Welcome by Barbara Myers | Presentation of the debate by Caroline Lucas MEP
Speakers 1 Kath Dalmeny | 2 Fiona Gooch | 3 Durwin Banks | 4 Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones
Contributions from the Floor
With the looming threat of climate change and increased levels of obesity, we are faced with big decisions about what goes into our shopping basket.
These issues were explored in the food debate held on 20th September 2007 at the Thistle Hotel. This was organised as part of Brighton and Hove’s Food & Drink Festival.
Hosted by BBC radio 4 presenter Barbara Myers, Director of Brighton and Hove’s Food Partnership and chaired by Caroline Lucas, MEP for the South East Region, further contributions to the debate were made by a panel of experts, who also took questions from the floor.
In welcoming the public to the debate, Barbara drew attention to the accomplishments of Brighton and Hove’s Food Partnership, which involves a wide range of people across the city, including community groups & organisations and statutory agencies such as Brighton and Hove City Council and the Primary Care Trust.
The vision of the partnership is a bold one: to work for better food for the entire city – now and in the future. 'Better food' means food that is healthy, affordable, accessible, and kinder to the environment. Particularly, the partnership would like to see more food produced locally, for people living locally.
Barbara explained about The Good Food Grant Scheme, which allowed funding for 15 projects. She cited two of these: the Harvest Food Feast at Moulsecoomb, which gets children involved in planting, growing and eating healthy food, and The Brighton Permaculture Trust, involving orchard-growing in Stanmer Park and providing a model for greener lifestyles and sustainable development.
The success of the Food Partnership is reflected in the availability of funding this year for four full-time food development workers. The partnership has now got the contract to deliver food work across Brighton and Hove on behalf of the Primary Care Trust.
The Food Partnership's Annual General Meeting will be held on 8th November 2007, where new members will be elected. Interest and involvement by the public is welcome.
Roger Marlow, Chair of Brighton and Hove Food Festival, was given the task of introducing the Chair of the debate and the panel of experts.
In order to illustrate the complexity of some of the issues, Roger related a dilemma he had as owner of a small hotel in the city, a business which tried to follow good environmental practice. One of his guests merely required two bananas in his room for breakfast, but was the hotel to supply:
Caroline presented her own illustration of the complexity of the debate by reflecting on whether it was better to import Australian or Spanish wine. Although Australian wine is transported over a long distance, it normally arrives in the UK by ship while Spanish wine is normally transported by air i.e. responsible for a larger volume of carbon emissions. Later in the debate, Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones challenged Caroline as to whether she should be drinking wine at all.
Caroline also highlighted the considerable waste involved in some of the food swopping which goes on between nations. While the UK imports 60,000 lambs from New Zealand, it also exports 30,000 lambs to New Zealand. Movements of cattle within the UK, with animals being transported to as many as eight farms in their life-spans (i.e. from birth to market) made just as little sense, especially in the context of the risks posed by foot and mouth disease.
Caroline emphasized the adverse effects of our food policies on climate change, especially through air freighting (the volume of which has doubled since 1992) and road transport within the UK. She also emphasized the importance of fairness in evolving new policies. The richer nations owe the poorer ones a carbon debt. The goods that we import from the poorer nations also need to be realistically priced. We should be thinking of imaginative ways of transferring resources from the Northern to the Southern hemisphere.
Kath could only contemplate one answer to the question "Can we eat well and save the planet?"
We absolutely must.
The richer nations enjoy the necessary degree of economic liberty to allow us to go about solving the problems caused by our unecological/extracive/energy-intensive/unethical food system in a civilized manner, but we have to act NOW.
We have to remember how to VALUE oil,coal, water and soil.
There should be more attempt to control population since feeding fewer people would ease the problem.
We need to get back to seasonal eating as well as reducing meat consumption. Meat production is responsible for damaging greenhouse gases, including considerable amounts of methane.
It is not only down to consumer choices. We need more than a few product labels. We need measures and laws to ensure that trading is fair.
We also need to inculcate the young (through education) in sustainable ecological practices.
We need to ensure a less painful transition (i.e. soft landings) for groups of people who are both harshly affected and less able to look after themselves. The vision needs to be based on social equity.
For Fiona, the dynamic of how trade is organised, was crucial to whether it will be possible to eat well and save the planet.
She emphasized the need to reorganise how our economy is structured. She saw the main obstacles as the injustice of poverty, the waste of people's potential and the modern day equivalent to slavery, which keeps people working unreasonable hours and struggling to make ends meet.
One of the main needs was to influence the behaviour of companies which buy food from abroad. 40 % of the vegetables consumed in the UK are imported.
Three million farmers and workers, mainly based in poor countries, can only use 110 buying desks to access a European market of 160 million consumers. This represents a considerable power imbalance in supply chains.
Under our current system of trade, there is shareholder pressure for higher returns, consumer expectation of lower prices plus the dynamics of competition between supermarkets.
The result of this is pressure for lower prices, fast and flexible production and higher quality standards. Thise leads to adverse labour conditions as people are hired on short-term contracts without right to unionise etc.
The supermarkets are crucial decision makers and you need one of them to take your product. How else is it going to be sold to the consumers?
A few supermarkets control suppliers’ access to UK consumers. In this situation of imbalance, supermarkets are able to pass disproportional risks onto their suppliers, who then pass risks onto workers and smallholders. Overseas suppliers have mentioned the following concerns to Traidcraft Exchange which have implications for people working in supermarkets’ supply chains:
Traidcraft Exchange has been working to increase market access for developing country products into the UK market, particularly from small scale producers.
However once overseas suppliers have gained access to the UK market they have found themselves to be part of an extremely unbalanced trading relationship.
One of the main problems is the disproportionate amount of risk which the supermarkets put on their suppliers because of the uncertainty of the market. Local markets are far more stable, but supplying to international markets involves far more risk.
A Fair Trade Premium involves workers and managers sitting down and discussing together.
There is a role for Government to put a strong regulator on supermarkets' behaviour. They must be stopped from off-loading costs to protect shareholder value, their buyers need to change their practices and the trading environment needs to change.
There is considerable scope for reduction of ffod waste. It is currently in suppliers' interest to bring one third extra produce into the UK, much of which is wasted.
Durwin Banks did not miss an opportunity to publicize the virtues of linseed oil as a component of a healthy diet.
He was critical of highly processed foods, containing an imbalance of oils and thereby contributing to inflammatory diseases. He told us that we did not need any more palm oil and that huge areas of forest were being needlessly cut down to make way for the production of the wrong types of oils.
Durwin's message was: "eat well - porridge instead of processed cereals - (and linseed oil!) and we would find it much easier to save the planet". He lamented the current sutuation where farmers had been turned into producers of commodities, having no control of markets and prices. You can meet Durwin Banks at local Farmers' Markets.
Durwin does not trust the Government to make changes. He told the meeting that it is YOU THE CONSUMER who will need to make the running.
He was critical of the policy of the Food Standards Agency which prevents him and anybody else making health claims for food, while it is known that unhealthy eating is responsible for a cost of about £10 billion to the National Health Service in treating food-related illnesses. Get them eating bad food and then sell them pills!
Durwin emphasized the need to eat locally. He observed that 80% of Spain's water is being used in food production, and this is resulting in the creation of deserts.
Gareth posed the main question of the debate in two ways and came up with two different answers:
It won't happen for three reasons:
Tips for consumers who really want to make a difference
Speakers from the floor expresses concerns relating to:
I was waiting for someone from the floor to reiterate the need to reduce population in the developed countries responsible for high levels of emissions and the disproportionate consumption of resources. Politicians seem to treat raising the subject of population as "politically taboo" - perhaps because "the right to decide the size of ones family" is something they believe to be sacrosanct among voters.
Another fear is that raising the need to limit population can often elicit opinions about controlling immigration. When climate change really bites and areas outside the UK become uninhabitable, there is likely to be a huge number of refugees wanting to share limited space in the UK, which will also be feeling the pinch.
A humane response by developed countries, largely responsible for climate change and peak oil, would be to share with the earliest casualties regardless of race or creed.
However, the more densely populated we become (there is a current drive for higher densities in UK cities), the harder it is going to be to feed even the indigenous population. Many crops currently imported will no longer be available.
Government projections on how many homes we need to build are based on estimates of what population is now and will be in the future. However, it seems anathema to politicians to act as if the State could control population (and therefore future estimates) through any kind of government intervention. The earlier this kind of inititative is taken, the less harsh it will have to be.
Clearly, measures of the kind taken in China are unlikely to appear in any forthcoming UK political party election manifesto. However, there are gentler economic incentives, which could be used if we act early enough.
Some sociologists take the view that education and tackling poverty are among the most effective contraceptives i.e. better than compulsion. If governments in developed countries, responsible for such high levels of consumption and carbon emissions, do not intervene earlier enough to reduce population size, then civil strife &/or natural catastrophe (e.g. flooding) resulting from climate change &/or shortages will control population far more brutally.
We are constantly reminded, by those who see economic growth (in the volume of goods produced) as the eternal cure for all ills, that the elderly have to be carried by younger people of working age. If this is a prescription for cramming an ever increasing number of people into finite space, it is not a sustainable one. It ignores the lower resource usage of the elderly, while younger people are leading unsustainable lifestyles. It ignores the potential of both the elderly and the very young to use intermediate technology to help produce the products we really need for a sustainable future. The Moulsecoomb Forest Garden and Wildlife Project whereby young children are taught to grow their own food, cook it and serve it to their parents, provides a model of education for sustainable living. A survey of the people who are growing food in Brighton and Hove's allotments would perhaps include a large number of retired and elderly people, while the occupations and leisure pursuits of many younger working people (in the name of economic growth!) are killing the planet.