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Food Debate

Food prices are on the rise and everyone is starting to feel the difference. But have we been paying too little for too long, or should food remain inexpensive? What is the real price of food and who pays? Consumers are increasingly aware of food’s social and environmental impacts, but do rising prices make ethical choices a luxury?

Food prices, food crisis? The Great Food Debate
Date: Thursday 11 September 2008

Time: 7:30-9:00pm (doors open at 7:00)

Place: Thistle Hotel, Brighton seafront

This year’s debate, organised by the Brighton & Hove food partnership as a part of the city’s annual Food & Drink Festival, will explore

***the consequences of rising food prices***
*****************************************************
The panel of speakers at the debate are:

- Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University,
- Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City, and
- Rob Lyons, Deputy Editor of Spiked.

The debate will be chaired by Simon Fanshawe.

Entry is free for members of the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership (membership forms will be available at the door); £3 for others.

Light refreshments will be provided.

For more information please contact Ann Baldridge at the Food Partnership on 01273 431700 or email ann@bhfood.org.uk.

Report on last year's food debate
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.


Most people know they should eat '5 a day' but is it better to choose local, or at least British, and avoid air-freighted produce?

What about the farmers in developing countries whose livelihoods rely on trade with countries like the UK?

If local is best, can we even grow enough produce to meet our needs?

How important is it to have a diverse and resilient food system in the UK?

These issues were explored in the food debate held on 20th September 2007 at the Thistle Hotel, was organised as part of Brighton and Hove’s Food & Drink Festival.

FEAST OR FAMINE: "Can we eat well and save the planet?"

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.

The panel of speakers (in the running order of the debate) were:

· Kath Dalmeny, Deputy Co-ordinator of Sustain: the Alliance for Better Food and Farming
· Fiona Gooch, Private Sector Policy Advisor within Traidcraft Exchange and their expert on responsible purchasing.
· Durwin Banks, local farmer from High Barn Oils
· Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones, leading a project on 'The Comparative Merits of Consuming Vegetables Locally and Overseas', University of Wales, Bangor.

Barbara Myers, Director of Brighton and Hove’s Food Partnership

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:
1) Locally produced bananas (grown inefficiently under glass)
2) Fair-traded bananas from the Carribean (transported a long way)
3) Organically-grown bananas from Australasia ?

Caroline Lucas, MEP for the South East Region

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 Dalmeny, Deputy Co-ordinator of Sustain: the Alliance for Better Food and Farming

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.

________________________________________

Fiona Gooch, Private Sector Policy Advisor within Traidcraft Exchange and their expert on responsible purchasing.

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.

3 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:

– changing volumes at short notice

- agreeing the value of a delivery of products after it has been delivered

- demanding ‘loyalty’ donations of suppliers (e.g. when a retailer is about to miss their profit target) or requests for sponsorship

- lack of transparency and poor communications about what is stocked in the shops and what is not, and how promotions are run

- disproportionate and untransparent charging for customer complaints

- refusing to enter into long term contractual relationships.

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.

- Suppliers selling into supermarkets are unable to plan effectively

- Consumer choice is reduced because small suppliers are prevented from supplying supermarkets due to unreasonable demands and practices by the supermarket. For example, slow payment; expectation that suppliers have expensive IT systems to link into supermarkets’ systems limit the ability of small
suppliers to supply supermarkets and therefore reduces consumers’ choice.

- Suppliers find themselves earning less than the cost of production due to purchasing practices by supermarkets associated with changes to terms including promotions. This has implications for how these suppliers in turn treat their workers and suppliers.

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, local farmer from High Barn Oils

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 was YOU THE CONSUMER who would 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.

__________________________________

Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones, leading a project on 'The Comparative Merits of Consuming Vegetables Locally and Overseas', University of Wales, Bangor.

Gareth posed the main question of the debate in two ways and came up with two different answers:

Can YOU as consumers eat well and save the planet?
Yes.

Will you eat well and save the planet?
No.

It won't happen for three reasons?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>}

1) You THE CONSUMER cannot get the information to enable you to make the right choices. The journalists who write articles on what to eat have no training in food science. The asortment of articles in popular magazines etc are not going to give a clear picture.

2) The people whom the food journalists talk to, are not honest brokers. Most are spinning all the time for either FINANCIAL or PHILOSOPHICAL gain.

3) The information is COMPLEX. For example, you cannot simply compare NZ lamb with Welsh lamb. Standards vary between farms. The time of year has a bearing on what choices we should be making. For example, it is OK to eat NZ apples during the first two weeks of July, but for the rest of the year there are better alternatives.

Tips for consumers who really want to make a difference

(a) Your non-food choices should be consistent with the result you are trying to achieve. It is no use making a healthy food choice in a supermarket and then going to a non-food aisle and putting a cheap pair of jeans and a video game into your trolley.

(b) Cut the energy you use in your home.

(c) Cut out marine-trawled fish.

(d) Give up recreational drugs

(e) Give up wine. Vineyards account for considerable use of pesticides and importing heavy commodities (liquids in bottles) is to be avoided.

Useful external link
Green INDEX of local traders and organisations, including FOOD growers / suppliers / campaigns.




This page was last updated by Dave on 20-Dec-2008

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