London: Professor Tim Lang at Christian Ecology Link’s 'Just Food' day

Professor Tim Lang

Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University in London, spoke at Christian Ecology Link’s “Just Food” day in London on 18 January. More than 50 people attended. This is a slightly edited version of his presentation.

I can be dressed up to look quite respectable, but I’ve done that dread word – campaigning. We’ve got lots of scientific evidence about Food – so then what? I’m 66, and I belong to what I call “the angry professors group”. How much evidence do you need before you act on the food system? On the subjects of Food Security and Food Sovereignty, I wax lyrical. I am troubled by those notions. I want to plant some key concepts. Food Security was coined 30 to 40 years ago – the underlying meaning is “Are you feeding people?”, but one research paper had 140 meanings, although I consider only about five. It’s essentially about access to food, the availability of food and the affordability of food – the three A’s. Are people being fed? This question is usually about under-consumption, but there are 1.4 billion people overweight, compared to 800 million people who are underfed.

Food Sovereignty was a term coined about 15 to 20 years ago by the peasants’ movement – Marxists and radical revolutionaries. “Peasant” anywhere not in the English language is not a term of abuse – it means “subsistence” farming, or living “hand to mouth” – with no wages. Food Sovereignty as a concept was championed by La Via Campesina, the voice of small farmers. In the world today there are 1.5 billion small farmers. La Via Campesina views from the perspective of the dispossessed – small farmers and peasants who are marginalised by agriculture operating on the mass scale – market-based agriculture. I was a farmer and I think a lot about farming. I’m interested in the food system and the inputs into the food system. As such I’m very interested in banking – as it determines the food system, such as inputs of agricultural chemicals. In the UK, hardly anyone works on the land.

There are 3.5 million people working in food in the UK, but only 500,000 who actually work the land in farming. The problems we now face are why I get out of bed in the morning – the biggest single determinant of planetary ecological decline. In the rich world, we are over-consuming. In the developing world, the trend is towards under-consumption. If everyone in the world consumed like they do in the US, we would need four or five planets. There is research by people like me into footprinting – consumption and sustainability. “Sustainability” is like a Rorschach inkblot, which psychologists used in the 1960s - everyone sees something different. “Sustainability” means everything to everyone. In the City, they use the word “sustainability” to mean – does the annual bonus cover a new Ferrari ? Sustainability should mean the sustenance of health of people and the health of ecosystems.

Whichever way we look at it, something is going seriously awry. I use that word “awry” carefully, because in one way, the food system is going fantastically successfully. Production is astonishing. Around about 100 year ago, we saw the development of food science, understanding of water, animal breeding. This was put together with nutritional science to address the difficulties in Victorian society where the life expectancy for some was very short. This was the beginning of social science.

In the 1920s, 30s, my grandfather got a Nobel Prize for research into vitamins – nutrients could alter life conditions. This was the basis for a scientific model – the capacity to improve the food system. During World War II, that model won. Before the war, Britain was producing only one third of its food. In 1945, in wartime, Britain was producing two thirds of its food. The real progress was thought to be in fertilisers – not in pesticides – and its only now we’re picking up that they’re killing off bees and insects. We are now having to address the problem of our role in a very complicated ecosystem – remarkably altered by a brilliant success story – of producing more food. It’s staggering. All the charts go up. The production of wheat, meat, fish, with all the essential fatty acids [ Omega 3 ], for brain development, for pre-conception health, for vascular heatlh – the graph goes up – but we are now seeing fish stocks in a dire state. We know we need to be eating fish, but in fish farming, fish is being trawled from the sea to feed caged salmon, which is a similar problem to soya being fed to chickens – a three to one ratio – an energy conversion problem.

Now down to political choices. Recent research shows there is a 25 year gap in the life expectancy between rich and poor. There is a phenomenon of globalisation. I was partly brought up in India – and I remember spices being sold to the UK. Of course, trade is not new. What is new about globalisation is the pace and the scale. Broadly, the food system is not globalised. Most food is regional. In 1982, the UK was 82% self-sufficient, but now the UK is a parasitic economy.

A speech was given recently saying we need to grow more, but I don’t see too much to encourage me. What do we mean by “ecology” ? I use the term in the Darwinian sense but go further – we humans are within that same ecosystem. We need an ecological framework for trying to deal with complexity. We now know enough about the impact of the last 100 years. We know the food system is a major part of the climate change problem. Lord Nicholas Stern has calculated that agriculture alone accounts for 10% to 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. Jetting off on a plane is small fry for carbon emissions compared to eating a diet considerably high in meat. It’s the sheer quantity that is being eaten – which is why we’re getting fat. I have 10 challenges.

1. Health

The spread of non-communicable diseases: It used to be that food was strongly associated with communicable diseases – principally water-borne disease. Now, the rise of non-communicable diseases comes with the “nutrition transition” from having a highly localised diet to having food from other places. Processed food is replacing domestic cooking. We end up with 35,000 items in the supermarket. Satellites tell farmers when to harvest. Logistical management systems are brilliant but they cause problems. A recent paper for public health warned of the spread of antibiotic resistance in food production. Tony Blair was warned that obesity is a ticking time bomb for the National Health Service. Companies are worried about reputational damage. Coca Cola is afraid of being sued for selling obesity.

2. Energy

Food is energy for us but is also using energy. There has been a growth in energy use – for example in the use of fertilisers created by the Haber-Bosch process – the fixing of nitrogen.

3. Land Use

I have a reproduction of a portrait of Malthus to remind me of the complications of this issue, but I’m not a Malthusian. Malthus has been proven wrong for 100 years. In my lifetime, human population has doubled to 7 billion, probably rising to 9.5 billion by 2030. There are more people, so there are more mouths to feed. I am a neo-neo-Malthusian – the problem of feeding the population is a very big challenge. Very crudely, there are two different models. The first is let’s have another go at the industrial food-growing revolution and other science. The approach can be summarised as: we’ve started altering Nature – let’s go the whole hog. However, even with the technical fix people accept we need to sequester carbon in the soil. Here in the UK, one of God’s plugholes, where it rains a lot, flooding is showing how we have mismanaged water and land.

4. Ecosystems

What’s going to alter the nutritional transition from simple diets to complex diets – the most likely change to the food system - will be the availability of water. Water distribution drives populations. Food is the biggest user of water on the planet. Agriculture uses something like 70% of all potable water. And ask Tony Allen, an expert on virtual water, and he will say that much of our food is embedded water.

5. Culture

I’m a social scientist. Eating all day long is actually a cultural aspiration. Our permanent eating economy is lovely and terribly civilised at one level. Think of Cafe culture. But what would a culture look like if it ate sustainably ? Marketing is out of control. £500 million is spent on food marketing and only £5 million spent on healthy food education. We opposed “Change for Life” which was targeted at the poor to encourage them to change their diet and lifestyle, as 95% of the population need to change their diets – not just the poor. Research from China has shown a rise in diabetes, stroke etc – from the 1980s and 1990s. As diets started to have more meat and fat in them, the diseases kicked in – the evidence for this is extremely strong.

6. Urbanisation

Working the land: we have a kind of “Volvo World”, where people want to live in the country but not work on it. We are now a majority urban world. Look at Rosie Boycott, working for more food in the City of London….. Growing on roofs. Growing more food in cities.

7. Demography

Plants are a quicker way to get nutrients. Much depends on what we eat and we can’t all eat an Argentinian diet high in beef.

8. Labour

A colleague went to Georgia to learn Russian so that she could do research in the Lincolnshire picking fields. Why will the British not pick vegetables? We will eat someone else’s labour. If you want more vegetables and fruit, you need labour. How much do you pay them? What working conditions? People walked off the land as soon as they could because of the appalling conditions for land labour.

9. Governance

The dominant model of the last 40 years has been the market. Tesco sells a third of all food and drink. Are markets the best way to meet needs ? Do they look after ecosystems ? We have got to have a system of governance of ecosystems. The European Union, for example, can’t keep putting human waste into the North Sea. We have got to remove agrochemicals from water, which will mean millions of pounds of
filtration. This raises the question of why add them in the first place ? The complexity of the picture requires governance. Yet, Tesco is more important than the Government. Walmart (Asda to you) is the biggest economic entity worldwide. Nestle, Coca Cola, are hugely more important than the Dutch Government. The 7th “country” is Unilever. It’s a thinking company – the only food company with a commitment to issues of
sustainability. There is a very interesting shift going on in corporate food. Are they doing it to protect their reputations ? It’s a governance problem.

10. Money flows

Who makes the money out of food ? Google “Defra food statistics pocket book”. Look at the digest of statistics. 65 million British people spend £180 billion a year on food. Hardly any of that money goes to farming. Most of the money is off the land. If we want more plants, more growing – the only want is to increase incentives – that is how to reframe the argument. Where the money goes is critical. Christians are very important in the Fair Trade movement. We want to see sugar consumption down by 30% and this will free land. Less sugar means more land to grow more crops. Cuba was a Soviet colony to grow sugar. It ought to be producing plants for health – not sugar. We need to get more money going back to food production.

Food Sovereignty is a great movement. It’s about us. About how we live. About whether we respond to data about the effect food is having on the planet. I’m to meet a journalist after here in a cafe – doing a cartoon on sugar. Fantastic. Actually the issue of food ecology and health raises the question of what do we mean by “progress” ? What do we mean by health ? What is a good food system ? A good food system is where the land is looked after to allow it to flourish – instead, we are threatening it. Human health should be about good health for all, not some. Good health means enhanced lives.

Other talks and notes from the day are available at: www.greenchristian.org.uk/archives/6662

Source: www.greenchristian.org.uk/archives/6636