Sustainable Food

The world needs to feed a growing global population in a less damaging and more sustainable way. That applies in a UK context as well as globally. The Government’s approach appears to be focussed on the concept of ‘sustainable intensification’. Intensifying production risks damaging the environment and society. The Government needs to make sure this does not happen.

The Government does not yet have a strategy that unifies policy areas that impact on food production, supply and demand in a way that drives the system as a whole towards greater sustainability. The Government’s Green Food Project could provide part of the answer, but is not covering all aspects of sustainability and risks delivering a food policy which focuses too much on increasing yields at the expense of delivering a more fair and a more equitable food system. It could be used, nevertheless, as a foundation for the joined-up cross-departmental food strategy which is required to deliver a food system in the UK that is sustainable and takes account of people’s health and the needs of their communities, as well as the environment. In particular, that food strategy must:

• Provide producers (including local and small producers) with fair access to markets, and customers with access to healthy and less environmentally impacting foods (including local food networks); • Provide consumers with the knowledge and information they need to make informed choices about food that is better for their health and the environment and reduces waste; and • Deliver research in the priority areas which we have identified, to improve and develop existing agricultural, food processing and distribution practices with fewer environmental impacts.

The Sustainable Food Problem

1. It is becoming increasingly difficult to feed the global population. In January 2011, the Government’s Foresight programme reported on The Future of Food and Farming:

Challenges and choices for global sustainability. It concluded that the global food system would experience unprecedented pressures over the next 40 years.1 On the demand side, it reported that the global population would increase from nearly seven billion today to eight billion by 2030, and probably to over nine billion by 2050. Many people are likely to be wealthier, creating demand for a more varied, high-quality diet requiring additional resources to produce. On the supply side, competition for land, water and energy will intensify, while the effects of climate change will become increasingly apparent. The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to a changing climate will be imperative.

The report warned that without changes in farming practice, the global food system would continue to degrade the environment and compromise the world’s capacity to produce food in the future, as well as contributing to climate change and diminishing biodiversity.

2. The Foresight report set out how the global food system was failing in two ways. First, it was using resources much faster than they were being replenished. Much agricultural activity had degraded land, and agriculture currently consumed 70% of total global water withdrawals from rivers and aquifers, many of which were over-exploited.2 Second, the food system was failing to end hunger — there were still nearly a billion hungry people and another one billion people suffering from ‘hidden hunger’ or malnutrition.3 In recent years progress on hunger had stalled and there was now little chance that we could meet the Millennium Development Goals hunger targets.

3. The impacts of food production in the UK environment are well understood. The last Government’s Food 2030 strategy, published in January 2010, noted that: 4 • Soil erosion in England was estimated to cost agriculture £45 million a year, and might incur further costs by reducing water quality and increasing flood risk when that soil entered our rivers.

• Although agriculture used only 1% of our water resources, this masked significant seasonal and regional differences. And the food system overall was a major water user, taking 10% of all industrial abstractions and another 10% of total industrial water taken from the public supply.

• Over 60% of nitrates, up to 40% of phosphorus and the majority of silt in UK waterways was due to agriculture.

The challenge of reducing these environmental impacts of food production must be undertaken in the context of a changing climate. Agriculture will have to adapt to increasingly variable and unpredictable growing conditions including increased incidence 1 Government Office for Science, Foresight, The Future of Food and Farming, 2011, p 9.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Defra, Food 2030, 2010.