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July 30, 2007 - NFU and vegans

I’m in trouble with the NFU. Not my fault, it has to be said, but a no doubt wonderful organisation called the Redditch Vegetarians and Vegans has issued an ‘eco-poster’ directly attributing these words me: “You make a bigger contribution to stopping global warming by becoming vegan than by switching to an eco-friendly car”.

Tut-tut, you Redditch Veggies! As you well know, what I actually said, back in January 2006, was as follows:

"Researchers at the University of Chicago have calculated the relative carbon intensity of a standard vegan diet in comparison to a US-style carnivorous diet, all the way through from production to processing to distribution to cooking and consumption. An average burger man (that is, not the outsize variety) emits the equivalent of 1.5 tonnes more CO2 every year than the standard vegan. By comparison, were you to trade in your conventional gas-guzzler for a state of the art Prius hybrid, your CO2 savings would amount to little more than one tonne per year."

I think everyone would probably agree:

(a) I am not a researcher at the University of Chicago;
(b) It’s very bad form sticking words into a person’s mouth from which they never emerged;
(c) That this is a very important issue which should indeed be discussed -intelligently and tolerantly – as I’m sure the NFU would agree.

So here’s a warning to the Redditch Veggies: do not, on pain of a torrent of incandescently angry emails ever mis-quote me again, let alone mis-quote what I am about to say now:

“Researchers at the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan have carried out a life-cycle analysis of beef production which shows that 'a kilogram of beef leads to the emission of greenhouse gases with a warming potential equivalent of 36.4 kilograms of CO2' (New Scientist, 21.7.07). To help you get your head around this, that’s equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by the average car over a distance of 250 kilometres."

As the (very) occasional consumer of (organic) beef, and preferably reared by people I know personally, I still feel a bad headache coming on at the concept of ‘beef offsets’ looming in my mind. No aspirin being to hand, a large malt whisky is clearly needed, were it not for the fact ……..

“Researchers at Strathclyde University have just carried out a life-cycle analysis of a ten-year old Macallan single malt whisky, which shows … “

They haven’t, actually! And even if they had, and shown that the production of a bottle of the same caused the emission of CO2 equivalent to flying from Birmingham to Speyside (which of course I wouldn’t dream of doing anyway - so relax Caroline), I wouldn’t give a damn.

Posted on July 30, 2007 5:17 PM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

November 15, 2007 - Just how 'anti-science' is it to worry about GM crops?

GM?In the November issue of Prospect, Dick Taverne has published a bitter critique ('The Real GM Food Scandal') of all those organisations and individuals still out there campaigning against the introduction of GM foods.

It's a splendid and largely ludicrous rant, to which I was invited to make an equally polemical response:

Article for Prospect Magazine Website

The pro-GM lobby has always had an almost unique capacity to shoot itself in the foot. From Monsanto's original bully-boy tactics trying to force its GM products on reluctant EU countries back in the 1990s, through to today's inept combination of legal threats and would-be seduction, it knows how to alienate people more effectively than any other industry sector. And Dick Taverne operates very comfortably in that tradition, with a show of arrogance that beggars belief.

His starting point in the Prospect article is a simple one: that anyone who has reservations about the use of genetic modification in agriculture is either mentally defective or simply "anti-science". Having positioned them in that particular corner, he then attributes to them an almost superhuman capacity to whip up fear and hostility amongst ordinary citizens, whom he portrays in turn as ignorant, gullible folk who should just sit back quietly and put their faith in the men in white coats and proselytising GM evangelists such as himself.

I resent this on both counts. I am not an anti-GM fundamentalist. I have always been open to the possibility that GM might have a role to play in securing a more sustainable food production system in the future, and have always said so in public. I am therefore very interested in what is happening in the world of GM science, was fascinated to catch up on various cutting-edge projects on a recent visit to the John Innes Centre outside Norwich, and have just finished a radio documentary on agricultural biodiversity, which I like to think was reasonably balanced. But the fact that I still have concerns (on health, environmental, agronomic and governance grounds) marks me down in Taverne's fundamentalist world as an emotionally-flawed dipstick.

I also despise his patronising contempt for the general public. He adheres rigorously to the "empty vessel" school of science education: most people are stupid and ill-informed on most issues most of the time, so it's the task of scientists to fill them up with impeccably objective "facts". Then they will be alright.

But Taverne's own abuse of science makes him a very dodgy vessel-filler. He states categorically, for instance, that there is no evidence on risks to human health. "The fact is that there is not a shred of evidence of risk to human health from GM crops". Yet he must know that this is a seriously misleading statement, in that proper animal feeding trials into the potential health effects of new GM crops were not originally required, and even now are still not routinely required. He must also know that there is a body of evidence emerging from governments, universities and companies themselves demonstrating a range of unexplained (and potentially health-threatening) effects from the consumption of genetically-modified organisms.

Taverne is therefore right in saying that there is no evidence of people keeling over and dying as a direct consequence of ingesting GM products; he is totally wrong in seeking to persuade people that there is no evidence regarding potential health risks. Hence the continuing need for strict regulation (whereas Taverne would leave it all up to Monsanto and other multinationals to regulate themselves) based on the proper application of the Precautionary Principle, which Taverne dismisses out of hand as further evidence of anti-scientific obstructionism.

Elsewhere in his article, Taverne states categorically that there is little evidence of environmental damage from GM crops, and that "worldwide experience of GM crops to date provides strong evidence that they actually benefit the environment". To demonstrate this evidence, he quotes from one recent (assertively pro-GM) study without even alluding in passing to the fact that there is a substantial body of "strong evidence" (as published in peer-reviewed science journals) detailing substantial damage to the environment.

Beyond categorical (and highly misleading) assertions, he also does a fine line in exaggeration and over-claiming. For instance, his account of the interesting case study of Golden Rice (modified in such a way as to address the problem of vitamin A deficiency in poor countries) is so one-sided as to be laughable. He pins the blame for delays in bringing Golden Rice to market entirely on over-zealous regulators and environmental campaigners, implying that they are therefore directly responsible for the deaths of between one and two million people a year and 500,000 children a year going blind.

Reality tells us how far from the truth this really is. The problems with Golden Rice have much more to do with underperformance (early strains would have necessitated the consumption of at least 12 bowls of rice to achieve the required dosage of vitamin A!), continuing controversy amongst nutritionists (many of whom believe the answer lies more in a proper diet including green vegetables than in Golden Rice), and aesthetics - Dick Taverne may not like this, but a lot of people in those countries still prefer their rice white not yellow!

A lot of the over-claiming is done by allusion. Taverne makes many references to the contribution that GM crops are (apparently) already making to reducing hunger and disease, and to combatting drought and high levels of salinity in the soil. To anyone in the business, that's a bit of a mystery. True enough, there's a lot more in today's innovation pipeline which specifically addresses those critical issues. But right now, there is very little going on out there that fits any of those categories of need.

This is hardly surprising given that almost all GM crops today are grown either for non-food purposes (primarily cotton), or to produce the protein that is needed to feed the livestock for our ever more meat-intensive diets. On balance, given the latest evidence about the impact of meat-eating on the incidence of cancer, let alone a host of other health impacts, GM feedstuffs are probably responsible for killing far more people than they have rescued from drought, disease or famine.

That's precisely the kind of cheap shot that will enrage Dick Taverne. But I use it deliberately. Because what enrages most people about Taverne's GM fantasies is his refusal to confront some harsh truths about the inherent unsustainability of modern agriculture - a physical reality which current GM strategies and products reinforce at every turn. Today's resource-intensive monocultures are depleting and polluting ground water, degrading soil quality, damaging biodiversity, consuming vast amounts of energy, and contributing significantly to accelerating climate change. GM or non-GM, this is simply unsustainable, and dangling in front of people the chimera of genetically-modified monocultural techno-fixes is classic escapism of the worst kind.

In his Editorial introducing Dick Taverne's article in Prospect, David Goodhart talked of the challenge of avoiding "a Malthusian crunch", and the potential contribution that GM might make to that. In truth, there is no avoiding that Malthusian crunch until we understand that people are not short of food today because of a lack of food but because of poverty, that current levels of wastage throughout the food chain border on the criminal, and that our current meat-intensive diets are not sustainable for the two billion or so people who enjoy them today let alone for the nine billion with whom we'll be sharing this planet by 2050.

Get your head around those facts, and then let's have a serious, balanced discussion, looking at the evidence on both sides, about the potential of GM to bring forward solutions in what is going to be a very different world.


Jonathon Porritt
14 November 2007

Posted by JP on November 15, 2007 12:16 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

February 12, 2008 - Loony vs Mainstream

Politicians must be finding it harder and harder to work out in the wider sustainability agenda what still falls in the ‘loony’ category (as climate change once did) and what now falls in the ‘emerging and increasingly mainstream’ category – which they better get their heads around for fear of appearing out of touch. The speed with which issues move from the former to the latter must be mind-boggling for them, persuaded as most of them still are that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with today’s model of ‘progress through growth’ that can’t be sorted out by a few timely touches on the tiller. Bless!

For instance, only a couple of years ago, if you so much as mentioned the need for Ministers and officials to think much more seriously about ‘food security’ (in other words, how this nation will secure access to enough food of the right kind at the right price in the future), you were definitely consigned to the loony category.

Indeed, Defra and Treasury combined forces in 2005 to produce a ‘Vision’ for the Common Agricultural Policy which oozed contempt for any such lame-brain recidivism: food security may have been a big deal after the Second World War (when the Common Agricultural Policy became our principal response), but today’s global food industry is deemed to be totally immune to any such pressures.

It all looks very different now – and although Treasury is unlikely to be found giving voice to such an heretical concept, Defra is beginning to think much more seriously about food security. This may have something to do with the highest-ever recorded rises in the price of food in 2007, or the fact that prices in various food commodity futures markets are climbing higher and higher, or that food imports into China are rising every year, or that harvests around the world are being seriously impacted by extreme weather conditions (which you may or may not link directly to climate change, depending on how cautious you are in pointing out cause and effect in such phenomena), and that ill-thought-out strategies for converting land to produce biofuels rather than food are already having an effect on food prices in different parts of the world.

So watch out for further developments on this front within Defra – if not in Treasury, or even in the FCO, where David Miliband has just junked sustainable development as one of the Foreign Office’s over-arching objectives. But more on that later!

Posted by JP on February 12, 2008 6:50 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

May 8, 2008 - Food Security

Forum for the Future is running an event for some of our partners in the built environment almost exactly one year on from this time last year. I’ve just reviewed the stuff we shoved at them a year ago – on climate change, energy security, peak oil, spatial planning, inequality, prospects for economic growth, and so on – and it’s quite mind-boggling to see how much the world has changed in the last year! And because the focus is on the built environment, I didn’t even mention things like food security which has “suddenly” soared up the global agenda.

I put ‘suddenly’ in those ironic speech marks simply because one of the most shocking things to have emerged in all the panic calls uttered recently by the UN and others is the degree to which this current crisis has been predicted by experts time after time – as politicians disregarded global food agendas, and research budgets were cut and cut again in the times of plenty.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has now summoned world leaders to an emergency summit in June, and set up a new Taskforce to put forward ways of dealing with the crisis. The World Food Programme has said it needs to find an additional $750 million to cope with the combination of growing numbers of people in need and rapidly rising food prices.

So, food security is back on the political agenda. Climate change is omni-present. Peak Oil is rising. The credit crunch is the new player on the block. Resource wars are looming. Rainforest destruction just won’t go away. Species loss is as bad as ever, but no one cares – for now. Water shortages are chronic.

But much, much more worrying are the linkages between all these notionally “separate” phenomena. The synergies, feedback loops, interdependencies. At long last, people are starting to make the connections – and are even beginning to link all those separate symptoms back to their root cause: today’s literally insane notion of getting richer by trashing the planet and screwing the poor.

Don’t hold your breath, but pretty soon you might even hear one or two of them start talking about population. And then you’ll know revolution is on the way.

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on May 8, 2008 11:15 AM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

July 14, 2008 - 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 | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

August 7, 2008 - Low Impact Food

So here's another sustainability bottom line: the prospect of 120 billion animals for human consumption is no more sustainable than the prospect of 9 billion human beings. The two numbers are connected of course: more humans, more meat consumption. More better-off humans, much more meat consumption – with a few exceptions like India.

There are 60 billion animals in the world today, a number which the Food and Agriculture Organisation reckons will double by 2050 simply because of increased demand. The combined impact of these animals is already massive, accounting for 18% of total global warming effect, for a third of the world’s arable land, for worsening levels of water and air pollution, and for equally massive impacts on human health. And that’s before one begins to think about these things from animal welfare perspective.

A sustainable world will, therefore, be a world in which less meat is consumed – especially in countries like ours, which already eats too much of it. I have not met anyone who can refute the logic of that – especially if you subscribe (as our Government does) to the notion that we should only be increasing food supply "in a way that does not degrade the natural resources on which farming and food production ultimately depend." Rest assured that going from 60 to 120 billion animals will systematically screw those resources for good and all.

But logic can be a wretched thing when it comes to taking your electorate with you. The Cabinet Office's recently published 'Food Matters' recognised that dilemma, and seeks all sorts of different ways of finessing it. For instance, it proposes a new "Healthier Food Mark" to promote healthier, "low-impact" food in the public sector – without quite spelling out that low-impact must (presumably?) mean less meat-intensive.

Good idea, but if it's promoted with the same laissez-faire spinelessness as the current Public Sector Food Procurement initiative, it will achieve precisely nothing. Hence the excellent recommendation from the Green Alliance (in its timely and very accessible new paper "Cutting Our Carbs: Food and the Environment") that the Government should make compliance with the Healthier Food Mark compulsory for all public sector bodies by 2012. For once, this would mean leading by example and by clear, unambiguous regulation.

And if you're still uncertain why that would be such a good thing, do please check out Compassion in World Farming’s website for details of its brilliant 'Eat Less Meat' campaign.

PS By the way, I am keen to round out my troika of inherently unsustainable numbers (ie 9 billion humans, 120 billion animals) by investigating the number of pets in the world today – and exactly how fast that number is growing, with what sort of impacts on food supplies and the environment. Does anybody know where I might unearth that kind of data?

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on August 7, 2008 11:56 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

March 11, 2010 - M&S set a sustainable benchmark for the retail world

I spoke at the annual M&S Suppliers’ Conference on Tuesday, which took place in Kensington Town Hall. This venue has a particular resonance for me as it was where the votes for the 1979 and 1984 European elections were counted – and every time I’m back there, I can’t help but recall that sense of consternation that so few people seemed to be prepared, at that time, to put their cross in the Green Party box!

Twenty-six years on and it seemed as if the M&S Suppliers were all voting enthusiastically for the updated version of Plan A! And that was not just because Sir Stuart Rose made a very powerful pitch telling them all that this was their reality whether they liked it or not. By the end of the day, they would certainly have had an unnerving sense of bars being raised all around them, in terms of production standards, transparency, reporting, innovation and so on.

Plan A was launched three years ago, and instantly captured people’s imagination. The combination of carbon neutral and zero waste to landfill pledges, the 100 Action Points, the commitment to invest £200 million, and the sense of all this being at the core of the company rather than being grafted on made an immediate impact. It also gave Plan A the kind of brand profile that took it way beyond the usual corporate responsibility strategies.

Three years on, the £200 million cost has been turned into a £50 million contribution to profit. Forty-five of the Action Points have been delivered, and another 80 have been added on. The ambition level has been ratcheted up several notches, with M&S now committing to becoming the world’s most sustainable (major) retailer by 2015.

Forum for the Future has worked closely with M&S throughout this time, so we are not exactly disinterested parties, but Plan A does provide the benchmark for the whole of the retail world. It’s visionary, it’s applied, it’s comprehensive (as in covering all the sustainability bases), and it’s succeeding in getting whole-company buy-in, through the high level “How We Do Business” Committee, chaired (and driven!) by Sir Stuart Rose.

So it’s well worthwhile checking out the new version of Plan A, available at: http://plana.marksandspencer.com/media/pdf/planA-2010.pdf

Posted by Jonathon Porritt on March 11, 2010 11:50 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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