We need fresh perspectives on food security, GM and state interference, says Kevin Hawkins


What, exactly, is this "great shift" in attitudes to food and farming that Tim Lang was celebrating on this page last week? Farming, he says, is "back in the cuddly zone".

But did it ever really leave it?

"Kingdoms are clay; our dungy earth alike feeds beast and man," wrote Shakespeare. To be sure, the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001 exposed at least one farm to the disgust of the public, but I recall that the food industry and the government took a lot of flak too as they did during the BSE crisis.

When the market price of commodities such as lamb, pork and milk reached their nadir in the late 1990s, it was the "robber-baron" supermarkets that got the blame. Media sympathy was entirely with the farmers.

And, of course, no other industry has been subsidised by the taxpayer to anything like the extent that farming has and still is.

The other elements in this allegedly new consensus also look familiar. We have all known for years where the sillier and more costly regulations that weigh on our food production come from and none but the looniest isolationists would refuse to slug it out with Brussels.

So what of food security? Having read Hilary Benn's Oxford speech and noted his call for more food to be produced in the UK, I was disappointed but not surprised to find no reference to GM the rehabilitation of which has been on Defra's agenda for years.

Nor did I find anything new on the mechanisms and incentives that will bring about the desired increase in output.

As for "corporate food power", which is Lang-speak for the big supermarkets, three successive and costly inquiries into the grocery market have produced nothing to justify more intervention than tinkering round the edges. If an ombudsman finally does arrive, the small produce suppliers will finally have a shoulder to cry on. The market will move on regardless.

The only new element in this consensus is that we can no longer afford the overblown nanny state. Spending millions trying to browbeat consumers into a different lifestyle and diet is plainly futile and the first step is to rid ourselves of every quango that does it.

The state will be reduced to its essential functions and the choice now is between politicians who will do it with conviction and those who won't.

Kevin Hawkins is an independent retail consultant

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Second Opinion: The great attitude shift has begun (10 April 2010)