Lordy this man has some interesting ideas.
Similarly, Britain\’s ability to feed itself has been in long-term decline, and food prices are reportedly rising in the cold spell. It was only two years ago that droughts in Australia caused a crisis in world grain supplies; in April 2008 food crises affected at least 37 countries and there were related riots in many. As climate change and volatile oil prices destabilise global agriculture, we are becoming more dependent on food and energy imports just as the geopolitics of both make it less likely that the world will generously meet our needs.
So of course the reaction is that we should become more self-sufficient, grow more of our own food and stop relying upon Johnny Foreigner.
Britons have been warned to brace themselves for an increase in food prices as plunging temperatures leave farmers unable to harvest vegetables and hauliers struggle to distribute fresh produce……Concerns have now switched to food supply. Sub-zero temperatures have made it impossible to extract some vegetables from the ground. Producers of brussels sprouts and cabbages are all reporting problems with harvesting. Cauliflowers are said to have turned to \”mush\” in the sustained frost, with the result that only imported ones are available – at more than £2 each.
Yes, you\’ve guessed it. His solution to food insecurity is to make food supplies even more insecure and even more vulnerable to the (weather is local, after all) vagaries of the weather.
And to think that this man and his minions get £600,000 a year of our tax money to tell us all how to make the world worse.
It is of course necessary to ensure food security in County Durham by requiring that the inhabitants only eat locally-grown food.
Brian, you would not want to live on what grows here.
Britain has not been able to feed itself since at least the middleof the nineteenth century.
As a more sensible solution to the percieved problem might I direct people’s attention to The Last Grain Race by Eric Newby?
I’d like to know where he’s buying cauliflowers, so I can avoid it. They were £1.39 in Sainsbury on Saturday, so I went to Aldi and got one for £0.98…
Sainsbury? Aldi? Julia! Darling!
Surely you realise sensitive souls like Mr Simms would never buy from rapacious corporations. They buy where the simple, working folk shop – places like that little Italian grocer’s in the Fulham Road which does such a wonder focacella.
Ian,
You are quite correct. But it would ensure food security, wouldn’t it? We know this because Andrew Simms tells us so.
It would ensure starvation, unless you can eat Nissans. No, hang on, Washington’s in Tyne and Wear now, isn’t it?
Apples and wheat, that’s all we can have.
“They buy where the simple, working folk shop…”
*chuckle*