المنتدى العالمي المعني بالأمن الغذائي والتغذية

FOOD WASTE

Submission from Susan Atkinson, Woodside Farm, Thorpe In the Glebe, Wysall, Nottingham, NG12 5QX, U.K.

My husband and I have an 80 hectare farm that has been in my husband’s family since 1919.  It has seen many changes in that time and at present is mostly arable and it is also in the Higher Level (environmental) Scheme (HLS).

Systemic Causes

1.  How a society views food and how abundant food production is in a country will determine how food is valued and whether or not food waste and losses are regarded as important or not. The UK has a mostly urban population that generally has little or no knowledge of how food is produced.  It also means that the UK government wants food to be produced that is afforded by the poorest of the population as comparatively few have the means to grow or produce any of their own food in our society.  Unfortunately, this desire has been expressed as food needing to be “cheap” rather than “affordable”.  As our society values goods by their price tag, paying thousands of pounds for “designer” handbags etc, food has become devalued in our population’s eyes and so little regarded.
2. This has been matched by the UK’s retail food sector becoming concentrated In the hands of a few large supermarket chains, who have held great power over UK farmers and have driven down farm gate prices to below the costs of production in their race to gain a larger share of the food market by offering customers ever lower prices, at least until the economic downturn of recent years.  Their pushing of ever cheaper food has seen our population turn to more and more convenience food in the belief that cheap food equated to good food.
3. At the same time the supermarkets demanded uniform standards for the products they bought from farmers.   This was to ensure that the produce could be transported over large distances as their operation became more and more centralised – standardised produce being easier to pack in a mass produced container for transport.  The standards were often set in a way that helped the supermarkets make maximum profit from the customer in spite of their claims for being value for money retailers.  Apples had to be a size that meant a pound of apples only contained three apples, so a family had to buy more for everyone to have one and cauliflowers were a size that was too large for one person and too small for a family.  These practises meant that thousands of tonnes of produce are wasted every year as the supermarkets do not want them.  Lately there has been some movement to supermarkets taking produce that does not fit the contract standard simply because supplies were short.
4. Also the supermarkets promoted “choice” for the consumers so that the customers were faced with products from other part of the world at all times and often could not find the British equivalent even if they wanted it.  Strawberries are flown In at the height of the British strawberry season and recently a supermarket claimed that it had to stock New Zealand lamb as no British lamb was available though it was the height of season for British lamb.
5. At the same time it has become the norm for people to eat snacks at their desks through the day rather than take proper meal breaks.  Food is regarded more as an inconvenience rather than a necessity.  It is known that our workers work the longest hours and yet are the least productive in Europe.  When people get home they all too often are too tired to cook a proper meal and so rely on instant meals.  The supermarkets have encouraged this by stocking frozen mashed potato, bags of prepared salad (apparently this item is the most likely to be thrown out as no longer fresh), containers containing portions of chopped up fruit and so on.  The supermarkets even sell bags of ice cubes!
6. All of these practises and others have led to food being wasted in phenomenally large amounts, all of it representing a great waste of time, non-renewable resources and money.  In turn this has led to the UK farming industry becoming highly indebted and under-resourced, both in equipment and farmers, while the country imports almost 40% of its food, much of it from countries where many people are unable to afford sufficient food for themselves and their families.

Food Production

1. Agribusinesses in the UK are forever at the forefront of those predicting vast increases in the world’s population and how farmers will have to produce far more food to feed everyone.  This is in spite of aid agencies telling how there is enough food in the world to more than feed everybody but that people go hungry due to the lack of land to grow it and/or the means to buy food.  I understand that if food losses were cut to zero there is enough food being produced now to feed several billion more people.  These announcements about the need to increase food production are always almost suggestive of the idea that the rest of the world cannot produce any large amounts of food itself.  The result is that farmers in the UK set out to produce as much of a crop as possible and are then surprised to find the market is over supplied and they are selling at prices below the cost of production
2. It is desirable that food is produced to a certain standard of nutrition if to be pronounced fit for human consumption and yet criteria setting the desired standard can be counterproductive, especially to the income of farmers.  One example of this is wheat.  The standards for wheat required to produce the type of bread eaten in the UK means that every year thousands of tonnes of bread-making wheat varieties grown for the UK market fail to make the grade, the amount failing varying according to each year’s weather patterns.  This failed wheat is then re-classified for animal feed and the farmer receives less for it, especially as the UK is an exporter of feed wheat. However, much of this “feed” wheat has high protein levels and as such is still suitable for human consumption elsewhere in the world and is exported abroad for this purpose.  Indeed, during the Ethiopian famine of 1984, the aid agencies exported high grade feed wheat to that country as it was both cheaper to buy and yet suitable for the way it would be cooked in  that country.  In ordinary circumstances, this sort of wheat can be dumped on markets in other countries, depressing prices for the farmers there.
3. Over-production is not just encouraged in crops but also in livestock.  The rising economies of India and China are always being promoted as emerging markets, particularly China.  The attitude taken is that the emerging economies will adopt a more western diet as the average income increases and no thought is taken of any potential problems to this theory.  A recent farming programme on television featured a Welsh dairy farmer who is planning to greatly increase his herd as he believes UK farmers have to get ever bigger to compete on world markets.  He saw China as a vast potential market for dairy products though the fact that Chinese people do not eat items such as yoghurt was mentioned.  He was talking about the UK needing to catch up with other countries that were already looking at this, blissfully unaware of the fact that most Chinese adults are lactose intolerant and therefore any market for dairy products is likely to be limited.  There is also the issue that even a large dairy farmer would not produce enough quantities of cheese or yoghurt to export directly themselves and just producing liquid milk would hardly be profitable in a country that has seen its own dairy industry decimated in recent years and imports over a million litres of milk every day as it is “cheaper”.  For decades the UK farming industry has been subjected to these “race to the bottom” tactics.
4. The drive for “efficiency” (which translates into farmers always reducing costs so the farm gate price can be even lower and big business makes even more profit) also means that the drive is for animals to be housed in ever larger numbers and intensively reared.  This is also being applied to the dairy sector, with herds being housed all year round and milked by robots.  There is little thought about what such practises are doing to the eco-system in spite of all the supposed concern about the environment.  This farm is in an area that once contained a great many small dairy herds, being part of the region that produces Stilton cheese.  The drive to larger herds and falling milk prices meant that farmers gave up their dairy herds (we were one) and now there is only one dairy herd ion this neighbourhood.  As the manure from a dairy cow can support up to 200 pounds weight of insects peer year, the numbers of birds also declined due to this loss of a major food source.  Also bio-diversity suffered as plant species found in pastures have spent thousands of years being eaten by grazing animals before their seeds have been deposited back on the pasture, with the result that once the animals were removed, the seeds had problems germinating.  We are using sheep on this farm at present to spread the rarer plants over greater areas of the pastures.  Upsetting the balance of any eco-system has unlooked for consequences, such as removing species that predate on insects that attack our crops and thus hampering food production unless ever more chemicals are used.
5. It is well known that an over-reliance on artificial fertilisers alone has led to soils being depleted of minerals and trace elements.  Now there is concern that the farm machinery is so large it is damaging soil structure, particularly in wet weather.  This was especially true in 2012 when the damage caused to many farms means that it would take several years to restore these soils, always assuming weather conditions allow this.  As once again the country is suffering from extremely wet weather, this is unlikely.  Having relatively small machinery on our farm meant that my husband was able to wait for conditions to be right before combining etc and our soil has not suffered.  Yet the land grabbing taking place around the world is for mega businesses to use very large machinery to grow monocultures, which could see soils ruined in a few years.  As the world’s climate changes, weather windows to get land work operations completed will be smaller.  Machinery size, labour numbers and farm size will have to adapt to this as the soils must be preserved otherwise average yields will decrease, in effect losing food pre-harvest.
6. Also there is a move to make more and more people dependent on commercially produced varieties of seed rather than continuing the practise of developing their own strains, swapping seeds and growing crops that effectively contain many strains per plot of ground.  This traditional way is the most efficient way to cope with climate change, but mega businesses have convinced many governments that their uniform mono-cultures are the most efficient.  As governments are mostly or all male while much of the smallholder farming is carried out by women, it is easy for the voice of business to win. 
7. Water management is also important, as has been demonstrated by the recent storms in the UK.  Rivers and other waterways have not been kept clear, so flooding is more and more frequent in some areas an d yet up to December, last year had been very dry and many farms need on farm reservoirs to cope with such conditions.  As the climate becomes more extreme, this swinging from wet to drought and back again could become the norm for many areas of the world and the consequences for food production would be enormous.
8. For all the talk about all the world’s population having the right to food and various targets and schemes supposedly aimed to achieve this, the world’s economic system treats food as commodities to be traded in order for a few to make vast profits.  Until this is altered so that food is treated as a basic human right, production systems will be manipulated in favour of business interests and the means to produce food, soils, water etc will also be wasted along with the waste and loss of food already experienced.