Britain’s Sustainable Farming and Food Strategy is “no longer not fit for purpose” and needs overhauling to take account of the obesity epidemic, a leading environmentalist has claimed.
Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission and director of the Forum for the Future, has called for a radical rethink of conventional food and farming policies. He wants to see a move away from systems based on consumption of fossil fuels in favour of a more sustainable one based on “real-time solar energy” and one which encourages dietary changes among the population to reduce the consumption of meat, animal fat and dairy products.
Such an approach was essential, he said, given the “perfect storm” of global warming, population growth and exhaustion of natural resources, together with the global rise in obesity in developed countries and food shortages in poorer nations.
Giving the 31st Annual Campden BRI Lecture, Porritt said: “Climate change and obesity are, of course, connected if in no other way than through the compelling neologism of ‘globesity’!” He referred to recent World Health Organisation data, which showed that each overweight person caused an additional one tonne of carbon dioxide to be emitted every year.
“The government’s own existing policies on both climate change and obesity require a total rethink of the current Sustainable Farming and Food Strategy,” said Porritt. “Yet there is little indication that DEFRA [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] has any appetite for such a rethink.”
He supported the Soil Association’s suggestion that UK farming should shift its emphasis to help reduce demand for meat, eggs, sugar, fats and dairy products and encourage increased demand for a wider range of cereals for direct consumption, more root crops, more fresh fruit and vegetables.
Porritt criticised much of the current debate on the issue of food security: “Free market absolutists battle it out with self-sufficiency evangelists; advocates of genetic modification (GM) would have us believe that our only salvation lies in the adoption of GM crops on every front; the organic movement brushes aside concerns about the imperative of having to feed 9bn people by 2050.”
Although recognising that the UK could not be self-sufficient for all foodstuffs, he called for “optimised, sustainable self-reliance” in the supply of more local home-produced food or food produced in Europe.