World figures on malnutrition show a rise after decades of fall. Yet we here in the UK are overeating our way to ill-health. We think of food problems such as crop failures, droughts and floods happening far away, but give less attention to how our food supply chain has a large ecological footprint. Calculations vary but if everyone ate like us, we'd need three or four planets.
The harsh reality is, that if we don't make changes to the food system soon, a major food crisis will hit. This isn't a problem for others. It's our problem. UK politicians need to push food policy up their priority list fast.
World food systems must address what colleagues and I call the New Food Fundamentals. These are: less oil; climate change; water (floods, stress and shortages); biodiversity reduction; massive urbanisation; labour shortage on the land; population rising to 9 billion by 2050; the impact of changed diets (from affluence) on health; and excessive production of meat and dairy (both heavy uses of water and grain).
Although there's just about enough food to feed everyone at the moment, it's unequally distributed within and between countries meaning that obesity and malnutrition co-exist. There is a food gap here in Britain. Think Jamie Oliver's TV programmes on Rotherham versus somewhere like Mayfair.
We need a new, detailed policy direction. There are signs that this is being recognised in Whitehall. The Cabinet Office Food Matters paper in July set out a new direction, centred on lowering carbon and nutrition. That's a start. But we also need to emulate the French and US and unashamedly rebuild growing capacity here, too. It's dropping fast from a peak in the mid 1980s, when we produced 80% of foods consumed here that could be grown here. Now it's near 60%. Why are we using others' land to grow food we could grow here? The Treasury is fixated on reforming the common agricultural policy by which it means cutting budgets. A new initiative is needed, to create a common sustainable food policy, based around sensible land use and health.
The new food policy has to produce more food from less land, be more equitable and improve public health. This requires new skills and R&D designed around sustainability. Colleges of agriculture and universities ought to be central to that. A low-carbon, water-secure, technologically appropriate, oil-reducing, health-enhancing, socially just food system cannot be left to chance. It needs investment, policy direction, vision.
Experiments are popping up all over the UK of more local, community-based, connected food supplies. In our own lives we can change our eating and shopping habits. Avoiding food that takes a lot of resources to produce like meat and dairy products, and growing more food ourselves could change our food system from the bottom up. But individual action is not enough. It requires choice-editing, not personal choice. Urbanised Britain needs sustainable farming. The crucial thing is to take action now and not to wait until a crisis hits. That's the new political agenda.