Call for action plan to fight ‘hidden hunger’

Britain must keep an open mind when it comes to potential new technologies in agriculture, according to Shadow Defra minister and Wakefield MP Mary Creagh.

Ms Creagh, speaking at the Labour Party Conference this week, said that the green movement did itself no favours in threatening to trash UK trials of aphid-resistant GM wheat earlier this year and said that Britain needed a new food strategy to tackle the epidemic of “hidden hunger”.

Highlighting a recent explosion in the use of food banks, and figures suggesting Britain’s poorest families are now eating 30 per cent less fruit and vegetables than in 2007, Ms Creagh said that this was the consequence of the recession and increasing food prices.

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A new food strategy, she said, should include action to tackle food waste, to create more resilient local food networks, and to invest in the underpinning agricultural science needed to help produce more food sustainably.

Her remarks came at a fringe meeting hosted by the Crop Protection Association (CPA) and New Statesman magazine entitled ‘Food for thought: Have people been priced out of the market?’

Speaking after the meeting, CPA communications manager Wendy Gray said: “This discussion has highlighted the immediacy and impact of the global food crisis. It is clear that for families on lower incomes here in the UK, the effects of rising food prices are already causing problems of financial hardship and poor diet.

“For people in developing countries, the consequences can be even more extreme. The need for production-boosting agricultural technologies, including access to innovation in plant science and crop protection, is greater than ever.”

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Caroline Bovey, of the British Dietetics Association, said the impact of malnutrition was already costing the NHS £13bn. This was set to worsen as the effects of cuts in benefit and social care provision fed through to even greater problems of food poverty.

The effects of this year’s drought-hit corn harvest in the US would take this problem to a new level, she warned, noting that the corn required to fill a 4x4 with biofuel would feed a child in Africa for a year.