Why are we British so timid about health policy? We confuse healthcare systems (the NHS, doctors, beds, waiting times etc) with public health. Food is no exception to this approach. I have just returned from a working visit to Dubrovnik, Croatia - formerly a war zone. The reconstruction of the beautiful city is almost complete but walking through the streets you can see where the shelling destroyed ancient systems.
I was at a European Observatory School considering globalisation's impact on central and eastern European public health. I was also finishing my new book. It's about what my co-author and I term the Food Wars, the present era of conflict over which direction the food supply chain is to go for the next 50 years.
This year, a half-century of production-oriented food policy was put up for review in the Curry process. It side-stepped the intensification issues, almost wholly ignored health and plumped for a recipe of work smarter while being kind to conservation'. Further chain integration was the recipe for the future.
Chancellor Gordon Brown's comprehensive spending review's half a billion pounds to fund Curry's environmental measures was bitter-sweet compensation to the critics, myself included. But, as everyone in the Dubrovnik meeting knew, what matters is not the Curry commission but the European Commission. That's the real powerhouse of food policy.
Both in Europe and at home there is absurdly little discrimination about what really matters  what use to put our fertile and well-watered land to. I mention water because we Brits don't know our luck. The World Bank sees water wars as a real possibility  dwindling supplies will impede global plant growth, let alone economic growth. And by 2015, 40% of the world's population will live where it is hard to access enough water to survive. Remember that next time you see those giant lumbering watering gantries on parched fields.
DEFRA and the EU's endless CAP reform process need to get wise about which crops to encourage. The issue is not whether to have a CAP but what sort; not whether to be efficient' but what to produce. British governments miss the trick. The alliance we constantly try to build for more radical CAP reform would be enhanced by a health element.
The health dimension was fully appreciated by my colleagues from eastern Europe. More variety and security of supply for them. Less fat, more fruit for us. I have looked at the milk figures in the UK and EU which show a stunning incapacity to respond to health signals. Subsidies keep the heart attack zones coming. The government has a choice: 1  approve statins (drugs) at £1 a day per person to stave off the heart attacks; 2  eat more fruit for years.
The chancellor may think Curry's half billion is the line in the sand, but it won't be. The diet-related bill is set to rise. Fruit and vegetables receive next to no subsidy, except the destruction of surpluses'. Tell that to kids in Glasgow who never eat fruit.
At Dubrovnik, a professor argued that increasing availability of year-round fruit and vegetables was the key to why western European life expectancy figures rose these past 50 years and why others didn't. That, and the binge drinking and smoking indulged in by eastern Europeans exposed to our' companies' marketing blitzkrieg eastwards.
As I typed my book's final section on whether there might be a period of Food Peace, and on whose terms it might be, an awesome storm rolled around the islands. All very symbolic.
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I was at a European Observatory School considering globalisation's impact on central and eastern European public health. I was also finishing my new book. It's about what my co-author and I term the Food Wars, the present era of conflict over which direction the food supply chain is to go for the next 50 years.
This year, a half-century of production-oriented food policy was put up for review in the Curry process. It side-stepped the intensification issues, almost wholly ignored health and plumped for a recipe of work smarter while being kind to conservation'. Further chain integration was the recipe for the future.
Chancellor Gordon Brown's comprehensive spending review's half a billion pounds to fund Curry's environmental measures was bitter-sweet compensation to the critics, myself included. But, as everyone in the Dubrovnik meeting knew, what matters is not the Curry commission but the European Commission. That's the real powerhouse of food policy.
Both in Europe and at home there is absurdly little discrimination about what really matters  what use to put our fertile and well-watered land to. I mention water because we Brits don't know our luck. The World Bank sees water wars as a real possibility  dwindling supplies will impede global plant growth, let alone economic growth. And by 2015, 40% of the world's population will live where it is hard to access enough water to survive. Remember that next time you see those giant lumbering watering gantries on parched fields.
DEFRA and the EU's endless CAP reform process need to get wise about which crops to encourage. The issue is not whether to have a CAP but what sort; not whether to be efficient' but what to produce. British governments miss the trick. The alliance we constantly try to build for more radical CAP reform would be enhanced by a health element.
The health dimension was fully appreciated by my colleagues from eastern Europe. More variety and security of supply for them. Less fat, more fruit for us. I have looked at the milk figures in the UK and EU which show a stunning incapacity to respond to health signals. Subsidies keep the heart attack zones coming. The government has a choice: 1  approve statins (drugs) at £1 a day per person to stave off the heart attacks; 2  eat more fruit for years.
The chancellor may think Curry's half billion is the line in the sand, but it won't be. The diet-related bill is set to rise. Fruit and vegetables receive next to no subsidy, except the destruction of surpluses'. Tell that to kids in Glasgow who never eat fruit.
At Dubrovnik, a professor argued that increasing availability of year-round fruit and vegetables was the key to why western European life expectancy figures rose these past 50 years and why others didn't. That, and the binge drinking and smoking indulged in by eastern Europeans exposed to our' companies' marketing blitzkrieg eastwards.
As I typed my book's final section on whether there might be a period of Food Peace, and on whose terms it might be, an awesome storm rolled around the islands. All very symbolic.
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