Watch again: Food security debate

Professor Ian Crute, chief scientist at the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board said: “The notion that there is some sort of ‘Either - Or’ in agricultural systems is clearly a nonsense.”

During a wide-ranging online Farmers Guardian debate on food security, Prof Crute explained that the term ‘sustainable intensification’, championed by the Foresight report, was about ‘simultaneously raising productivity, increasing resource use efficiency and avoiding or at least reducing the negative environmental impacts of agriculture’.

He said the Foresight report was clear that ‘nothing should be ruled out’ when it comes to meeting the food security challenge, including applying ‘all the knowledge and technology at our disposal - and ‘so-called agro-ecological approaches’.

“Why is it necessary to rule out any technology if there is a prospect that it can deliver higher levels of productivity with improved resource use efficiency (including land use) and an outcome that enables ‘spared’ land to be used for other desirable outcomes?” he said.

“There are of course people that want the world to be organised differently to the way it is at present - but that’s politics and has little to do with science.”

But Hans Herren, director of the Millennium Institute and a leading advocate of agroecology, argued that there is a need to ‘de-intensify agriculture in Europe and most developed countries’.

He said he preferred the phrase ‘nourishing the world’, rather than ‘feeding the world’, when it comes to debating food security.

“We need to use less external energy. Also one needs to know that today we actually overproduce food, 4600 Kcal per person per day, that is double the need.

“So we could actually grow less and better quality with less inputs in the developed countries, and easily double the production in the developing countries with agroecological and organic farming methods, all which has already been proven many time over that it is possible. I have done that research myself, so know that we can do it.”

Colin Tudge, biologist and writer, claimed the phrase sustainable intensification was ‘more or less meaningless’.

“The powers-that-be who run British agriculture - Government, the corporates, the NFU, and their selected advisers - take it to mean ‘business as usual’, ie more industrial agriculture producing bigger and bigger yields, eked out with GMOs which allegedly are designed to grow better with fewer inputs. But this is nonsense. This will simply perpetuate our dependence on oil-based industrial chemistry and heavy engineering,” he said.

NFU president Peter Kendall said sustainable intensification ‘is the route we’ll need to go down’, although demand for organics will ‘continue to offer potential for some farms’.

He denied the concept meant ‘business as usual’. “We know have to up our game - farmers are only too well aware of cost of fossil-fuel based products.

“That’s going to be a real restriction in the future. You should get out onto UK farms and see some of the work that’s going on with controlled traffic systems, min-till, and development of waste products to enrich our soils,” he said.

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