BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE:EXISTING INTERNATIONAL food policy which simplistically holds that greater production will alleviate food supply problems is now going into "crisis".
Some developed countries will soon be unable to meet their own food requirements and climate change and water scarcity will increase the problems, according to a professor of food policy at City University, London.
"The old order is no longer with us," said Prof Tim Lang of CUL's centre for food policy. The days of "unending choice" in our supermarkets was gone. "The hypermarket is dead."
Prof Lang was speaking yesterday in Liverpool during a presentation at the British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual Festival of Science.
Food policy in Britain and many other western countries was based on a policy introduced in the 1930s and 1940s.
"Then the problem was underproduction, therefore the role of the scientist was to increase production," he said.
"It argued, raise production and everything would be all right." Great efforts were put into making all food types plentiful, but this in turn sparked related problems such as our increasing food consumption leading to obesity.
"Within 20 years of the productionist paradigm it was beginning to come unstuck," he argued.
Food supply had become an international and a highly complex activity affected by issues such as the cost of energy, the availability of water, climate change and collapsing biodiversity, he said.
Demographics would see world population rise from 6.7 billion to nine billion by the middle of this century, with a strong and continued drift toward urban living. "In food terms this is particularly important because who is going to produce the food," Prof Lang asked.
Other factors affecting the international food supply system included labour costs, the fall-off in production in the developed world as developing countries move to sell low-cost food products in developed markets and even the diets that we choose to eat.
These factors would serve to end the era of low-cost food, and also "contribute to geopolitical uncertainties", he stated. "These are the new fundamentals."
He issued a call at the festival for the development of a unified approach to food production, supply and consumption that takes in aspects of all of these. "We have to unite around what I call omni-standards."
These standards would gauge costs such as labour and energy but also the environmental footprint, healthiness and also social responsibility associated with food supply, all in a single rating.
He likened it to the international approach taken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and said that any body overseeing food policy should be informed by sound scientific data.
"Scientists have got to get a grip on this. We have to help build an institutional framework." This was something that could help to overcome "policy cacophony", the competing and contradictory advice currently provided to the consuming public.
He gave as an example government recommendations that we should eat more fish because of its health-giving properties - but who would supply the fish and at what cost?
"The poor countries are providing food for the rich countries when there are developmental arguments for the poor countries to eat their own fish," he said.
It was no good for a scientist to say he was researching genetically modified foods without thinking of the implications for society or for a social scientist arguing for improvements in the food supply chain without considering the financial implications.
There was an urgent need for policy coherence given the "terrifying gap" between where the current policy was and where it needed to be, he suggested. With pressing but unanswered questions before us on climate change and long-term water supply, "we are walking into Armageddon," he concluded.
