disproportionately.  Mr Paterson might claim he would be prepared to eat a Findus lasagne, but nobody really believes that he ever has.  Government ministers earning £134,565 do not normally shop in the value range.  Somehow this story plays perfectly in to the Labour narrative of a government of toffs, out of touch with the needs of common people and primarily interested in helping their millionaire chums.  For some people no doubt, it’s a kind of sequel to ‘pastygate’.

Away from Westminster the argument has mainly been about the role of supermarkets and big food processors, already reviled for destroying high streets and small businesses, squeezing farmers, encouraging factory farming and raising food miles and CO2 emissions.  If you want to avoid horse meat in your burgers, goes one strand of the debate, go back to your local family butcher.  He might even know the name of the cow he’s chopping up for your dinner.

That argument is silly and insulting to many people who might be time poor as well as cash poor.  Actually there is some evidence that consumers have been turning to prime cuts in the wake of the continuing horse meat saga, but for many that is not an option and it’s not a solution.  This blog is a big supporter of the concept of buying fresh, local produce from local farms through small scale shops and distributors, but there is no way we are going to turn back the clock to some bucolic vision of Britain taken from a Thomas Hardy novel.  Food is a global industry and factory processed food, supermarkets and the like are here to stay.  Even poor people have a right to expect that the food they buy is safe and corresponds to the description on the packaging.

In fact this whole episode is a symptom of the inexorable rise of world food prices.   I have blogged previously on how the global supply of farm land is largely static and how a world population of over 7 billion is responsible for a long term and continuous upward trend in food prices.  Meat is particularly expensive to produce, and with world fish stocks in decline protein is becoming especially expensive with increasing demand from a new aspirational middle classes emerging in countries such as China, India and the Gulf states.  The high price of beef present s opportunities for unscrupulous operators to make money.  It’s a perfect capitalist crime. Exactly what we should expect from the lightly regulated free-market.

The truth is, on this occasion, may be awkward and uncomfortable for Mr. Paterson and his political friends, but we’ve got all the wrong characters in the dock.

We stand a much better chance of controlling this nefarious trade with the help of our EU partners and Europe wide regulations and controls.  It’s actually a strong argument in favour of the EU.  Remember the whole thing came to light thanks to the Irish Food Safety Authority alerting their British counterparts to their findings.

Within Britain we need a robust, confident and well-resourced FSA to tackle the small but ever-present threat in our domestic industry.  Nobody but the secretary of state is convinced by the government’s preference for voluntary schemes, self-regulation and nudge theory.  proper regulation is not the dead hand of the state interfering with wealth creation, it is the foundation of a safe and well-respected industry.  Far from being a break on growth it can facilitate it.

And yes we need supermarkets to wield their enormous power in the interest of consumers.  Only the big retailers have the resources and the motivation to drive criminals out of the industry and provide the safeguards that the public demands.

Who Do You Think You Are Kidding Mr. Osborne?

Is there anybody who doesn’t know that we are in the middle of the worst economic recession since the war?  This week UK unemployment reached its highest point in 15 years, inflation is running at 5%, real wages are falling and business confidence is being held down by the crisis in the Eurozone.  Even if all that has somehow passed you by, you could tell something big was happening just by listening to the language of our politicians.  David Cameron in his first leader’s speech as Prime Minister resurrected Lord Kitchener’s call to arms telling his party “Your country needs you”.  George Osborne, The Chancellor of the Exchequer, caught the prevailing mood and revived his own wartime slogan to tell voters “We are all in it together”, conveniently ignoring the fact that some of us are more ‘in it’ than others in the way that only a multi millionaire could.  Even the Green Party has recently called for a ‘new home front’ against climate change, Caroline Lucas, the party’s only MP comparing climate deniers to appeasers of the Nazis in the 1930s.

Maybe it really is time to look to the 1940s for parallels in our present circumstances.  After all, the whole of Europe is occupied with the plight of the Euro and in thrall to the Germans. Britain alone, it seems, stands on the outside ready to fight the contagion of Eurozone uncertainty on the beaches.  For the most part, the British public has adopted austerity with the usual blend of sangfroid and chirpy resignation.  There is something in the British character that appears to make the hair shirt almost as comfortable as the ubiquitous shell suit, or in the case of George Osborne, the Barbour jacket and green wellies.

I wonder if all this wartime retrospection is having an impact on the nation’s eating habits yet.  After all the extraordinary fact is that the Second World War was the only time in modern history when the entire population of Britain has enjoyed a healthy balanced diet.  In both WWI and WWII when the UK introduced conscription they found many working class men unfit for military service because of malnourishment.  Almost immediately, as affluence returned in the 1960s, a new disease of obesity began to manifest itself, and is now running at epidemic proportions.  But for a few years in the middle of the twentieth century, government rationing ensured that everyone got a fair share and everyone had the basics for healthy living.

In 1939, (for American readers that’s when WWII started for the rest of us) Britain was completely locked in to the Empire System,  which meant we imported 75% of our food: wheat from Canada; butter, cheese and sheep meat from Australia and New Zealand; sugar from the Caribbean and so on.  Next time you hear someone talking about ‘food security’ think about that.  More than 50% of meat was imported, 70% of cheese and sugar, nearly 80% of fruits and about 70% of cereals and fats.

The Germans knew that the quickest way to force Britain to surrender was literally to starve her into submission.  That is what led to the Battle of the Atlantic where convoys of merchant ships ran the gauntlet of U Boats in order to bring basic food stuffs into the British Isles.

As the blockade began to bite, the government had no choice but to take a firm grip on food distribution and introduce rationing for all.  The minimum weekly allowance of butter per person was only 2oz (57g), cheese was even tighter at 1oz (28g) and sugar was only 8oz (57g).  Eggs were rationed at 1 per week, but only if available.  They usually weren’t.  Meat was rationed by price, but again availability governed consumption more often than the official measure.

The only things that were not rationed at any stage during the war were bread and fresh vegetables.  Ironically bread and potatoes only went on ration after the end of the war, as Britain assumed the additional responsibility for feeding liberated Europe.  In fact as members of the public were urged to ‘Dig for Victory’ the supply of home grown vegetables grew steadily.  The whole country it seems  willingly dug up their lawns and flower beds to grow spuds and leeks.  That hair shirt mentality again!  By 1943 over 1 million tons of vegetables were being produced from gardens and allotments.

The Ministry of Food then set about providing information and recipes to help people make the most of their rations.  Marguerite Patten, who later became a famous food writer, was employed to come up with nourishing recipes which she broadcast on the BBC.  Most famous of all was the vegetable pie which came to be named after the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, but which was in fact created at the Savoy Hotel in London by the head Chef, Francis Latry.

Frederick Marquis,
1st Earl of Woolton

This diet, rich in vegetables, low in meat and fats, was sufficient to “Keep Britain Fighting Fit,” in the words of yet another wartime slogan, and by the end of the war Britain produced almost 80% of its own food.  The figure today by the way, stands at around 60%.

When rich politicians decide to preach to the public, or when they urge people to tighten their belts while standing in front of their chauffeur driven Jaguars, it naturally falls on deaf ears.  The public simply does not believe that they are all in it together while they see bankers receiving huge and unjustifiable bonuses, or MPs fiddling their expenses.  But anyone who is nervously watching inflation erode their savings, or struggling to survive on Job Seekers Allowance could do a lot worse than taking up gardening.  Digging is therapeutic and fresh vegetables are delicious.  You will also find that growing and eating your own vegetables is good for your health, good for your wallet and good for the planet.

Recipe – Lord Woolton’s Pie

Ingredients:

1lb diced potatoes
1lb cauliflower
1lb diced carrots
1lb diced swede
3 spring onions
1 teaspoon vegetable extract
1 tablespoon oatmeal

Salt and pepper to taste
A little chopped parsley

Method:

 Cook everything together with just enough water to cover, stirring often to prevent it sticking to the pan. Let the mixture cool. Spoon into a pie dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley.

Cover with a crust of potatoes or whole meal pastry. Bake in a moderate oven until golden brown. Serve hot with gravy.

Wooltons Pie with potato crust

Notes:  I’m not sure what was meant by ‘vegetable extract’ in the 1940s, but I used Marmite.  Also the original recipe suggests varying the selection of vegetables according to season and availability.  Although I have a long standing love affair with swede we are currently not on talking terms, so I substituted some butternut squash.   I didn’t have spring onions so in the interest of austerity I substituted a small red onion.  I’ve also read comments that the pie could be a bit bland, so I added a chopped leek and used a cheese mash for the crust.  I probably blew my ration for the month!

Verdict:  Using a mashed potato topping made this into a kind of vegetarian shepherd’s pie and it had the same comforting, homely feel.  The taste was evocative of my childhood somehow and I thoroughly enjoyed it, which is just as well because even though I halved the quantities there’s enough for two more main meals.  Quite acceptable as a filling, midweek dinner and economical too.

What a Waste

Wasting food has always been a difficult issue for people of my generation.  As kids, if we didn’t clear our plates at meal times we were always told to ‘think of the starving millions of Africa’.  Apart from the fact that it was hardly an aid to appetite to see pictures of emaciated children with distended bellies caused by kwashiorkor, I could never quite see the connection between the pile of cabbage on my plate and a child 6,000 miles away.  I remember a cartoon in Punch describing exactly that situation.  In the final frame, after the kid has been admonished by his mother and finished his dinner, he gets a phone call, and the voice at the other end says, “This is the starving millions of Africa. Thank you for eating your dinner.” Haha.  Today the connection seems much clearer to me.

Have you noticed that food is getting expensive?  If so, you are not alone.  According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, world food prices have risen in all but one of the past 5 years, and in August 2011 the Food Price Index (FFPI) stood 26% higher than the same month last year.  And now the bad news, this trend is here to stay.

The world’s population is forecast to rise to a peak of around 9 billion sometime in the middle of this century.  That’s an increase of almost 50% since the start of the century only 11 years ago.  Also, it may not feel like it, but people are getting richer.  Rich people demand a better, more varied diet with more animal protein, which is an inefficient way to feed humans.  For instance with grain fed cattle, it takes about 6 kilos of grain to produce one kilo of lean beef.

Meanwhile the world’s food resources are under huge pressure.   Only about 18% of the land mass is agriculturally productive.  The rest is made up of deserts, mountains, tundra, forests and so on.  That percentage cannot easily be increased without massive environmental impact.  In fact, it is declining.  70,000 square kilometers of agricultural land is lost to construction every year.  That’s an area roughly twice the size of the Netherlands.  All those new people need houses too.

Global warming and unsustainable cultivation methods are leading to increased desertification in many areas of the world including Africa, Asia and North America.  The Sahara Desert alone is expanding at a rate of 48km per year.

Meanwhile rising sea levels are threatening huge tracts of productive land and also many population centres.  A study in the April, 2007 issue of Environmentand Urbanization reports that 634 million people live in coastal areas within 30 feet (9.1 m) of sea level. The study also reported that about two thirds of the world's cities with over five million people are located in these low-lying coastal areas.  Displaced city dwellers add to the pressures on agricultural land.

If that weren’t bad enough we are actually diverting productive arable land and pasture which is currently growing food, to the production of crops for biofuels.  Many countries have set targets for the substitution of fossil fuels with renewable biofuels in response to peak oil and greenhouse gas emissions targets.  Presently around 2% of all productive land is used for biofuel production. But if current biofuels goals are to be met, it could require between 10% and 42% of existing arable land to meet 2020 targets, which is unlikely to be politically acceptable.  By the way, the variation is so wide because biofuels are often planted on pasture which has previously been considered unsuitable for growing crops, but that brings its own problems.

And if the land is under pressure, it is no use looking to the sea solve our food needs.  The oceans are also under stress.  75% of the world’s fish stocks are either over exploited or at maximum sustainable exploitation levels.  Some estimates say that edible fish stocks will reach total depletion by 2050 unless we alter our current rate of exploitation.  And it’s not just fishing.  We continue to use the sea as a dumping ground; we destroy fisheries by polluting them, extracting minerals from the sea bed and building off-shore installations and wind farms.  We really can’t expect the sea to provide the extra food we will need to feed the world.

What this adds up to is that food supply is currently static or declining.  In fact huge advances in agricultural productivity were made throughout the second half of the twentieth century in what is now termed the Green Revolution.  The trouble is we need to repeat that over the next 40 years and many scientists doubt whether that is possible.  In any case it was associated everywhere with huge environmental degradation which we could ill afford to repeat.

So with inelastic supply and a rapidly increasing demand, food prices can only go one way.  For the rich, developed world this is inconvenient.  We may have to spend more on food and commensurately less on other luxury items.  But for a large part of the world’s population, price rises and increased competition will mean poverty and starvation.  Finally globalisation has made the connection between the food on my plate and the diet of those starving masses.



Onions left in the field

Yet in spite of the rising prices and the growing shortages of food, we waste an enormous amount.  According to the FAO we waste around one third of all the food we produce.  In the UK alone we waste 16 million tonnes of food annually.

·         3.7 m tonnes never leaves the farm

·         3.6 m tonnes are lost in the supply train

·         700,000 tonnes are wasted in hotels and restaurants

·         This means fully half is wasted by consumers.

This is a symptom of modern living.  Immediately after WWII when food was scarce the waste figure was around 2%.  Even 30 years ago it was estimated to be only 6%.  Part of the problem is that, in the developed world at least, although food prices are at an all time high, they are also at a historical low when measured against disposable income.  In the UK the average family spends only 7% to 10% of total income on food, although the global average is around 50% and some developing countries it rises to 80%.   But that is not to say that many families can afford to waste money.  On average each household could save £50 per month if they cut out all food waste which should be welcome to most people.

Of course it’s not just a waste of money.  The UK produces only 60% of its food and the rest is imported from all over the world, much of it by air.  For instance, salad products are among the worst cases when it comes to waste.  46% of all salad ends up being wasted, and much of that is imported from Spain. The campaign group, Love Food Hate Waste, estimates that  eliminating Britain’s food waste would have the same carbon impact as removing a quarter of all cars on the road.

Their website offers recipes and tips designed to help consumers cut down on waste.  They offer useful advice on a range of subjects from measuring individual portions, food management and how to interpret shelf-life labels.

As for restaurants, the Sustainable Restaurants Association will launch a campaign among its members to help them cut down on waste starting next month entitled Too Good To Waste.  The SRA Food Waste Survey has calculated that by reducing food waste by only 20%, restaurants could save up to £1,700 per annum just on collection costs, and that’s not including the money spent on the food in the first place.

Like LFHW, the SRA web site offers advice to members on how to reduce spoilage, preparation waste and plate waste.  These include everything from having your fridge properly serviced to finding uses for trimmings including potato peelings and off-cuts from meat.

And for customers, why not ask for a doggy-bag?  It seems many diners in the UK are still reluctant to take food home.  This is not a problem in America where even top restaurants will be glad to box up leftovers.  After all, you’ve paid for it.  And every penny you save is a penny that doesn’t push prices up.  Every ounce of food saved has carbon savings.  And in this globalised world, there really is a connection between the food you waste and the starving millions of Africa.