Is there any more
fundamental a question as we approach a general election than to ask
what is the point of Government? Many theories and forms of
government hold that the primary purpose is to protect the members of
the society. There are differences and nuances but generally they
include protecting the weak and disadvantaged individuals from
exploitation and worse by the strong and powerful, and to protect the
society as a whole from external impacts such as invading armies, and
diseases. Personally I would add protecting future generations from
the inevitable destruction and consumption of the current generations
lifestyle, but that is not commonly included.
Having read the
manifestos for the candidates in our election, you might be forgiven
for thinking the primary function of our Government was to manage the
economy. I'm not intending to argue that here, nor am I going to
review how well (!) our Government has done based on the above
criteria over the lifetime of the last assembly.
Maslow wrote his paper
'A Theory of Human Motivation ' in 1943. In doing so he outlined a
hierarchy of need for human beings. The base consists of
physiological functions: breathing, sleeping, excretion, water and of
course food. The next layer above that, which can only really be
addressed when the lower level has been satisfied, is safety.
Included in that level are security of body, employment, resources,
family, health property. You would think on the basis of that much
quoted paper that food security would be a primary concern for
individuals, society and indeed the government. It doesn't feel
like that in Jersey.
Food security is a huge
topic in itself. There are many aspects and factors involved in
thinking about it. I have sometimes been upbraided by people when I
talk about it that I don't understand it and we would be able to
organise a mini armada of small boats to bring stuff from France if
it came to it. That is a very narrow and specific aspect of food
security entailed in emergency planning. If you are relying on an
emergency plan, you do not have security, you have contingency. Food
security is much more than just can we get over a short term
difficulty should it arise.
Appreciating where we
are in respect of food security requires some understanding of food
as an industry of many interacting parts. The old days of a
patchwork of small family farms feeding themselves and selling
surpluses locally have been long dead in much of the western world.
We have mega farms larger often than our whole island, half a dozen
seed merchants who control over half the world's seed supplies,
distributors, processors of scale like Unilever and Kraft, retailers
in the UK dominated by four big companies, wholesalers and others.
Like any supply chain it is only really as strong as its weakest link
and there are many links here that could be a bottleneck. All of
that is of course today; there is also a future thinking dimension –
changing diets round the world, loss of cultivatable land, water
stress, soil erosion, pest and disease susceptibility, population
increases.
Jersey is a small
place, minute population, surely such global issues wouldn't affect
us? I hear this little Jersey argument a lot about all sorts of
things, but I would suggest we are are more susceptible than other
places when it comes to food security. Apart from some dairy,
selected marine items and Royals, we import almost everything edible.
Probably over 95% of our food is externally sourced. In August
there was a significant debate in the UK over their food security
with the NFU worried that the UK's food self sufficiency had fallen
to only 60% ! See
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/aug/07/britain-food-self-sufficiency-decline-imports-nfu
It has been used to argue for increased technology usage and GM. I
don't agree with that as a solution, but I do agree there is a
problem.
In an article in the Guardian, 10th October,
Jay Rayner wrote about the declining UK self sufficiency: 'Almost
all of that decline is down to supermarkets pushing deals on farmers
that have made their industry financially unsustainable. The only
kind of land use to have increased in the past 25 years is of
farmland that is no longer being farmed. In an age of rising
population and an exploding global middle class – factors that will
fuel demand for 50% more food from the same amount of land by 2030 –
that isn’t merely a cause for concern. It’s a catastrophe.' If
60% self sufficient Britain is concerned and facing a catastrophe,
what does 5% self sufficiency in Jersey say about our near future?
Clearly transport links are not the only issue. The UK is worried
about food security even though they are not reliant on one port.
There is a lot more to food security than its distribution.
While we often talk of
food and food security as though there is just one entity, there are
in fact several food types that we have to consider. There is the
fresh fruit and vegetables, the stuff that the 5 a day campaign and
dietitians urge us to eat more of. They are the source of much of
the vitamins, minerals and micro-nutrients we need for health, often
with a very short shelf life or storage potential. At the other end
there are the staples- wheat , barley, rice etcetera that provide
energy dense food like bread. Typically they require special
processing to turn the raw grain into edible product. These grain products is where
the bulk of the dietary calories come from. There is the dairy sector
providing significant contribution to dietary protein. Often shorter
life products require chilling, except perhaps for the more processed
items such as cheese and UHT milk. Somewhere in between we have
frozen and tinned vegetables, processed meats, ready meals that are
the specialist domain of the processors. Some can have a long shelf
life, though possibly at the expense of taste and nutritional value.
When WHO looks at food security they focus on calories. You need vitamins etc for health and vitality long term, but without calories starvation ensues in short order. Some foods are far more efficient and effective at supplying those. To get the 2500 kCalories recommended in a day as an adult male, you would need:
Just over 2lb of modern
white processed bread or
8lb of potatoes for
same or
16lb carrots ! or
25lb lettuce (!!) or
2.5 lb steak. or
0.7kg vegetable fat.
It should be clear from
that list that what we have to ensure is supplied by way of food
security is highly dependent on the diet we are fulfilling. That in
turn affects the land area required to supply the food (ignoring sea
food elements of course). Currently the average American consumes
about 2000 lbs of food per year, which works out to about 5.5 lbs and
2700 calories per day. Very crudely eating their body weight in
food per month! Europeans are a little more moderate, at about
4lbs of foods each daily. In 1993 the FOA reckoned the minimum
amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security,
with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western
Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This
does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it
assumes adequate water supplies. 0.5 hectare is 53,000 square feet.
Some implications if that were adopted across the world are at
http://people.oregonstate.edu/~muirp/trophic.htm
However that is one extreme, and there are other diets and
assumptions that others use, eg Pimentel and Jeavons.
There was a very good
article by Simon Fairlie in the Land magazine, Winter 2007-2008
entitled Can Britain Feed Itself? He looked at the basic Mellanby
diet ,and a number of other options including permaculture, meat, and
vegan options , and the implications for land usage. “In 1975,
Britain grew 15 million tonnes of cereals on less than 3.6 million
hectares at a yield of about 4 tonnes per hectare. This was the
equivalent of 283 kilos per person a year, which is about 2,700
calories a day — comfortable enough for every man, woman, child and
elderly person in the country. The total population was 53 million .”
There are many notes
and comments, but very crudely the outcome was:
Type
|
Pop
|
Land used for food
|
Fed per hectare
|
Jersey population fed
|
Mellanby 1973
|
53 million
|
11 million hectares
|
~5 per hectare
|
~32,000
|
Conventional with livestock 2005
|
60.6 million
|
10.8 million hectares
|
~5.5 per hectare
|
~35,000
|
Conventional vegan 2005
|
60.6 million
|
3 million hectares
|
~20 per hectare
|
~127,000
|
Organic vegan 2005
|
60.6 million
|
7.3 million hectares
|
~8.3 per hectare
|
~53,000
|
Organic with livestock 2005
|
60.6 million
|
15.9 million hectares
|
~3.8 per hectare
|
~24,000
|
We can do a quick
conversion to give Jersey equivalents, assuming 35,000 vergees
agricultural land and 5.5 vergees to a hectare for numerical
convenience.
By contrast Jeavons in
his biodynamic approach claims a sustainable (organic) vegan diet is
possible on 4000 square feet per person, equivalent to 26 people fed
per hectare. The difference between Jeavons and Fairlie here is that
Jeavons is labour intensive, hand tools only, whereas Fairlies
figures use normal tractor based agriculture.
However such figures
are not too useful on the small scale. Soil conditions, micro-climate
and seasonality all play a part. Even if you could grow your vegan
diet locally, you would still have to deal with the realities of the
hungry gap in early spring and the glut in late late summer/early
autumn. Greenhouses and glasshouses can mitigate some of that
seasonal production and diversity problem, but we have abandoned them
commercially. You need storage and processing to make pickles, jams,
chutneys and freezing other stuff. If you want to make you own bread
it is even harder. After you have dried the grain, threshed it
somehow and winnowed it you could store it for sometime as long as
the weevils and vermin don't get to it. You could mill it to flour
right away but it goes rancid in a couple of months and wont store
anywhere near as long as it does as grain. You can grind some every
day for your own use. On a hand mill it might take you an hour a day
to mill flour for a family. It is a chore – hence the daily grind.
That is all fine for a
smallholder who has a bit of land, skills and knowledge, tools and
equipment, but it wont run on a societal basis. The smallholder
family might have food security, but they are not going to produce
much surplus. It is hard work and there is very little money in it,
see
http://www.theecologist.org/green_green_living/gardening/1097217/smallholding_the_basics.html
.One of the reasons for the decline in worked farmland in the UK,
touched on in the Rayner piece and it might well soon apply here too,
is that it is simply too difficult to make a living farming.
Children who have seen exhausted farming parents working long hours
just to stand still are not enthusiastic about taking up the
challenge when there appears to be so many easier ways to make a
living. There is an inherent conflict here. In general small
integrated farming or horticulture operations are more productive in
yield per unit area than large operations, especially when sized
right to the equipment deployed. However they are more labour
intensive. I estimate that if we were to use the Jeavons approach to
maximise producing our food and diet requirements locally , we would
need about a fifth of the population involved in food production.
Even if we could produce the grain, we have only one working mill ,
and that operated part time by volunteers. The only working threshing
machine is a piece at the Pallot steam museum used as an annual
attraction.
The only options that
could provide all our food locally are the two vegan options, plus
any marine produce. Even if we were collectively happy to all turn
vegan overnight , in practice it isn't going to happen. Leave aside
what happens to the Jersey cow on a vegan island, it is simply not
going to happen on any scale, not while they are comfortable well
paid office jobs in existence. Even if you thought finance was about
to collapse and bring down the local economy with it forcing us back
to the land, there would be plenty of practical problems, starting
with simply educating and training enough people to make it work.
So we have to deal with
the reality that in Jersey we are going to be importing a significant
amount of our food for sometime to come. In particular we are very
dependent on imports for processed packaged items, meat and grain
based products. This is the area that particularly concerns me –
bread. You can freeze it , but otherwise it does not keep for long,
even when made with the Chorleywood process. Of course as I alluded
to above if you have the flour stored you could bake it on demand,
but that would require either significant commercial bakery
facilities, or almost every house in the Island home baking. We no
longer have the commercial option since CI bakeries closed down. That
closure was said to be because for price competition from imported
supplies. The remaining on island bakeries could probably produce no
more than 15% of our island's daily bread requirements, even working
flat out. As recently as the 1970's bakeries were expected to carry
over a month's supply of flour on premises to ensure supply of that
most essential of commodities - bread.
Even if we had the
storage for flour we no longer have the capacity to process it. I
cannot yet see hoards of eager home bakers baking bread daily, nor
does it seem an efficient use of energy. In fact home food production
seems to have declined remarkably. People in the UK generally no
longer cook at home – they heat stuff from packets and tins.
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/sep/05/home-cooking-decline-low-income-ready-meals.
Even if we had the raw materials available locally it seems a
growing army of people would not know or not be inclined to turn them
into food. There is a different weakness there. The number of
processing companies is small, and they operate a few large factory
units. The problem was brought to light most clearly with the
horsemeat scandal.
What should be clear to
readers is that our food security in the Island has been eroded
steadily over many years. It needs integrated thinking on food for a
system that works for the island, from growers to processors to
retailers to the public. Matching facilities need to be in place to
make the whole work. There is no point in farmers growing wheat
other than for export unless there are facilities to thresh and mill.
There is no point to setting up a bakery unless you have flour
supplies on hand. The evidence is we are losing it. We used to
have 40 mills in the island, we now have one run part time. We no
longer have a canning factory for potatoes and carrots - that closed
in the '70s. We have lost farmers, we have I believe narrowed our
crop and produce range gearing it for export, we have lost bakeries,
converted glasshouse and nursery sites into building developments and now we are about to lose food warehousing. Each step, each loss, has
lessened the resilience on island to provide for ourselves and
increased our dependence on others outside.
I asked at the top of
the piece, what is the point of government. In respect of food
security I would say in Jersey it has shown itself to be an
irrelevance. Yes there has been some support for farmers and for
some facilities like the dairy. It has been heavily biased towards
export activities, to the monetary aspect of the industry. Nothing
aimed at staunching the disintegration of facilities we would need if
we were forced to rely on ourselves. An no, an emergency plan is not
food security and isn't good enough. There is a price to 'cheap' food and it is the risk of no food.
For me the fact it is
the Co-op closing the on island warehouse is particularly ironic.
Until the recent sale of their farms to pay for the disastrous foray
into banking, the Co-op group in the UK was effectively the countries
largest farmer. The group had a degree of vertical integration of
supply , distribution and retail of a portion of its food supplies. That exactly parallels what needs to be done to ensure we have food
security.
