|
OUR
FOOD, OUR FUTURE
- BBC
RADIO 4
MONDAY
28TH JULY, 9.00AM
How have
we so quickly come from a period when we were sitting on top of a
butter mountain and surrounded by groaning grain silos to a time when
wheat prices are soaring and the rising cost of food is noticeably
beginning to hit family budgets? Is this simply an transient blip or
the beginning of a dramatic change in the way we view food and the
way we eat? Global food prices have been falling in real terms for
100 years but is the party over?
In this
series Tom Heap unpicks the crisis and poses challenges to some of
the new conventional wisdoms about food. He asks whether the current
food shortages are not simply the result of bad luck but of
short-sighted policies; and asks whether biofuels, so often cast as
villains, have been unfairly blamed for pushing up prices. He
investigates whether British consumers, far from being victims of
rising prices are in fact partly to blame, by their refusal to change
their eating habits when costs go up. He also reports on how EU
policies are subsidising non-farmers not to farm; a policy which not
only takes farmland out of production but also drives up prices for consumers.
Given that
Britain has some of the best wheat-growing land in the world, what do
high grain prices mean for the British countryside? Some people argue
that farmers will be tempted to turn over every available hectare to
arable, and that livestock will disappear from the countryside, or at
least banished only to remote areas unfit for cultivation. For the
last 20 years, farmers have been encouraged to be stewards of the
landscape, with environmental benefits of farming given priority over
food production. Now, that may change, and environmental land
policies may come to be seen as unaffordable luxuries. What choices
will we make?
The series
also examines whether Britain could become self-sufficient in food
and whether it's a good idea to try, and whether scientists are
capable of rising to the challenge of saving the world from
starvation by increasing crop yields and producing new foods to tempt
the British palate.
top |