Memorandum submitted by the Food Ethics
Council (SFS 24)
1. The Food Ethics Council is an independent
research and advocacy group that aims to make the food system
fairer and healthier from farm to fork. The Council is chaired
by a farmer and its members include consumer advocates and leading
academic researchers.
2. The Council welcomes the Committee's
inquiry and this opportunity to comment. We have limited our submission
to four brief points that may be useful to the Committee at this
stage in their inquiry, but would be glad to provide further evidence
on request.
3. Strengths or weaknesses? Ensuring
security of supply entails proofing food supply chains against
possible threats. Since these are at best uncertain and at worst
unknown, resilience depends on diversity. As Defra has emphasised,
the UK's supply chains are diverse inasmuch as our food comes
from many countries. However, they are anything but diverse inasmuch
as they depend heavily on oil and other non-renewable resources,
rely on a narrow range of plant and animal breeds, use the same
bulk ingredients to produce an array of different products, and
rely on consolidated purchase and distribution systems. Our May
2005 submission to the Committee[76]
discussed some of these challenges in greater detail and we have
since produced publications on specific challenges including water
scarcity, livestock production and consumption, and food distribution.
4. UK or global? Whether food security
is framed primarily as a global challenge or as an issue for the
UK has a profound bearing on how policy should support it. The
starting point for any global approach must be that our food systems
are catastrophically insecure right now—we do not need to
look forward to 2050—in that close to a billion people live
in hunger. We believe it is morally incumbent on the UK government,
and consistent with its commitment to a "one planet"
approach to sustainable development, to see food security primarily
as a global challenge. Taking such an approach requires the UK
to get its own house in order, but also means that any credible
commitment to improving food security must be backed by a step
increase in international development support and by commit-ing
the UK to an international development-led stance in international
trade negotiations.
5. Scarcity or injustice? Decades
of research and intervention to address food insecurity globally
have underlined that it is more fundamentally a problem of injustice
than of absolute scarcity. This implies that although pressures
on supply will increase and government has a pivotal role to play
in helping to meet those demands sustainably, the front line in
promoting food security is actually to help manage demand. This
is as true in the UK as it is internationally—the difference
internationally is that many of the poorest "consumers"
derive their economic entitlements from agricultural production.
For the UK this implies a policy focus on: managing demand by
improving welfare provision and public health intervention to
tackle food poverty; and managing supply by introducing fiscal
and regulatory measures to protect the workers, the environment
and natural resources, and investing in innovation to cater sustainably
for changes in demand. These points are elaborated in our publication
on the Food Crisis.[77]
6. Science or innovation? Just as
concentrating on a "supply push" for food might increase
production with improving security, so a "supply push"
on science is unlikely to deliver the innovation to underpin sustainable
and secure food systems. This is the message from the International
Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for
Development (IAASTD), directed by Prof Bob Watson, now Chief Scientific
Advisor at Defra. As the largest, most rigorous and most inclusive
assessment of its kind ever, dwarfing any process past or planned
in the UK, it deserves to be taken very seriously. The UK government
must invest more to support sustainable innovation in agriculture
and supporting the science base is a crucial part of that; however,
unless it radically overhauls that science base such investment
would be squandered from the point of view of ensuring food security.
One part of the challenge is to make basic science more independent,
cushioning public interest research from the pressures of intellectual
property markets. The other part is to invest more heavily in
problem-driven research—in a sense less independent—driven
by the needs of target beneficiaries such as farmers pioneering
sustainable production and management systems, and consumers experiencing
food poverty. These points are discussed further in the IAASTD
report (www.agassessment.org),
in "Just Knowledge?" report and in submission to the
Royal Society.
January 2009
76 Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee's
Fourth Report of Session 2006-07, The UK Government's "Vision
for the Common Agricultural Policy", HC 546-II, Ev 176. Back
77
Not printed. Back
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