Want some holiday reading? Try the National Food Strategy plan.

No – I am not joking. If you are even remotely interested in your fellow citizens’ health, our children’s diet, the state of our farming industry, biodiversity, climate change – or even systems analysis – you will find it extremely interesting. And, if you believe that the government will take it all on board and implement their suggestions, rather encouraging. Unfortunately I fear that is a very big ‘if’.

To encourage you. It is written engagingly and although heavily referenced and laced with diagrams and charts, it is so ‘un-dry’ that I polished off a hundred pages at the first sitting.

It is also extremely easy to access either as a download or online. It will give you something to read while you are waiting in the three hour queue at the airport trying to get back into the country after your holiday – before you start your quarantine…

The plan falls into two parts – an analysis of why we are where we are now and the panel’s recommendations as to how we can put matters right. So to pull out just a few very random headline stats, facts and comments which I hope may persuade you to read on.

 

Systems thinking and the food industry

Systems thinking, the feedback loop and systems traps – so often caused by a failure to define one’s goals accurately. (If you read nothing else, do read this chapter in full – I found it fascinating.)

Emissions and global warming

• The food system is responsible for 25–30% of global emissions: air travel only contributes 3.5%.
• Three man-made greenhouse gases account for the bulk of the warming associated with climate change: Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), and Nitrous Oxide (N2O). The food system is the only field of human activity that emits all three.
• The two greatest emiters of  methane are rice (fermenting bacteria in the wet soil of rice paddies) and ruminants (cows and sheep).
• The methane produced by ruminants is estimated to have caused a third of total global warming since the industrial revolution.

Agriculture

• Around 50% of Earth’s habitable land is now used for agriculture.
• 77% of the world’s farmland (and 85% of the farmland in the UK) is used to graze animals or to produce crops to feed to animals.
• However, these animals only provide 32% of our total calorie intake while the remaining 15% of that farmland (in the UK) grows crops which provide 68% of our calorie intake.
• The combined weight of animals bred for food is now 10 times the combined weight of all wild mammals and birds put together.
• The green revolution was miraculous in terms of feeding the world but a disaster in terms of the natural world and the creation of carbon emissions.
• Since 1930, we have lost 97% of our wildflower meadows, half our ancient woodland, 56% of our heathland, and 90% of our lowland ponds.
• As wheat yields in the UK doubled from 1970 to today, the number of farmland birds decreased by 54%. The UK now sits in last place on the European farmland bird index.

Water

• Farming uses 70% of the fresh water on earth.
• Water pollution is so bad in the UK that only 16% of surface and ground water meets the criteria for ‘good chemical status’.

The oceans

• Between 1970 and 2012, global marine biodiversity is estimated to have fallen by 49%.
• Since the 1890s, when fossil-fuel powered bottom trawling began, cod landings have declined by 87%, hake by 95% and halibut by 99.8%.
• To put this in perspective, in the 1830s small sailing vessels around the Dogger Bank could catch a tonne of halibut per day. Today, all fishing across the entire Dogger Bank lands less than two tonnes of halibut a year.

Diversity and the invisibility of nature

• It is impossible, according to American biologist Edward O. Wilson, to put a true ‘value’ on genetic diversity because we cannot know its worth to future generations. When will you discover that what you thought was just a pretty flower produces alkaloids which can cure deadly cancers? (See the Catharanthus Roseus).
• Currently, while 300,000 species of plant have edible parts, just 20 species account for 90% of the world’s food, and three – wheat, maize and rice – supply more than half. To be so heavily reliant on a tiny handful of crops puts humanity in a precarious position. Genetic diversity could help future-proof the food system.
• Not only do our economic systems treat natural resources as if they were both costless and infinite they actively encourage the destruction of nature.
• Every year, $500 billion-worth of Government subsidies are spent globally on supporting practises – intensive agriculture, fisheries, fossil fuel mining and fertiliser manufacture – that destroy nature. (See The Economics of Diversity by economist Partha Dasgupta.

Health

• Nearly 3 in 10 of our over-45 population are clinically obese.
• The government spends an estimated £18 billion – 8% of all government healthcare expenditure – on conditions related to high BMI (Body Mass Index) every year.
• The OECD estimates that the combined cost of conditions related to high BMI, in lost workforce productivity, reduction in life expectancy and NHS funds, is £74 billion every year. This is equivalent to cutting the UK’s GDP by 3.4%. To cover these costs, each person in the United Kingdom pays an additional £409 in taxes per year.
• One in three of over 45 year olds has either diabetes or a heart condition.
• There has been a 338% increase in children’s A&E admissions caused by food allergies since 1998.