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Supermarket offers and food waste targeted in government’s food strategy
Martin Wainwright, The Guardian
Fewer cut-price supermarket gimmicks and other measures to help target food waste are central to a new government food security strategy to maintain UK food supplies for the next 40 years.
The strategy is highly critical of bogof – “buy one get one free” – offers and heavily reduced “loss leader” lines that encourage shoppers to buy food they don’t need which eventually ends up in the bin. And it calculates that reducing food waste has the potential to cut carbon emissions equal to taking a fifth of the country’s traffic off the roads. It also promotes leaner and healthier diets, along with higher crop yields and a move towards accepting genetically modified crops.
The series of reports called Food 2030 had been expected last month but was delayed by internal disagreement within the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and foot-dragging over measures that would potentially be unpopular with voters.
Launching the strategy the environment secretary Hilary Benn said: “Last year the world had a wake-up call with the sudden oil and food price rises, but the full environmental costs and the costs to our health remain significant and hidden. We need to tackle diet-related ill health that already costs the NHS and the wider economy billions of pounds each year.
“We need everyone in the food system to get involved — from farmers and retailers to the health service, schools and consumers. Our strategy needs to cover all aspects of our food — production, processing, distribution, retail, consumption and disposal.”
It was welcomed by some food specialists who argue that government must provide a brake to consumer-driven market forces. But there was criticism that action with real bite, including curbs on the power of supermarkets over suppliers, and carbon emissions from farming, remained too vague.
…Professor Tim Lang of City University, a specialist on food policy and member of the Sustainable Development Commission, said: “The issue is how radical or slight will changes for consumers be, and how soft or hard will the policy changes be?
“It’s good to see Defra at last championing the view that the UK’s food system needs to become very different. But I predict that some very uncomfortable and unpopular decisions will lie ahead for governments in coming years.
“The dominant policy language of recent years has centred on markets, choice and consumer sovereignty. These are too simplistic now. Politics needs to move fast.”
(10 August 2009)
‘Radical rethink’ needed on food
Mark Kinver, BBC news
A “radical rethink” of how the UK produces and consumes its food is needed, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn has warned.
He was speaking at the launch of the government’s assessment of the threats to the security of what we eat.
The food supply was currently secure but population growth and climate change could have an impact, he warned.
Producers, supermarkets and consumers have been invited to suggest how a secure food system should look in 2030.
Some of the findings from the consultation are expected to be published in the autumn.
Food research ‘needs a boost’
As well as launching the consultation process, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has published a scorecard-style assessment of the current state of the UK’s food supply.
“It is to stimulate a debate within the UK on what a food policy should be, and how do we define and look at food security more broadly,” said Defra’s chief scientific adviser Professor Robert Watson.
…Today’s food security assessment focuses on six areas, including global availability, UK food chain resilience and household food security.
It assesses the current situation in each area, and the likely situation in 5-10 years time.
One sector identified as “very unfavourable” and showing no sign of improving is global fish stocks.
Yet other areas, such as the diversity of the UK’s suppliers of fresh fruit and vegetables are deemed “favourable” and likely to improve even more.
In July, the Sustainable Development Commission – the government’s environmental watchdog – warned that the current food system was failing…
(10 August 2009)
No appetite for action on food security
Felicity Lawrence, The Guardian
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published a package of documents on the security of the UK’s food today.
One of the papers has some tell-tale red warning lights attached to the department’s assessment of how well we are likely to fare over the next five to 20 years as the impacts of climate change and global population growth intensify.
The prospects…are “very unfavourable” when it comes to certain key global resources, such as water and fish stocks, upon which our current food system depends. Energy is another field in which “unfavourable” conditions in the near future will affect food production and gets an amber warning light.
A quick sounding of food experts across the spectrum, from retail and farming industries to health and environmental groups, suggests this marks progress but not nearly enough. At last Defra has shifted from its position that we can depend on the global market to meet all our needs. Here is the recognition that we cannot take food security for granted any longer and that as pressure on global resources makes markets more volatile, we will need new thinking.
But the experts point out that it’s a year since the Cabinet Office’s strategy unit produced its report highlighting many of the inadequacies of our food supply. Today’s headlines may have been about Defra calling for a radical rethink of food production, but most of them would have liked to have seen a bit more action by now…
(10 August 2009)
