'Sustainable Food' is healthier for People and the Planet...
|
People:
There are nearly a billion people in the world overweight - about the same number as those who go hungry. The WHO calls this "the double burden".
'Sustainable' food takes into account environmental, health and social concerns. Can these concerns be included now as food prices rise? We are realising that ‘cheap’ food ignores the costs to health and the environment.
Two Definitions & Principles
|
 courtesy: www.sln.org.uk/geography/ |
Planet:
Food production makes up about 1/5th of all Greenhouse Gases (Stern)
Other concerns include:
energy use, (ca 10 calories used to produce one food calorie),
water (20 Niles flown out of Africa)
biodiversity(few crop strains instead of diverse range), and
land needed...
The UK 'Food Footprint' (What, Why, Who, How) is 5X the size of the UK.
|
"Sustainable" food means different things to each of us, as we seek to balance emerging food issues about various health, environmental and social concerns. When producing food, we need to use less finite resources like oil, and emit less greenhouse gases (Environmental), treat those in food chain better (Social), and make money for further investment (Economic). Sustainable food encouarges debates and dilemmas such as food miles or local, organic v GM, ethical & fair trade, land & labour, climate change & carbon labelling, cheap v quality (assured), health & environment, biodiversity v monoculture, veggie & animal welfare? On this site, we try to deal with these dilemmas at all levels, from consumer choice to government policy, but mainly at the level of your organisation.
Sustainable Food does not rely on the market, with its ups and down, to determine the future food security of the world. The world bank says: “The relationship between agriculture and human nutrition is far more complex than …the economic relationship between food supply and food demand”. ie food is much too important a commodity to be left to the whims of the markets. After all, food is a matter of life or death. And what sort of life we live.
For more on 'sustainable food', see What Why & How. Where are you in the Food Chain?
|
