A shift towards a more sustainable global food system could create up to $10tn (£7.9tn) of benefits a year, improve human health and ease the climate crisis, according to the most comprehensive economic study of its type.
It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs, in effect, borrowing from the future to take profits today.
That is interesting, do say more!
A change of diet is another key element
Ah, the same old bollocks, the turnip diet.
Fuck off.
Listening to Klaus Schwab and others I don’t think ‘Fuck off’ is going to be an acceptable response and unlike ‘victims’ who are acceptable to the powers that be people like this blog’s readers will have no rights under the planned dispensation – look at the treatment meted out the January 6th protestors, hundreds of whom remain in jail or even awaiting trial.
Despite what George Monbiot says, the ‘intrinsic values’ of the Left wing aren’t extended to those who reject the shibboleths of the new orthodoxy
Sounds like the only way to ensure an acceptable diet is to cook up all these drongos as long pig.
The constant improvements in food supply has been an absolutely massive success story. The left always have to have a way of labeling such successes as failures, otherwise they will have no justification for shoehorning their destructive and barmy ideas into the works.
Farming is the sustainable global food system. It has sustained Human life for thousands of years having replaced unsustainable, unreliable hunter/gathering.
@Stoneyground
Exactly. Back in1950 the world population was 2.5 billion. Now it’s 8 billion the vast majority of whom aren’t starving. That successful increase of food production is what keeps us alive.
If someone wants to step back to how things were always enquire what their plans would be for the two thirds or more of the population who wouldn’t fit their model. The chances are you are in that group, but never them.
Answer to all this nonsense is “you first”. For example, if the BBC thinks AGW is beyond debate, they won’t want to use all that horrible gas powered electricity, right? So, we switch off their signal whenever the wind drops, right?
It found that existing food systems destroyed more value than they created due to hidden environmental and medical costs,
Well if most of the population die of starvation, that’ll keep those pesky medical costs down.
Rupert: that would be the one useful function of smart meters – cut off all those who buy ‘green’ electricity when the wind drops and at night.
Same old then…
And honestly.. smallholders… If there’s one certain way to introduce food insecurity and famine it’s that route..
But sure.. go ahead… I like mealworms and other kinds of grubs. They happen to be very good at getting rid of bodies of pesky intellectuals telling me what I Must Do For The Future.
Said grubs can then be fed to pigs and chickens on my Smallhold, keeping me in Bacon and Breast.
What’s not to like?
And no… you don’t want to feed them to the pigs directly.. They might be contagious.. You need that insect buffer…
Smallholders? These cunts think peasant farming will feed 8 billion people? It barely feeds the world’s (relatively) few remaining peasant farmers. That’s why people in Bangladesh are happy to work in garment factories.
Bollocks on stilts.
20% of food in UK is wasted. (Sell by date, domestic chuck.)
30% in developing nations rots before it gets to market.
Sure, there are pockets of famine (caused by politics) and children go hungry (according to my experience, children are always hungry).
Meanwhile enormous tracts of land (especially in USA and Canada) are abandoned as farmland and left to nature.
So it’s not the fault of farmers, who seem to be too efficient for their own good.
We could feed another two billion humans, no sweat.
“So it’s not the fault of farmers, who seem to be too efficient for their own good.”
Its more that farming consists of many small producers who sell their produce to a small number of very large organisations. Farmers thus have absolutely no pricing power whatsoever. All efficiency gains in farming accrue to just about everyone else in the production and retailing chain, other then the actual producer. And to the consumer of course. If someone invents a way of making 2 ears of corn grow where 1 did previously all that happens is that the price of grain adjusts downward, and those further up the chain get the benefit. Profitability at producer level is largely (in the medium term) unaffected, and remains at subsistence level.
The cost of each unit of food production has dropped massively over the last 70 years as new technologies and techniques have meant fewer and fewer farmers can make more and more food. And the real price of farm output drops just about every year. If wheat prices had just kept up just with inflation since the 80s they would be 2-3 times higher than they are today, and bread prices likewise.
Yes Jim
Between the need for strategic food security, demand for out of season produce, low cost / low safe / low standards / low everything, is a government trying to solve an impossible conundrum by introducing giant amounts of red tape that they don’t even understand themselves.
Thank goodness we can rely on dispatchable electricity from Norway France and Denmark when the shit doesn’t hit the fans, eh?
Knew someone who for a PhD looked at end to end energy costs and concluded economies of scale meant that the farmers markets used significantly more energy and carbon etc than the supermarkets, this was over a decade ago no doubt he’d not be allowed to reach that conclusion now.
His favourite example was growing tomatoes where it’s hot and shipping them in bulk vs locally grown greenhouse tomatoes, significant difference when you do end to end energy requirements
“Knew someone who for a PhD looked at end to end energy costs and concluded economies of scale meant that the farmers markets used significantly more energy and carbon etc than the supermarkets, this was over a decade ago no doubt he’d not be allowed to reach that conclusion now.
His favourite example was growing tomatoes where it’s hot and shipping them in bulk vs locally grown greenhouse tomatoes, significant difference when you do end to end energy requirements”
I often wind up my fellow farmers when they start up on the food miles and carbon footprint angle (which is really just a plea to ‘buy your food at higher prices from meee!’) that it is often the case that something produced on the other side of the world in a nice temperate climate using natural sunshine will probably have a lower carbon footprint than their output, produced half way up a mountain in Wales, and having to use lots of fossil fuels to do so. Even after accounting for shipping.
They don’t like this 🙂
We need food to eat.
Comments are closed.