A shake-up of what we eat, how it is grown and what it costs will have to be thrashed out in food circles if the supply chain is going to be able to support the population of the future. Threats to food security are making headlines and for the first time, they are being talked about at all levels. The magnitude of the problem is finally coming into focus.
The Foresight report on The Future of Food and Farming set the pace in January, led by the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington, who was among the first to warn of the “perfect storm” of a growing population, climate change and diminishing resources for food production.
Talked about variously as an insight into a “scary future”, a “ground-breaking” analysis or as a beast with “no teeth”, the findings are the culmination of a two-year study involving 400 experts from 35 countries and as Beddington puts it, highlight the case for “decisive action and collaborative decision-making across multiple areas including development, investment, science and trade”.
The report has got people talking across the food industry internationally, picking up on the debate surrounding production, hunger and the impact on the environment against the prospect of a population that will peak around 2050.
Interestingly, UK media coverage hit squarely on the GM angle with The Telegraph going for “Britain must swallow fear of GM” and even The Sun reporting that the “World can’t afford to ban GM crops”.
The pioneering study was commissioned after the food price spike in 2007-08 and its release follows the Food Matters report published in July 2008 and the subsequent Food 2030 strategy. It identifies five priorities including balancing supply and demand sustainably, addressing the threat of volatility on the food system and ending hunger, as well striving for low emissions and maintaining biodiversity while feeding the world.
The issues are ripe for discussion, especially given that food prices are now showing a similarly worrying rise and more and more questions are being asked about how the growing population will be fed. The key now is for the food industry to take the report forward, rather than leave it to gather dust somewhere in Whitehall.
Only last week, a meeting was held in Brussels, hosted jointly by the European Commission and the Foresight team, to bring together the European parliament, member states, the private sector and NGOs to discuss how best to act on food security.
This came the day before industry leaders came together at the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum last Thursday to thrash out ideas for the next steps for policy.
Beddington stresses that the report was commissioned to set out the challenges for the future and open up an international platform for discussion in order to bring about changes. “The whole point about these Foresight processes is to have consultation, so we get that consultation first by buy-in from the key government departments and secondly, we have a team whose job it is to go out and actually engage with the key stakeholders in the field,” he explains. “So three weeks ago we were making presentations to the World Bank, to USAID, we were making presentations to the American Association of the Advancement of Science and we have been making presentations to various venues in Europe and I think that is the way to get this thing moving.”
A step-by-step plan, he says, was never part of the brief. “It would be hubris in the extreme to think one could, in such a process - albeit with a lot of expert input - produce something that is going to have a detailed work plan, a set of recommendations. These are the problems that need to be solved.
An honest appraisal
A thorough review of food sustainability has been a long time coming and for many it has confirmed that there will have to be fundamental changes to ensure long-term security.
Dr Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development and a member of the Foresight project’s lead expert group, insists that the food system is “broken” and “not fit for purpose” as it stands.
“We cannot let things go on as they are,” she says. “There are serious concerns about whether the food system today will be able to cope. It’s broken, it’s not coping and we have to do some serious investment in making it better if we are to manage to meet not only the current demand but that which will be exerted by the population in 2050.
“We work on the assumption that there is little or no new land for agriculture. We think we have to produce more food with fewer inputs on the same land and we very much push this idea of sustainable intensification, which combines this sense that our food production has to be very much embedded in making the world a more sustainable place between now and 2050, able to produce more but in a way that imposes fewer impacts on the environment.”
She maintains that to achieve this, “food production, agricultural production and food systems need to move very substantially up the political agenda”.
Buzzword or byword?
One of the key messages to come out of the report is that growers will have to produce more using fewer resources and with less impact on the environment, even in the context of an increasingly competitive market.
The concept of “sustainable intensification” has been presented as key to resolving the situation, but there is some disagreement over what is meant by the term and has even been taken to mean all things to all people.
Dr David Radcliffe, senior policy adviser in agricultural research for development at DG DEVCO, says the term is useful in conveying one of the central solutions to food security but he prefers the “ecologically efficient” label of “maximising your production per unit of natural resource while at the same time minimising your negative environmental impact, so you are not doing things that deplete your natural resources and you are not polluting the water or degrading the soil, for example”.
Will it work?
There are question marks over whether the findings can have an impact on policies as diverse as those that affect planning, immigration and imports as well as the likes of the Common Agricultural Policy, ensuring that farmers’ ability to compete is not undermined.
At the same time, the report demands that new technologies should not be written off on either ethical or moral grounds but that the food industry needs to respect the views of those coming from other perspectives.
Crucially, the report highlights early on the “critical importance of interconnected policy making” and advocates an overhaul of the food system.
Tom MacMillan, executive director of the Food Ethics Council, fears that the conclusions will not make good on the need to have a complete redesign of the food system. He compares the report to a “snake that’s had a rather big meal”, with “a lot of interesting stuff in the middle but rather thin at both ends where the teeth should be”.
“They duck the crucial question of who does what redesigning,” he says. “The report calls for political will and for institutions to change, but without unpicking what it is that shapes political will and what enables institutions to change. And I get the sense that in trying to be pragmatic, it actually sets its sights too low to succeed.”
In the UK, many agree that a practical strategy would go some way to restore faith in the future of food production at a time when growers are under increasing pressure.
Phil Hudson, head of food and farming at the NFU, insists that having a clear plan will send out the right signals to farmers to give them the confidence to reinvest in the business and produce more. He insists that in order to produce intensively yet sustainably, “farmers will need access to the 21st century methods of production”, which means “new technologies and farm management policies, not to mention effective transfer of existing knowledge and best practice and I mean by that also knowledge exchange”.
“If British farmers are to be part of the solution to securing food supplies for the future, there must be a serious commitment from this government and any government to doing so,” he says. “This means putting in place the policy framework that enables producers to optimise production while protecting the environment in a changing world. That’s patently not about setting targets for food production, but it is about ensuring that the barriers to an increase in production are identified and measures put in place to surmount them.”
Whose line is it, anyway?
DEFRA is a sponsor of the Foresight study alongside the department for international development and is the obvious leader in how to translate the findings into policy and eventually, practical steps. A plan was published alongside the report in which DEFRA committed to five key commitments, ranging from championing a more integrated approach by government and looking at sustainable intensification to putting more emphasis on mitigating climate change and managing price volatility.
Dr Katherine Higgs, deputy director of EU and international food policy at DEFRA’s food policy unit, attended the meeting in Brussels last week and maintains that DEFRA ministers are committed to taking forward the report with “early action”.
“The solution isn’t just to produce more food or to change diets, or just to eliminate waste; the potential threats are so great that each of these challenges can’t be met on their own,” she says. “It’s only by making a lot of changes to the food system and a lot of them being made at the same time and by a whole range of actors.”
No one sector can make a difference on its own and many agree that what is needed now is a whole chain approach, from the science base through to growers, suppliers and retailers as well as the government. The multiples, in particular, have been singled out as a force that should be harnessed to help find a resolution.
Dominic Dyer, chief executive of the Crop Protection Association, maintains that the major supermarkets should look beyond competing on price to consider what impact their influence is having on production and re-evaluate the impression they are giving the public about the cost of food. However, he acknowledges that the retailers were involved in various working groups in the lead up to the Foresight report.
“The one thing that concerns me about the retailers is that they have been able to supply for the huge variety and choice of foods that we have largely taken for granted and they are very successful global businesses as a result,” says Dyer. “I think what they need to be doing is looking beyond the year in, year out competitive nature of their business to what is actually happening globally in the supply chain where the problems are in terms of sourcing certain food products, what the implications are for the environment, social economic implications and be a bit more honest with us because they are not going to be able to offer us that choice in the next 10 years; it will be fewer products and it will be more expensive but we need to be prepared for that. They can’t keep fighting on cost.”
But it is clear that finding the answer is going to take wide-ranging input from the science and research community, through the length of the food supply chain to NGOs and governments worldwide. It is a marathon task, but a well defined action plan could transform the food chain and secure supplies in the years to come.
No comments yet