Join us live for our ‘super dairies’ debate

Readers' comments (2)

• Anonymous | 19 November 2010 11:45 pm

  a step in the wrong direction,
  where the farming practice is unsustainable, relying on oil derivertives, creating a much larger carbon footprint.desese will spread faster more antibiotics needed

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• Dr David Hill | 28 November 2010 1:38 pm

  Anything that increases our food security has to be supported wholeheartedly without hesitation - cows included.
  
  For food shortages and a possible famine in the UK are far more liable than ever before. Lord Cameron of Dillington, a farmer and first head of the Countryside Agency coined the phrase ‘nine meals from anarchy’. Cameron saw the potential of a real food crisis hitting not just the poor of the Developing World, but we here in the UK during this present Century. His thinking was that it would only take three full days without food on supermarket shelves, before law and order started to break down and where British streets would descend into chaos. If you think that this is far fetched, that’s exactly what happened in the U.S. after Hurricane Katrina in the US where people started to loot their neighbours and communities in order to feed themselves and their families. A mere three days after the disaster struck.
  
  But this is getting much closer to home now than people realise, for food supply is directly linked to oil supplies through transport and production (fertilizers et al). Indeed, according to Professor of Food Policy Tim Lang at City University, London, ‘We are sleep-walking into a crisis.’
  He is correct, for the official facts are that Britain now has only a national home-grown food security of 58% (official statistics for 2007 from the ONS) We are therefore totally dependent upon the remaining 42% from imports from other foreign countries. Therefore in a crisis, we could not feed 42 out of 100 people. But, we have also to understand that the threats to a global food supply are getting far worse by the year for Britain, as more and more food is being consumed by the increasingly affluent Far-East who are importing far more of western food supplies now than they did just a mere 10-years ago. For as the long-term credit crunch and prolonged recession hits together over the next decade with our high debt factors in the UK, our constantly increasing inflation and a falling pound, those in the East will command far more buying power than ourselves to secure food supplies for their people. Another dictum of the ‘free market’ and capitalist forces economic mechanism that is flawed towards prosperous consumers and global suppliers.
  
  Unfortunately also we are all aware that governments are reactive and not proactive – predominantly they only act when a major problem is upon us. In this respect governments only act in times of crisis and on impulse. But with food, one has to prepare long before, for once the food has gone elsewhere, there is none to be had. Indeed, we can weather everything else but not a food shortage. Considering this truism, governments have to start NOW and invest heavily in ‘home-grown’ food production before it is far too late to do anything about it. In this respect even the Wall Street Journal on 15 October 2008 had to comment on the UK’s inbuilt food security problem.
  For in reality we are not that very far away from the ‘nine meals from anarchy’ scenario and where government has to act to prevent a human disaster that would make the credit crunch feel like a holiday. For without food, we starve and where food and water supplies are our most vital commodities, not financial wealth. We have sufficient of the latter but where we are nearly half bankrupt in the former. Therefore let’s do something about it whilst we can for denial is the worst form of ignorance ! Presently we have our eye ‘off the ball’.
  
  Dr David Hill
  World Innovation Foundation Charity (WIFC)
  Bern, Switzerland
  

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