Something is badly wrong with the way we feed ourselves. In rich countries, food is cheaper than ever, yet premature deaths from diet-related diseases are soaring. Down on the farm, soil, water and biodiversity are under pressure as never before. In poor countries, it’s even worse. In Africa, malnutrition is rife, while in India diet-induced diabetes is rising sharply. And farmers often cannot compete with the flood of subsidised food from the rich world’s abundant farms.
Last week experts from all parts of the food industry gathered to present some badly needed new ideas at a conference organised by New Scientist and the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London. They will need to be powerfully different, driven by evidence rather than expediency, and capable of transforming relationships between governments, food companies, farmers and consumers. There is no bigger challenge
Obesity
“Yes” is the short answer to the biggest question on the table: are we eating ourselves to death? There is a growing consensus that people in industrialised nations are overdosing on sugars, fats and salt, leading inevitably to obesity, cardiovascular disease and premature death. What’s more, people in many developing countries are following suit.
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In Europe over the past 30 years, average daily energy intake has risen by about 300 kilocalories to 3400 kcal, said Robert Madelin, the European Commission’s director-general for health and consumer protection. This may not seem much – about two large glasses of regular Coke – but the Micawber-like conclusion is that it is bringing us misery. Already, 10 per cent of Europe’s health costs go on obesity.
A mass of evidence shows the dangers we face by eating too much and exercising too little, said Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London. Yet while ministers call on people to listen to health education, other policies point the opposite way: the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), for example, pays farmers to churn out fats. “This is a nonsense,” said Lang.
Madelin argued that sustained public education on the benefits of healthy eating could make a difference. The food industry would certainly sign up to such a programme, said Martin Paterson of the UK industry body the Food and Drink Federation.
That’s all well and good – except the public don’t seem to take any notice, said Richard Moody of Manchester Metropolitan University. He has found that even when people accept advice on what they should eat, they don’t act on it. “Palatability, convenience and price tend to overwhelm healthy eating decisions,” he argued.
For Lang, too much effort has gone on changing public behaviour and not enough on encouraging change within the food industry. Blaming companies for the rising tide of food-related disease is unfair, he said. Since the second world war, the food industry has been told to raise output and cut prices. The real fault lies in the underlying policy.
An entirely new direction is now needed, but what will it be? One route is towards technical fixes. Identify the genes that contribute to diet-related diseases, then give people diets that help them avoid those diseases. This field, called nutrigenomics, is already being heavily funded by industry.
Lang’s preferred route is for human well-being to be seen as part of the health of the global ecosystem. “Human and environmental health must be intrinsic to the food system,” he said.
But how to encourage industry to move forward? One suggestion is a tax on fat, but Lang said this is a non-starter because fat is difficult to track within foodstuffs. He has a better idea. “McDonalds and Coca-Cola each spend $1.7 billion on advertising every year,” he said. So put a tax on advertising.
Madelin also threw down the gauntlet to food companies. He challenged them to allocate hard cash and staff time to encouraging people to eat more healthily. They should join in the work on setting benchmarks for healthy eating, and allow their own performance to be monitored.
Outside the US, litigation against food companies probably won’t work. Nevertheless, the global nature of US food companies has meant that court cases against them at home have echoed around the world.
Perhaps the most powerful new force for change has emerged from the finance industry. Two studies last year rated food manufacturers by the unhealthiness of their products. Companies with lots of unhealthy products were rated very low. Pressure from the mainstream stock markets makes companies nervous, said Lang, and this could have a major impact.
Sustainability
The story of farming in industrialised countries since the second world war is a decisive success – or a troubling failure. It depends how you look at it. The successes are cheap food and plenty of it. The failures are the loss of hundreds of thousands of small, uneconomic farms and the impoverishment of much of the agricultural landscape.
Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex, UK, argued that society must take account of the public good achieved by farming, as well as its failings. He put the annual cost to the UK of the negative effects – everything from having to remove pesticides from water supplies to the medical costs of poor diets – at around £1.5 billion.
The blame for this lies with the system. As delegate after delegate stressed, modern agriculture is set up to encourage one thing: produce more. Yet farmers clearly do many other things we value, such as managing the landscape, helping to fix carbon in the soil and preventing flooding.
The key to making sustainable agriculture viable, Pretty said, is to convince people that farmers should be paid for all the extra things they do. Both Michael Pragnell, chief executive officer of Syngenta, and Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, talked of a “disconnect” between farmer and consumer: people have lost contact with the land. They don’t know how food is produced and they don’t see the “extras”, so they are not inclined to pay for them.
How do we reconnect? Holden thinks public awareness is crucial. He’d send all city schoolchildren on farm visits. As Pretty put it: you need to show the consumer the factory that makes their food.
Sustainable farming can already be economic. Caroline Drummond described how her organisation, Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF), is helping farmers make their farms more profitable using environmentally friendly methods such as minimum tillage. This technique preserves the soil structure, keeps carbon in the soil and cuts erosion. In North America, minimum tillage took off big-time because farmers found they could make money from it, said Jack Wilkinson, president of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers.
That price incentive, Wilkinson said, is crucial if society wants farmers to do other things. Yet it is conspicuous by its absence. Holden, who has been farming organically for more than 30 years, had to subsidise his farm by £10,000 last year because he had to sell his milk and carrots at below the cost of production.
Nothing less than “a new land and food ethic” is needed, Pretty declared. “Every time we buy food, our choices shape farms and nature and communities somewhere in the world.” It’s the most political decision we make, and we make it every day.
Farm to larder
One feature of food systems in industrialised nations is the power of the middlemen: the food-processing companies and large supermarket chains. Three charges are levelled against these players: they push up pollution by transporting food crazy distances to centralised collection and processing centres; they push down prices, so farmers earn less money for their produce; and they cut consumers off from the farmers.
But fresh ideas are changing this picture. While countries such as France have a long tradition of farmers selling direct to consumers, in the US, UK and Ireland the idea had to be reinvented 20 years ago. The resulting farmers’ markets now bring in hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and this week saw the launch of AlimenTerra, the European Network for Sustainable Food Systems. By cutting out the middlemen, these markets put money back into farmers’ hands, said Clive Peckham of AlimenTerra. They inject money into the rural economy as a whole, promote the notion of a local food culture, and build trust between farmers and consumers.
Building trust is also important for larger concerns. The Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever has started to create sustainable food chains for crops such as peas, tomatoes and black tea. It publishes guidelines on good farming practice, and measures such things as soil fertility and loss, pest control, and even the impact of their plans on local economies. And, the results are reviewed by external bodies, including the conservation organisation WWF.
Is Unilever acting altruistically? Not totally. It makes sense for the company to safeguard its future business, said Steve Parry, its head of research into frozen food and sustainable agriculture. Quizzed on whether Unilever pays living wages to its suppliers in developing countries, he responded: “We can only continue to be successful long-term if the societies we operate in continue to develop well and sustainably.”
And what about the ridiculous distances some foods travel before reaching consumers? Moving food around the UK accounts for about 3.5 per cent of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions, said Tara Garnett of the UK-based pressure group Transport 2000. The farther food travels, the higher the CO2 emissions associated with it.
Things are not always so simple. Tomatoes grown in heated hothouses in the UK contribute so much to CO2 emissions that it is better to import tomatoes from Spain, where they grow in the sun. Transport 2000 is going on to look at the life cycles of entire diets. “Locally sourced meat is fine,” said Garnett. “But meat is the most energy-intensive sort of food we can eat. Instead of worrying about how far our carrots have travelled, we should worry more about the overall make-up of our diets.”
Third world
African agriculture is often portrayed as being in crisis. Some 65 per cent of Africans depend on farming for their living, while the continent has the highest proportion of malnourished people. Intensive agriculture, with its mechanisation and economies of scale, will end the crisis – or so the dogma goes.
This creed is woefully misguided, said Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development. Sustainable agriculture is booming on smallholdings in west Africa, she has found, and harvests are plentiful. “Family farms have been absolutely central to the continued growth of the agricultural sector in west Africa,” she said. “In all but a few crops, family farms have been at the heart of driving the expansion in production.”
Successful small farms are run by anything from two people to extended families of up to 80. Toulmin is fighting the preconception that smallholder farms are backward and unresponsive to market demands, while modern, large-scale farms are beacons of efficiency. “This is a false dichotomy,” she says. “Many large-scale farms go bust in very short periods of time.”
Toulmin says small farmers are coming under increasing pressure from companies that control both the purchase of their produce and supply of their raw materials. They also face biased international markets in which developed world farmers benefit from trade-distorting subsidies amounting to $330 billion. In the US alone, subsidies under the Farm Bill amount to between $15 billion and $20 billion per year – more than the value of Africa’s entire annual agricultural exports.
“Agricultural subsidies are a total perversion that hurts poor people in developing countries,” said Bob Watson, chief scientist at the World Bank. “The European CAP and the US Farm Bill stimulate overproduction of many food crops, resulting in cheap food being dumped in the international market, primarily on developing countries, which undermines their export market.”
Removing trade-distorting subsidies is top of the agenda at World Trade Organization talks this month. If approved, this could increase Africa’s agricultural income by more than 5 per cent, says Klaus von Grebmer of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
Like many developing regions, west Africa faces multiple serious challenges. According to projections, some African countries will lose 20 per cent of their labour force to AIDS over the next 15 years. That, says von Grebmer, means farming know-how is being lost to a whole generation of orphans now growing up on these farms.
