Sponsored by
Outraged expert's plea for more fruits from our fields
British farms should supply much more of the food Britain eats but may have to settle for doing more fruit and less beef, according to an influential government adviser.
Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, has also said he wants to see a big rural building programme, so British people can return to living and working in the countryside.
Prof Lang, who has the ear of Environment and Food Secretary Hilary Benn, said: "I don't think we know what the future for farming is but we now know enough about the criteria in which we will judge what a sustainable system is.
"Take meat. We will simply have to produce less of it. We can't carry on using good arable land to produce food to then feed to animals.
"My guess is that we will have to put all our animals back on hillsides.We should be using prime croppable land to directly produce food for people."
"This country is now producing just five per cent of the fruit it consumes and it does not consume anywhere near enough.
"One of the things that has to happen is orchard planting on a massive scale. But it should be mixed farming. We don't want to replace monoculture maize with monoculture apples.
"Let's be honest, farmers are basically being paid for the view at the moment. We should return to food being the core use of our land. To do this will need more people on the land.
"It will need more rural housing. At the moment, horticulture is heavily dependent on migrant labour. We've got to ask how we can have British citizens working in this sector again. If there was a war, it would happen straight away.
"We have to breathe a human life back into the countryside and not persist with this chocolate-box idea.
"The percentage of food we consume that's produced in Britain is dropping like a stone and that worries me."
Prof Lang was named last week as a member of Hilary Benn's new Council of Food Policy Advisers.
He was a Leeds University graduate in psychology and sociology and stayed on for a doctorate.
In the 1970s, he spent seven years running a sheep-and-cattle farm in the hills near Slaidburn, Lancashire, with two partners. In the 1980s, he became director of Ken Livingstone's London Food Commission, which highlighted the increase in salmonella in poultry and contributed to the Food Safety Act of 1990.
He spoke of his current preoccupations in an interview published in the latest edition of Countryside Voice, the magazine of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
The magazine says: "Lang has worked harder to change the food landscape in Britain than any other single person over the past 30 years. Lang was raising the alarm about the declining quality of school dinners 25 years before Jamie Oliver.
"Lang was arguing for the need to buy seasonal local food – he coined the term 'food miles' – a decade before it became the voguish lifestyle choice it is today."
More recently, Prof Lang was a contributor to the Cabinet Office report Food Matters: Towards A Strategy for the 21st Century, published this summer, which said climate change, public health and the impact of world trade had to be taken into account.
He told the magazine: "This can't just be left to Tesco. For 30 years, successive governments have had a tacit food policy that I call 'Leave it to Tesco'. This also can't just be left to the power brokers in farming.
"Until I was eight, I grew up in India. When we returned, I remember my mother crying when she saw the greenness of England again. We are so lucky.
"So what are we doing growing so little of the food we eat? It's a moral outrage."
chris.benfield@ypn.co.uk
Email to a friend
Print this page- Leeds lose Ward to Palace: Is there anyone they can afford now?
- Sheffield Wednesday leaving it late to hijack Leeds United over Ward
- As Snodgrass dithers over Leeds, Warnock throws a lifeline
- Ball is in Leeds United’s court over contract - Snodgrass
- Police turning blind eye to Asian voter fraud, says MP
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: East
