Feature

Food quality lacks taste

Farming and food policy are under scrutiny as never before – yet there’s still little understanding of the close relationships between food, health and sustainability, say Jeanette Longfield and Vicki Hird

Everyone knows the farming and food system is in crisis, not just in this country but worldwide. The foot and mouth disease (FMD) disaster came while the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) catastrophe continued to unfold, and horribly soon after the tragic deaths in Scotland from E. Coli 0157. While beef and sheep hit the headlines, swine fever recently ripped though the pig industry (still reeling from an economic crisis of overproduction).

In Belgium, an incident involving dioxin contamination contributed to a change in government, and from time to time stories of epidemic avian flu in the Far East trickle into the news columns. Meantime, antibiotic resistance (caused, at least in part, by overuse of antibiotics in intensive livestock systems) continues to cause havoc in health services across the globe.

Protests about the feared environmental and social damage that could be caused by genetically modified crops have spread like the proverbial bushfire. Obesity rates in many countries continue to rise, while some 800 million people starve.

Little of this is new. The series of food scandals stretches back at least to the mid-1980s when Tory health minister Edwina Currie was sacrificed for telling the truth about salmonella contamination in poultry and egg farming. Listeria in soft cheeses and pates swiftly followed, along with patulin in apple juice and pthalates in baby milk. Fat and heart disease were rarely out of the news in those days and, although no longer fashionable, remain stubborn health problems. Today, the number of diet-related diseases simply gets bigger, with some cancers and, perhaps, immune system diseases such as asthma joining the list.

So new Labour, new hope? No. Instead, it’s new Labour, new initiative (new tautology?) In Labour’s first term of office the Food Standards Agency was established to much fanfare. So far, it has succeeded in being gratuitously offensive to the organic farming and food industry, bizarrely unsympathetic to citizens’ right to know whether or not they’re eating GM foods, and strangely silent on nutrition and diet-related diseases.

Its second term, forged in the fire (literally, in places) of FMD, has seen initiative-itis take hold. While few tears were shed over the passing of the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food, its replacement Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) has not yet been greeted by bunting. But there has been a recent flurry of activity in food and agriculture policy, including:

• the policy commission on the future of farming and food (chaired by Sir Don Curry, former head of the Meat and Livestock Commission);
• The Royal Society inquiry into infectious diseases of livestock;
• Professor Iain Anderson’s inquiry into the lessons to be learnt from the FMD outbreak;
• the Rural Recovery Task Force, led (controversially) by Chris Haskins of Northern Foods;
• investigations by, among others, the National Audit Office and parliamentary committees.

By January, the policy commission should have issued its report, but few commentators seem convinced, at this stage, that the future of the farming and food system will be any clearer. It would help, of course, if these initiatives were – in that now infamous new Labour phrase – joined up, but there is little sign of this.

For example, the commission has been holding a series of meetings in London and around the country to hear the views of stakeholders. It also had meetings with what it regards as four key stakeholder groups: industry, farmers, consumers, and environmental groups.

The Food Standards Agency, too, hosted a series of meetings around the country, as well as a major event in November in London, as part of the process of developing its submission to the policy commission. The Royal Society inquiry will be visiting parts of the country affected by FMD and inviting submissions from a range of groups as, no doubt, the Rural Recovery Task Force already has done. Some groups have been consulted so often that the later investigations may find inquiry fatigue has become endemic.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, this plethora of initiatives it is hard to avoid feeling that fundamental issues are being glossed over. The close relationship between food and health, for example, barely features in any of the official work outlined above. Certainly, Lord Haskins restricted himself to the health of the rural economy, rather than the health of anyone working in it.

Many Sustain members and others protested formally to Sir Don Curry, chair of the policy commission, about the lack of health expertise (among other things) on the commission. The response was to protest, in turn, that some commission members had a ‘strong interest’ in the subject. Similarly, our concerns about the commission’s extraordinarily short timetable were merely politely acknowledged.

The exception to this blind spot on health is the Food Standards Agency which, conversely, seems obsessed by food safety but rarely links this to broader food, nutrition and health issues, and not at all to the farming and food system.

While few would call for a thorough investigation of the length and expense of the Phillips inquiry into BSE, there is surely a midpoint between two years and millions of pounds, and a few months and small change?

Sustain takes a longer term view. Its submission to the policy commission will be based on its existing work and on documents sent in by members. At a recent members’ meeting we also agreed that Sustain should initiate, with the Centre for Food Policy at Thames Valley University, an ‘agri-food network’. This will aim to make connections between public interest groups, which often struggle to find good quality research to support their policy work, and progressive researchers, who, in turn, often find it difficult to engage in the policy process. The first seminar, in what Sustain hopes will be a series, took place in November and augured well for the future.

A recurring theme is certain to be how to create mutually reinforcing links between food safety, nutrition and sustainability (environmental and social), the three pillars of the integrated food and nutrition policy developed by the World Health Organisation in Europe. This policy document has been approved by the 50-plus governments in Europe, including the UK. However, our government seems determined to treat them as separate (and occasionally conflicting) policy areas.

Official dietary advice remains, for example, to eat two portions of fish a week (one of which should be oily fish), despite fish stock depletion, marine pollution and the environmental damage thought to be caused by intensive fish farming. TV viewers may remember a hapless Food Standards Agency official being skewered on this very point.

Other examples of disjointed policy abound. We should all be eating more fruit and vegetables and the government recently announced it would be spending £42m of lottery money to expand the national School Fruit Scheme (see page 12). This specifies the supply of apples, pears, bananas and satsumas only, so the volume of fruit imports and therefore the environmental damage caused by long-distance transport, is bound to increase. Meanwhile, UK vegetable growers languish for lack of a domestic market and marketing support.

Will any of the policy initiatives announced by government demonstrate a firm grasp of this large and complex picture and, most importantly, set a clear and consistent policy direction towards meeting the goals of food safety, nutrition and sustainability? Sadly, all the signs are that they will not.