• “To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish..” President Obama’s inaugural address
  2009/04/16

Anticipating the first G8 agriculture summit

• “A grave problem”: world leaders to address food security – The Tracing Paper anticipates the first G8 agriculture summit
  2009/04/07
• Food crunch: 1st G8 agriculture summit meets in Italy, April 18-20, to “draw up concrete proposals on world food security” # 2009/04/07
• G8 agriculture summit aims to “restore farm produce to economic policy, counter speculation, enhance production chains, invest..” # 2009/04/07
• La Via Campesina, International Peasant Movement: G8 should clean up own mess instead of telling poor countries what to do
  2009/04/17

Examining food security

• Meanings of food security: nationalism, defence, control, resilience, risks, sovereignty, democracy, capacity – Tim Lang
  2009/04/20
• Vince Cable: “fascism has disappeared but there are.. subtle voices.. setting out a protectionist programme in the name of food.. security” – Introduction to The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means
  2009/04/16
• Vince Cable’s The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What it Means, Chapter 4: “The Resurrection of Malthus”. Good concise analysis of current food emergency & historical, economic context
  2009/04/22
• Talk of national food security may be mask for protectionism or worse; concern for global food security is humanitarianism
  2009/04/16
• More on (food) security: “Agriculture and Infrastructure: A Global Stimulus to Thwart Terrorism”, speech by Kenneth Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation
  2009/04/16
• The double burden of malnutrition: hunger and obesity coexist in the developed and developing world
  2009/04/20

The summit gets underway

• G8 agriculture summit: why? – “Issue on the agenda: the world food emergency.”
  2009/04/17
• The Independent on the G8 agriculture summit: world agriculture ministers meet today to address “a crisis of almost biblical proportions” http://ow.ly/3auH
  2009/04/18
• G8 agriculture summit working towards final declaration, reports Earth Times. Argument over global cereal stocks, duties, quality standards?
  2009/04/20

Assessing the outcomes

• Guardian report of G8 agriculture summit conclusions suggests feeble outcome. The “Profound failure” predicted by Oxfam?
  2009/04/20
• G8 food summit final declaration short on action, big on words: “agriculture & food security at core of international agenda”
  2009/04/20
• The FT on G8 food & agriculture summit: admits failure to feed poor, asserts importance of food security, but little action
  2009/04/21

Fundamental issues: land, production, food, prices and sustainability

• Shades of Sustainability on Civil Eats: valuable discussion of what sustainable food really means. (Via @FoodNDrink)
  2009/04/20
• “sustainable food supply.. produced & consumed in a way that supports the well-being of generations” Sustainability in the Food Industry (Institute of Food Technologists Series)
  2009/04/20
• Landgrab: how Asian & Middle Eastern countries are buying overseas farmland to secure food supplies. More from agripods.com (registration required)
  2009/04/20
• World food price watch from BBC World Service: prices down over last year in Brussels and Washington, up in Nairobi 2009/04/08
• Land to feed 1 person? Eating only beef 8173 m²; … pork 2592; eggs 2395; milk 2053, fruit 1369; veg 1314; potatoes 275 – reports Tim Lang in lecture, Food Security: are we sleep-walking into a crisis?
  2009/04/20

Related posts:

1. “A grave problem”: world leaders to address food security
2. Waking up to food security

After decades of complacency, in which food security was widely seen as an issue only for poor countries, even the world’s leading economic nations are waking up to the need for action if the whole world is to enjoy a sustainable supply of food.

Enough food for all?

After the economically focused G20 summit in London, G8 agriculture ministers will meet at Cison di Valmarino, in Italy, from the 18th to 20th April, ahead of the main G8 summit in July. Other preliminary meetings will bring together environment and development ministers.

Time for a re-think

Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has stated that this G8 summit should provide an opportunity to “rethink the global economy’s ground rules” and ensure an ethical and legal underpinning:

it is necessary to define common ethical and legal standards and new rules governing the transparency, propriety and integrity of international economic and financial activity at this time of global economic difficulty

A policy document released ahead of the summit, notes that the food crisis of the last two years, in which commodity prices have fluctuated wildly, “will become structural in only a few decades” unless agricultural production doubles. We may not have even a few decades.

A global partnership for food security

In this context, Italy is also seeking to build a “a global partnership for farming and food security“, first proposed at last year’s FAO High-Level Conference on World Food Security: The Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy in June 2008 and receiving support at the 2008 G8 summit in Japan, where leaders “acknowledged the grave problem caused by rising agricultural commodity prices and called on agriculture ministers to draw up concrete proposals on world food security”.

As the world’s food system comes under increasing pressure from rising population, climate change and dwindling resources, Italy’s Foreign Undersecretary, Vincenzo Scotti, has stressed the urgent need to:

promote more effective and consistent action both inside each country and at the global level. [...] Given the worldwide economic downturn, the time has come for countries, international institutions, NGO’s and private-sector players to cooperate on “fostering a fresh boost to investment in the spheres of farming and food, and a search for innovative solutions to support small-scale producers and to set up social security networks”.

It’s reassuring to see recognition of the vital role that small producers play in providing food to the world, and of the need for community-level initiatives and networks. Perhaps the failure of global financial markets has provided a timely lesson that the world cannot rely solely on the mechanisms of market capitalism to feed itself.

World representation

As befits a summit seeking to build a global network, delegates have been invited from outside the G8 club:

• Czech Republic’s agriculture minister (in capacity of EU Council duty president)
• EU Agriculture Commissioner, Marianne Fischer Boel
• Brazilian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, South African, Egyptian, Australian, Argentinian agriculture ministers
• FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organisation)
• WFP (World Food Programme)
• IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development)
• World Bank
• High-Level Task Force on Food Security
• African Union
• OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)

Let’s hope the summit delivers on the promise to “re-think” and prepares the ground for the development of a truly sustainable world food system over the coming decades.

Related posts:

1. G8 agriculture summit on food security: a round-up
2. Waking up to food security
3. Reducing waste to feed the world

Food policy is in desperate need of considered direction if a sustainable food system is to emerge from the modern food industry, analysed by Tim Lang in his books The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where and Why (updated edition 2008, with Erik Millstone) and Food Wars: The Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets (with Michael Heasman, 2004).

The new fundamentals of food policy

In the meantime, the transcript of Tim Lang’s speech to the Garden Organic AGM 2008 gives a compelling insight into his recent thoughts on the rapidly changing food policy landscape. In this speech, Professor Lang identifies the ten “new fundamentals” of the 21st century world of food:

1. Oil and energy
2. Water
3. Climate change
4. Biodiversity
5. Demographics
6. Urbanisation
7. Labour
8. Nutrition transition
9. Health care costs
10. Battles of power and price volatility

Each of these issues clearly plays an important part in the working of the food system and the way we eat. Each of them must be addressed and the right answers found if we’re to create a sustainable food system, in the real sense of one that can feed us and future generations. It’s reassuring that Tim Lang is a member of Defra’s recently created Council of Food Policy Advisors.

The only obvious gap in this list of fundamentals is any recognition of taste and culture, the aspects of food that can bring so much rich pleasure and fulfilment to our everyday lives.

Summarising the fundamentals

The following clips show Lang’s concise summaries of each of the ten fundamentals and why they matter:

Oil

Water

Climate change

Biodiversity

Demographics

Urbanisation

Labour

Nutrition transition

Health care costs

Battles of power

Related posts:

1. Twittered morsels: Norman Borlaug, food policy
2. Food in books: mapping the world’s food
3. Morsels: Nordic diet, spring foraging, seasonal rhubarb, London wine, food policy, eating seaweed

It’s all a little contrived perhaps (the chosen food packaging will be familiar to anyone who’s already read the Conservatives’ “current examples of unclear and misleading labelling”), but the point stands.

Related posts:

1. Tories call for honest food
2. Compulsory “place of farming” labelling for agricultural products? Too good to be true
3. Twittered morsels: honest Tesco, organic justice, spectator agriculture, Stilton source, hungry business, MacSpuds

Misleading labels

Hard to argue with, maybe, but sadly far from the truth in Britain today. As recent food scares, from avian flu outbreaks to the contamination with dioxins of some Irish pork, have highlighted, we can’t take it for granted that apparently British food is made from the meat of animals raised on British farms. A result of concerns about BSE in the 1990s was the introduction of compulsory origin labelling for fresh and frozen beef, but not other meat.

Legal limitations

The problem is simple: under current laws, the origin of a food product is basically the last point of processing.

Sausages can be labelled as British if the meat was made into sausages somewhere in Britain, even if that meat were from farms in Ireland, Poland or further afield. But most people, reasonably enough, understand “made in the UK” to suggest that the ingredients (at least the principal ingredients) come from UK farms.

The law, as the Food Standards Agency’s chief scientist, Andrew Wadge, recently pointed out on his instructive blog, only requires that origin be specified if consumers might otherwise be misled. His example is of packaging showing the Eiffel Tower: if the product weren’t French then this would be misleading.

The nub of the problem is the lack of precision in this requirement – what’s clear to some may still be misleading to many. An ICM opinion poll, commissioned by the Conservative Party, bears this out with the finding that 51% of consumers think a sausage “produced in the UK” contains only meat from UK farms.

The British authorities seem very generous to food manufacturers and retailers when it comes to assessing what’s misleading, while other countries are – or would like to be – more exacting.

Pictures of the Eiffel Tower are one thing, but the Spanish Government declared in 2003 that all canned asparagus should be labelled with its country of origin as consumers might reasonably expect it to be Spanish and would otherwise be misled. Significantly, the European Commission didn’t oppose this decree, though it responded negatively to an Irish proposal to extend compulsory country of origin labelling to all meat.

Gallery of shame

Tory researchers have compiled a selection of case studies (pdf) of labelling they’ve identified as misleading, from Birdseye’s “Great British Menu” chicken dinner (made in the Republic of Ireland from imported chicken) to Tesco’s bacon chops (declared “produce of Britain” though the pork could be from Holland, Denmark, Ireland or Britain). Other examples are of information that’s so vague as to be useless, such as Sainsbury’s roast chicken slices (made of “Brazilian or British chicken”).

More upmarket brands and retailers aren’t blameless either: Marks and Spencer’s “nation’s favourites” corned beef roll is emblazoned with a union jack even though the beef is from Brazil.

Strong support

The Honest Food campaign is welcome political recognition of the lack of transparency in the food system and deserves support. It already has the public backing of several celebrity chefs and food campaigners, including Prue Leith and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. More significantly, it’s won the support of farming and animal welfare organisations from Compassion in World Farming and the RSPCA to the NFU and the British Poultry Council.

Notable by their absence in the list of supporters are any food manufacturers, retailers or their representative organisations. I wonder why.

Oh, there’s a silly video clip promoting the campaign too:

Related posts:

1. Clarissa Dickson Wright joins the Tories (in calling for honest food labelling)
2. Contamination of Irish pork exposes our fragile food system
3. Why does it matter where our food is from?

The UK government is at last waking from its long complacent slumbers and asking serious questions about food security. After enjoying an abundant supply of ever cheaper food for the last five decades, the developed world may at last be beginning to realise that we can’t take the essentials of life for granted indefinitely.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, has long been warning that we are “sleepwalking into a crisis”. Is it possible that we’re waking up in time to find another path?

A rash of reports

After years of waiting for a decent government report on the food system, three come along at once.

Following last week’s Cabinet Office publication of the most important policy statement on food for decades and a Treasury report on global commodities (mostly focusing on food and energy), Hilary Benn (Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) yesterday released a Defra discussion paper on food security.

Recognising the issues

While Tim Lang talks about “a new era”, even the government is openly raising questions of:

unforeseen disruptions
(Defra)

instability and uncertainty
(HM Treasury)

long-term challenges for world food security
(Cabinet Office)

The Cabinet Office even admits

we are still a long way from having an environmentally sustainable food chain

and

none of [agriculture's emissions and use of resources] is sustainable in the long term

Change to the food system is inevitable and it’s imperative that we do whatever we can to change it for the better.

UK Self-sufficiency

The Defra paper pulls together some revealing figures on the UK’s ability to feed itself. Our current self-sufficiency ratio is currently around 60%, meaning that 60% of the food we eat is produced in the United Kingdom, following steady decline from a peak of 80% in the mid 1980s.

UK Self-sufficiency ratio (Defra) Enlarge

Self-sufficiency in the 1980s was higher than at any time since the early 19th century, representing the peak of post-war agricultural intensification. The nadir of British food production was between the World Wars, when as little as 30% of our food was home grown and Britain relied on its empire to feed it.

Britain was last 100% self-sufficient, or as near as makes no odds, over 250 years ago, when our diets were limited to what we could produce and global trade was almost non-existent. Current food imports are only in part driven by our taste for a diet beyond the temperate produce of these islands. We only produce 80% of the temperate produce we consume.

The benefits of trade

There are powerful arguments for some international trade in food, and not just the exceptionally varied diet we enjoy with barely a thought for the intricacy of the mechanisms that put tea, bananas and tuna on our plates.

The economic law of comparative advantage tells us that all should be better off if we specialise our production and trade. Food security must be considered a global issue and we have to share the world’s production if we’re all to have enough to eat. On the other hand, some trade is simply a profligate waste of resources or a shameful transfer from the poor to the wealthy.

Trade can also bring resilience to our systems of food supply, allowing the movement of food to alleviate unexpected local shortages through severe weather, crop failure or animal disease.

Not just local or global, but sustainable, resilient and equitable

Rather than wasting our time on a polarised argument (local v global), we should be attempting to answer the very difficult question of what constitutes a sustainable, resilient and equitable balance between universally advantageous trade and appropriate local production.

UK Food imports by country (Defra) Enlarge

Where does our food come from?

Defra is proud to tell us that no more than 13% of our imports come from a single country, avoiding too much fragile dependence. The majority of imports come from the countries closest to us and are more to do with production techniques and history than extending our diet beyond the confines of our temperate climate.

Our principal supplier is the Netherlands, a country that recognised early two opportunities that now underpin much of our food supply: the advantage of glasshouse production of fruit and vegetables to produce consistent crops through an extended season; and the opportunity to use cheap global grain supplies to produce higher value meat, particularly pigs and poultry. Both types of production are heavily dependent on energy inputs.

A role for communities

The Cabinet Office paper acknowledged that:

community groups, voluntary organisations and social enterprises have an important role to play in supporting activities that promote healthy eating and more sustainable production and consumption, and in encouraging public debate about food issues, and thus in promoting new social norms that facilitate behavioural and cultural change

However, there’s nothing about community, co-operative or domestic action in the Defra paper, which recognises deep-rooted problems with the modern food system without countenancing any truly radical possible solutions, such as those discussed in the recent Growing Food for London conference.

Be consulted

Defra has published this as a consultation paper and is inviting feedback, before issuing a final policy statement on food security later this year. Read the full food security discussion paper and have your say on this critical issue.

Read more…

• Ensuring the UK’s Food Security in a Changing World, Defra’s food security discussion paper
• Patrick Holden of the Soil Association responds to the Defra discussion paper

Related posts:

1. “A grave problem”: world leaders to address food security
2. G8 agriculture summit on food security: a round-up
3. Food: the destiny of our nation

The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.
(Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste)

This unlikely quote is one of three that open the new Cabinet Office report on food policy, Food Matters: Towards a strategy for the 21st century. Less surprising, is the dropping of a fourth quote that found its way into the earlier analytical report:

I’ll bet what motivated the British to colonize so much of the world is that they were just looking for a decent meal.
(attributed Martha Harrison)

Taking food seriously

Tim Lang stated in his keynote speech to the recent Growing Food for London conference that we’re now living in “the most dangerous … but potentially the most interesting time for food policy”. True enough, the British and other governments are now recognising that we can no longer take for granted a stable global supply of cheap food.

Just a glance at the report’s chart of the price changes in major foods since 2000 is enough to convince anyone these are extraordinary times for the global food system. And desperate times for those already spending a significant proportion of their income on food. In the UK, where just 9% of average household spending is on food, most of us are lucky enough to enjoy plenty of leeway before rising prices make us hungry.

More than just leftovers

As Felicity Lawrence notes in the Guardian, the cabinet office report is a serious document that was only trivialised by Gordon Brown’s launching it by talking about eating up our leftovers.

The report makes some striking acknowledgements of the problems with the food system:

• its dependence on increasingly scarce and expensive resources
• its enormous emissions of greenhouse gases
• the social inequalities in what and how we eat
• the health impact of our diets

Out of this list, the Number 10 spin doctors chose to highlight an issue, waste, and more particularly household leftovers, that while undeniably important was always the one most open to ridicule.

The Prime Minister’s lavish 18 course meal (or was it just 8, or as many as 19?) with his fellow world leaders only made his talk of leftovers appear even more ridiculous and patronising.

More to digest

There’s a lot more to consider in this report, and we can only hope that these critical issues are aired and debated once the 18 empty plates and leftovers are just a memory. Expect more from the Tracing Paper at least…

Related posts:

1. Waking up to food security

Growing in and around London

The day looked at approaches to growing food for London in or near the city, from domestic production, allotments and transformed public spaces to community food groups, city farms and the surviving working farms on London’s fringe.

Mayor Boris Johnson stumped in during the morning tea break, mug in hand, expressing his apparently unbounded support for urban agriculture in an off-the-cuff speech. He professed that he’d like nothing more than to uncork a bottle of London fizz at the opening of the olympics and asserted that there should be “a lot” of allotments in the city.

Production in decline

Like any city, the growth of London has pushed the production of food further from the centre, particularly over the last 200 years. Long gone are the times when lavender was grown on Lavender Hill and asparagus cultivated, rather than just sold, at Nine Elms.

The decline in production in the Greater London area even within the last 40 years is striking. In 1970, there were significant clusters of horticulture along the Lea Valley, in London’s south-west corner and along the Thames estuary. Today, only a handful of growers survive.

Potential for growth

Still, it’s not all concrete, bricks and tarmac. Two thirds of London’s area is still green space or water, with the potential to produce food. Even soil-less front gardens and window sills have potential for container growing, as promoted by Food up Front, “the urban growing network”.

The artist Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates project (documented and illustrated in his new book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn: A Project by Fritz Haeg) targets the cult of the lawn, imported to the United States from England.

Haeg claims that lawns occupy more space than any agricultural sector in the US, and challenges their idolisation by transforming front lawns into productive gardens. In the UK, he led a transformation of a grassed communal space in front of social housing, now known as the Brookwood Edible Triangle.

Community groups can build strong links between city residents and the farms on the city fringe and beyond, as well as making the most of opportunities to grow food within the city.

Growing Communities, in Hackney, is one of the most inspiring examples, providing 450 households with mostly local, organic produce, some of it grown on their own inner-city sites such as their plot at Springfield Park, Clapton.

A growing imperative

With food prices rising fast, there’s an ever stronger personal incentive to grow even just some of our own food in whatever space we have available. Some of the most expensive foods, such as herbs and salad, are also the easiest to grow.

The total production of farming in the London area is estimated at £8 million / year, more or less £1 per person. If every Londoner grew just one pot of herbs on the kitchen window sill, that alone would be equivalent to London’s commercial agriculture.

The issues underlying the rise in food prices are an even stronger imperative for urban production. As Carolyn Steel points out in her excellent new book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, 30 million meals have to be provided in London every day. Rising oil prices, declining resources and a growing population are placing an increasing strain on the mainstream models of food supply.

It’s time we started producing some of these meals closer to home.

Recommended reading on domestic growing and urban agriculture

• Growing round the houses, briefing paper on food production on housing estates, by Ben Reynolds (Sustain) and Christine Haigh (Women’s Environmental Network)
• Edible Cities, report on study visit to urban growing schemes in Milwaukee, Chicago and New York, by Ben Reynolds and others (Sustain)
• City Harvest, older but still instructive 1999 report on the potential for urban food production, by Tara Garnett (Sustain)

Related posts:

1. Waking up to food security
2. UK Dairies / Milk Processors – Greater London
3. UK Abattoirs / Slaughterhouses – Greater London

The Guardian reports that Barack Obama has written to Sir Terry Leahy, Chief Executive of Tesco, to urge him to engage with the US trade union representing workers at Tesco’s new US venture, Fresh and Easy.

Without union engagement, the union claims that Fresh and Easy’s workers are stuck with no written contract of employment and working conditions that compare unfavourably with Tesco’s employees in Britain.

“Talk to us!”

The possible future US president’s intervention is a success for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union, which has been campaigning to encourage Tesco to talk to them. Despite Tesco’s strong relationship and partnership with USDAW, the British union representing 85,000 of its workers, they’ve so far reportedly refused all invitations to engage with UFCW.

Global standards or double standards?

Tesco assert that their workers are free to join the union and that they’ve “engaged with community leaders”, but it’s a far cry from their partnership with USDAW in Britain. Elsewhere, the trades union movement has raised questions about labour relations in some of Tesco’s other oversees operations, such as Tesco Lotus in Thailand.

UFCW has dubbed Tesco the “Wal-Mart of Britain”. It’s a confusing turn of phrase, as another British supermarket, Asda, is actually owned by Wal-Mart. And while Wal-Mart’s attitude towards unions is notoriously uncooperative (except in China), Asda, like Tesco, has a rather good relationship with British unions.

The different approaches taken by companies around the globe demonstrate the importance of labour laws and established workers’ rights. Britain is no longer a cushy environment for trades unions and their workers, but it’s a lot more comfortable than America and other countries.

Easy facts?

UFCW has teemed up with “grocery workers, food industry professionals” to create freshandeasyfacts.com, also known as freshandqueasy.com, to publicise their campaign against Tesco. Don’t bother trying these links to the Fresh and Easy Facts homepage from the UK. It’s blocked to UK-based browsers, presumably for legal reasons.

Other pages are accessible, though, such as “Get the Facts“, which summarises and links to various stories, mostly in the British press, about Tesco’s environmental record and infringement of food safety laws.

Hard facts?

Strangely, there’s no mention of working conditions or labour terms. It seems USDAW, apparently disappointed and frustrated by Tesco’s failure to talk to them, have chosen to mount a broad attack on Tesco’s record.

There’s even a video questioning just how “easy” Fresh and Easy is, whose entire argument is based on the absence of leading brands from the shelves, where own-label products dominate. Another video – an extract from a BBC Whistleblower documentary – exposes undercover footage of apparent breaches of food safety laws.
Frightening and entertaining they may be, but these videos are hardly relevant to the issue of labour standards.

For a serious analysis of Tesco’s relations with the unions, at home and abroad, read UCFW’s report, The Two Faces of Tesco (pdf, 4.25Mb).

Here, the hard facts about working conditions in Fresh and Easy are compared with those in Tesco at home in Britain. “No written contract of employment”, “Fresh & Easy employees are allowed only 60 hours paid time off [a year], and this must be used for time off sick as well as for holidays”, “Fresh & Easy only guarantees 20 hours of work per week”? It doesn’t sound right.

Related posts:

1. Is Tesco just a retailer?
2. More Co-operative Retail
3. A Long Time in Food