Gary's views

Gary's weekly views

Each week an article by Gary has appeared in the Plympton Plymstock and Ivybridge News in South West Devon. The articles are published here

FOOD

Some of you can remember food shortages just after world war two, ration books and all that. That can never happen again in a country like Britain, can it?

I hope not, but I am not so sure. We now import the vast majority of our food from overseas, whilst our own farming industry withers on the vine. Dairy farmers are leaving the industry in droves, because they can hardly make profits at the prices paid to them. Thousands of acres of land every year leaves agricultural production and becomes leisure or recreational land, and so the potential for domestic food production falls even further. Young people cannot afford the capital costs to break into farming today, even if they wanted too – and few do.

At the same time the supermarket shelves are full of produce from all over the world. It is wonderful to have access to exotic fruits vegetables and produce that former generations could only read about. But we also import many of the dairy meat and arable products that we can and do make ourselves. We are now even importing milk from New Zealand (why?)

Does any of this matter? Is this not just like any other industry, say cars or textiles? Is this not just a reflection of globalisation: one big happy world where we all buy and sell from each other as our ancestors did from their own village.

Maybe. I hope the world develops in a peaceful and constructive way; I hope that natural, or political, or medical, or technological, or military disasters will not impact the growing inter-dependence of today’s world. But the sheer scale of the recent tsunami ought to cause a moment of reflection.

It would be inconvenient if we could not access new cars or the latest fashion labels for a season. But when a nation cannot feed its own people, that is a different matter altogether.

The farming industry is not like many others; you cannot just turn on a tap and produce pork chops and potatoes for all. It takes time to gear up food production. That was why farm subsidies were introduced in the first place: to help our agriculture industry survive the capricious cycles of the market, so there was always enough food on Britain’s table.
We should take more care over the British farming industry and make sure that it is still there when we need it.

posted by Nigel on Monday, January 17, 2005