18/03/2011

The issue of food security is currently a hot topic and looks set to play an influential role in reforms of the EU’s common agricultural policy this year, however, many agriculturalists believe that establishing food security may not be a question of merely increasing yields.

Yesterday (17^th March) farmers and scientists assembled at the annual meeting of the Guild of Agricultural Journalists of Great Britain stressed the need for yield increases and the reinstatement of an independent farm adviser.

Among those assembled in Birmingham was Professor Ian Crute, of the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board and contributor to the recent UK Government Foresight Report. Commenting on Crute’s assertions that technological advances need to be transferred from the lab to the field, farmer Guy Smith said, “If we are to feed the world we need to replicate what our fathers and grandfathers did in doubling yields. We also need to understand why we have not been able to do the same."

The Foresight report, while frequently quoted as pushing for increased yields and the acceptance of GM technology, actually strongly recommends the uptake of agroecological practices and the need to reduce waste and address inefficiencies in the global food supply chain. The report advocates, “Utilising agroecological solutions to achieve sustainable intensification” describing agroecology as, “a new concept that has become firmly embedded within this Report.”

Vaclav Smil, author of the 2000 book Feeding the World and recipient of the 2007 Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for excellence in writing and editing in the population sciences, pointed out the astonishing scale of post-harvest waste in the current global food supply chain. The Foresight report notes, “It has been estimated that as much as 30% of all food grown worldwide may be lost or wasted before and after it reaches the consumer. Some estimates have placed it as high as 50%.” 

Smil condemns a narrow focus on increased production and believes the supply chain must undergo serious re-evaluation. In Feeding the World he wrote, “Nearly all assessments of long-term food prospects have been preoccupied with exploring the possibilities of increased supply instead of reducing waste along the whole food chain.” The Foresight report itself argues that halving food waste by 2050 would have the same effect as increasing food production by 25 percent. 

UK farmers losing out as a result of inefficient supply chain 

The problem farmers in the UK, as well as many others worldwide, face is identified by the UK Food Group as ‘immiserising growth.’ In their 2004 report Food, Inc: Corporate Concentration from Farm to Consumer the goup defines immiserising growth as a system wherein, “Producers, whether of bananas or milk, coffee or pigs… must produce more but earn less.” The report documented a national situation where “the top five supermarkets often account for 70% or more of grocery sales.” The UK Food Group explained that under such a system, “key agents such as a food processor or retailer sets the ‘rules of the game’ for participating in the chains.”

Furthermore, Bill Vorley, the report’s author, identified the situation in the UK supply chain as one where, “Downward pressure on processors’ margins from deregulatrion and increased supermarket purchasing power is also very apparent… exacerbated by a supermarket tradition of below-cost selling.”

Little appears to have changed since 2004; earlier this week Clive Aslet reported in The Telegraph on the plight of dairy farmers in Okehampton who, although they recently received a rise of a penny per litre in farmgate prices, due to the rising prices of feed, fuel and packaging, “[farmers] are spending 3p per litre more on producing their milk than they get from selling it.”

Aslet said, “Farming’s problem is that milk is regarded as one of the three or four items whose retail price is known to the ordinary shopper. Consumers assume that cheap milk equates with cheap everything else in the store... This is the free market, with claws out and fangs bared.”

Similar pressure on producers can be seen in the egg and pork sectors where farmers say they are losing money (£5 per chicken and £20 per pig) due to rising costs and lower farmgate prices. Efforts are being made to instate an ombudsman or supermarket adjudicator, such calls were made again yesterday (17^th March) by NFU Scotland with a view to securing a better deal for Scottish pork producers, but large processors and retailers appear to be unaccountable.

Many maintain that the amount of food produced today could adequately feed the world, that access to food is not the problem but instead that food is too expensive for the world’s hungry, the majority of whom are farmers. Hans Herren, recipient of the 1995 World Food Prize and advisor to the newly founded all parliamentary group on agroecology, said in support of minimising waste and adopting agroecological practices,  “Today, we have yield potential in most crops which, if realized, could feed the world twice over in the year 2050. And that’s why we go back to improving soils, making more efficient use of water, and moving to sustainable agricultural systems.”

Herren’s words were echoed in January in the pages of the Foresight report. The UK Food Group, also recognising that shortages are not behind hunger and that an inefficient supply chain is responsible for shrinking farmgate prices paid to producers, surmise, “The roots of low farm prices lie in oversupply… the terms of trade for primary producers have declined, the gap between producer prices and retail prices has grown, and family-scale farmers are finding themselves excluded from higher value markets and facing livelihood crisis.”