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Food and the G8

Ok, so it wasn’t smart for the Prime Minister to be lecturing us all on the importance of not wasting food just 24 hours before he was tucking into a gargantuan feast at the wretched G8 Summit in Japan. Derision was guaranteed, and not undeserved.

Unfortunately, however, this completely overshadowed the report on which the Prime Minister was commenting – namely, the Strategy Unit’s brand new policy document, "Food Matters". And that’s a shame – as it provides a really important contribution to an increasingly important (and urgent) debate about food.

In fact, this is the first crack at an integrated food policy that we have seen in the UK since the middle of the last century. In a world dominated by the Common Agricultural Policy, the World Trade Organisation and global food chains, politicians of every political persuasion have felt under no obligation to worry much about an integrated approach here in the UK.

Pretty stupid really, as generations of food and environmental campaigners kept pointing out – to no avail. But multiple shocks in the global food system over the last 18 months or more have jolted politicians out of their near-comatose state of complacency on food policy.

Albeit in catch-up mode, there is a lot of really good stuff in "Food Matters", including a number of critical pointers for the future – a new Foresight study to look at the full impacts of accelerating climate change on food consumption and production, and a new (and very welcome) push on sustainable food procurement across the public sector – with a new "Healthier Food Mark" scheme.

Having said all that, observers of the current debate about "sustainable development as add-on to business-as-usual as opposed to "sustainable development as a wholesale transformation of our dominant model of progress", will find "Food Matters" particularly fascinating. There is a deep, hugely damaging fault-line running all the way through it, captured in a brave but ultimately forlorn attempt to hold both "business-as-usual" and "business transformed" within the same policy framework.

For example, the report just takes it as a "given" that the World Bank’s estimates that cereal production "must" increase by 50%, and meat production by 80% by 2030 is some kind of higher-order imperative. If you start from that kind of "predict and provide" point of view, almost regardless of the impacts of climate change, the impact of oil at around $150 a barrel, the impact on the rural poor, the continuing degradation of productive land, over-exploitation of water resources and loss of biodiversity, then you are not likely to end up with anything even vaguely resembling sustainability. And from my perspective, as a keen supporter of Compassion in World Farming’s "Eat Less Meat" campaign, simply projecting year on year increases in meat production because there is a demand for it out there is ecologically insane.

The business-as-usual mindset in "Food Matters" still dominates. Food markets will apparently become even more globalised, high-tech breakthroughs (including GM) will apparently allow huge increases in yields, and intensive mono-cropping of commodity crops will dominate supply chains even more than they already do. There is no empirical basis to justify such manic assertions, but you can at least see exactly where they’re coming from. After all, wouldn’t it be wonderful, as Hilary Benn was arguing the other day, if we could just engineer another "Green Revolution" of the kind that lifted agricultural yields so dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s?

Well, no, it wouldn’t – if we continued to ignore every single one of those environmental and social limits referred to above, which we almost certainly would.

As you might expect, in that context, the "business transformed" mindset is far less well-developed in "Food Matters", but at least it’s there, peeping out tentatively from behind the report’s "business-as-usual" barriers. And that’s progress of a sort.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 14, 2008 1:48 PM |

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