Food security has become the dominant framing of agri-food policy and research in the UK. However, it is not the only framing. In this post we take a look at one of the alternatives, food sovereignty. We look for food sovereignty in policy, in research, and in the media. We also explore the emerging food sovereignty movement within the UK.

While food security is the dominant term used, there is some debate about its meaning. However, there is broad agreement that it includes everyone having access to safe, nutritious food at all times, sufficient to support an active and healthy life. Following the food price spike of 2007-08 food security became identified by Defra as a cause for concern although this policy document noted that the UK enjoyed a high level of food security.

The recent Foresight report, The Future of Food and Farming (2011), examined the challenges of climate change, a rising global population, changing dietary demands as countries become wealthier, and increasing competition for resources such as water and land, and concluded that a policy of sustainable intensification – producing more food with the same or lower environmental impact – was required.

In these, and other, policy documents food security is seen to be promoted by open markets. An alternative frame, food sovereignty, is characterised by Foresight as being associated with national trade protectionism and self-sufficiency which are rejected in the report.

However, this is only a partial understanding of food sovereignty. Food sovereignty is often associated with the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina. This movement of small farmers, agricultural workers and others advocates local food under the control of those who produce it and argues that this, food sovereignty, is the best way to guarantee food security for local people.

The food sovereignty movement is based on six pillars (food for people, value providers, local food, local control, building knowledge, and working with nature) explained more fully in this piece by the UK’s World Development Movement, one of the leading groups in the UK’s emerging food sovereignty movement.

With food security the dominant framing of food provisioning, we wondered if food sovereignty was represented within UK food research agendas. We examined the published strategies and websites of the UK research councils for food sovereignty and, using suitable search terms, looked for food sovereignty research in British universities and research institutes.

We found only four references, all on the ESRC site, to projects that explicitly used the food sovereignty frame on the websites of the UK research councils. All of these were projects focused on countries in the global south. Limited engagement with food sovereignty was found in searches of research institutes and, again, most were projects focused on the global south. In universities, we found eleven with dedicated food security webpages and, of these, four had some engagement with food sovereignty within those programmes. Though our research was limited to websites and published strategies, we can conclude that in agri-food research, the food sovereignty frame is a minority one in comparison with food security.

We also examined the extent to which food sovereignty had a public presence in the national media. We searched for ‘food sovereignty’ in UK national newspapers for the period January 2000 to May 2013. Fifty-two stories were identified of which twenty-two were in The Guardian or The Observer, seventeen in the Morning Star, five in The Independent and two in The Times or Sunday Times. Only six stories were found in tabloid newspapers. The high proportion of stories in the left-wing daily Morning Star is, we suggest, indicative of food sovereignty containing an oppositionist element to food security which is seen as representing a more neo-liberal agenda.

Finally we asked if there was a food sovereignty movement in the UK. We discovered that there was but that it was very recent, embryonic and small.  Indeed, so far as we can currently establish, the movement dates from as recently as 2012. There is an umbrella group of 22 partner organisations, Food Sovereignty Now! The members reflect various facets of the food sovereignty frame with some focusing on rejecting GMOs, and some supporting small farmers for example. There is also a strong presence of international development groups such as War on Want and the World Development Movement.

In the UK, we conclude, food sovereignty is a minority approach to framing agri-food challenges compared with food security. It is rejected in UK policy documents and, while there is some research being conducted which explicitly uses the food sovereignty frame, this is tiny in comparison to food security and often has the global south as its focus of study. Public representation of the frame is also small and tends to be concentrated in the liberal Guardian and radical Morning Star. The fifty-two stories found using food sovereignty is in comparison with a search for ‘food security’ which yielded over 3,000 hits.

We must acknowledge that our methodology has some shortcomings and can offer only an indicative picture. We know, for example, that there is a good deal of research being carried out into topics such as local food which reflects some of the concerns of the food sovereignty frame while not ‘branding’ itself as such research. In future work we will explore both the food sovereignty and food security frames more closely within particular institutions and by individual researchers to understand more fully how agri-food research agendas are negotiating these concepts.

Adam Spencer, Carol Morris and Susanne Seymour (School of Geography, University of Nottingham and Leverhulme Making Science Public Programme)

Photograph credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45005153@N07/8660555647/

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In February, the United Nations treated 500 delegates at its Environment Programme event in Kenya to a five-course meal. The surprising thing about this is that all the food served would have been rejected by European supermarkets despite being perfectly fit to eat.

Waste food is an important issue for people interested in food provisioning. Waste food represents wasted resources of water, energy and land and so has an environmental impact in addition to representing economic loss for farmers, retailers and consumers alike.

Interest in food waste has been increasing recently. Kerry McCarthy MP proposed a Ten Minute Rule Bill to the House of Commons which sought to require supermarkets to donate their surplus food to charities rather than throw it away. There have also been reports on food waste by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) and the Fabian Society.

Reducing food waste seems to be a sensible thing to do for consumers in a time of austerity and, at a policy level, to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. However, there are problems.

A major difficulty is trying to establish how much food is being wasted. The IME report says that between ’30-50% of all food produced never reaches a human stomach’. In addition to being a large, imprecise range, some of the data are quite old, and, as suggested in this BBC radio programme, inaccurate. This 2010 paper reviews definitions and data on food waste and suggests that post harvest losses of grain in developing countries might be overestimated.

Another problem is working out quite what we mean by ‘waste food.’ These debates can include discussion of just what is waste and, as discussed by Professor Strak here, economic arguments about the opportunity cost of turning useable produce into food mean that not all unused food should be considered waste.

At a domestic or business scale, working out food waste might be a little easier and there have been several studies attempting to estimate the quantity of waste food. This study, by the Sustainable Restaurant Association found that, on average, the ten London restaurants it surveyed wasted 59.8kg of food each day which is 21 tonnes of food waste per restaurant per year. In addition to the economic cost to the restaurant, these figures also contribute 7.972 tonnes CO2 equivalent per restaurant in Greenhouse Gas Emissions where waste food is sent to landfill.

There have also been studies into household generation of food waste. This study, carried out by Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), a not for profit company including business and government stakeholders, found that, on average, a household produces 5.3kg of food waste per week, costing £520 per year to the household. Of this food waste, the study estimates that nearly 70% of it could have been avoided.

Reducing waste food has a common sense appeal. It saves money and reduces the environmental cost of agriculture. However, as shown above, calculating food waste is difficult. Also difficult is knowing what to do to produce a reduction in waste. Cutting portion sizes, improving labelling of foods, accepting ‘ugly’ fruit and vegetables have all, inter alia, been proposed as ideas to reduce food waste in developed economies.

The effects of offering food advice, or using ‘nudges’ can also be difficult to predict and can lead to political controversy. The Fabian research found that waste reduction measures requiring little change in individual behaviour were most popular with consumers. Government  advice on diet is given greater prominence, reflecting developed world concerns about obesity and diet related illness, rather than waste reduction measures. Faced with a lack of certainty and a potential loss of votes, government focus on food provisioning in countries like the UK tends to be on production which is easier to measure and predict. Production also contributes to economic growth and provides commercial opportunities. Whether that is a sustainable policy position in the longer term, remains to be seen.

Dr. Adam Spencer, Schools of Geography and Sociology, University of Nottingham.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, on how we can get more food with less environmental impact. 

I was in Denmark a couple of weeks ago, as the guest of the Danish Agriculture and Food Council (DAFC), attending a gathering of over 2,000 Danish pig farmers and their employees in the town of Herning. I joined them for two days listening to experts in all aspects of pig and meat production.  And, before you jump to conclusions, it wasn’t the prospect of a bacon sandwich that took me to this isolated (but very pleasant) part of Jutland.

The theme of the Herning Congress was “more from less” and that was the attraction for me – and a further incentive was the release of a major report by the DAFC which describes the potential gains to the Danish economy of investing in the Danish pig in industry. The report noted that, over the past 30 years, production of pigs in Denmark has increased from c. 10 million to 30 million pigs whilst the environmental impact has decreased. Two pigs are produced today, claimed DAFC, with the same environmental impact as a single pig in 1985. That is certainly, “more from less”.

Just after I returned to the UK from my “information smorgasbord” I reviewed an academic study published in Germany that takes this “more from less” theme on to a wider European analysis.  It shows that productive agriculture brings significant benefits for food security, resource efficiency, economic stability, improved biodiversity, and climate-change mitigation.

This report, ‘The social, economic and environmental value of agricultural productivity in the European Union’, has been published by the Humboldt Forum for Food and Agriculture, an international non-profit think tank based in Berlin.

Significant benefits

According to the report each percentage point increase in agricultural productivity in Europe brings significant benefits. Namely:

• feeds more than 10 million humans per year
• increases the annual social welfare generated in European agriculture by approximately 500 million
• contributes EUR 500 to the annual income of an average EU farmer
• reduces our net virtual land imports by about 1.2 million hectares
• acts to save 220 million tons in CO2 emissions
• preserves global biodiversity equivalent to fauna and flora of up to 600,000 hectares of rainforest

The report draws heavily on peer-reviewed work and assembles a cogent case for investing in improved productivity in European farming.  The authors conclude that switching to low input agricultural methods, with an average of 31% lower yields than productive agriculture in the EU, would come at the cost of these benefits.

In other words, we can get more from less when we apply science and technology to agriculture and, indeed, improved productivity is essential for global food security and meeting the challenges that come from climate change.

Am I surprised by this? No. Am I surprised that we have to continually make this point to a wider audience? Yes.  My Danish trip and the German report at least reassure me that that other academics and decision-makers in Europe realise that science, innovation and higher productivity are the way forward.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, discusses how the horsemeat scandal has dented trust in the food industry and what this means for food security.

Are we eating too much processed meat?

Meat consumption is dominating the news agenda these days and the latest headlines concern the risk of cancer from eating processed meat. New data comes from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study (covering 10 countries and around half a million people) indicating that high consumption of processed meat is associated with an 18% increased risk for all-cause mortality.

However, the risk was much lower with red meat than with processed meats – indeed no statistically significant link between fresh meat consumption and mortality was found. This distinction was hard to find in the tabloid headlines and the storyline was, “sausages and bacon are bad for you”.

Past peak meat consumption

Regardless of the tabloid’s reporting of these new  findings, if we stop and look at the statistics more widely it may be that consumers in developed economies are already reducing consumption of meat even without the latest news from EPIC.  In the USA per capita consumption of meat has fallen by about 10% in the last 5-6 years and in Europe per capita consumption has levelled off. In the USA some commentators believe that the country is now past “peak” meat consumption.  That news may come as a shock to Texas cowboys but the numbers  are there to back this claim up.

There are also reasons to believe (horsemeat scandals, recession, etc) that meat consumption is also falling in some European countries.  The latest Which?  survey supports this in the UK and notes that consumer trust in the food industry has dropped by 24% since the horsemeat scandal broke. 30% of shoppers are now buying less processed meat and 24% are buying fewer ready meals with meat in, or choosing vegetarian options. The retailers have suffered in all of this: before the scandal broke, nine in 10 felt confident when buying products in the supermarket. This has dropped to seven in 10.

Food security policy

It would appear that consumers’ perceptions about health and food safety procedures in meat production and consumption are leading them to reduce consumption  and change their shopping habits –  almost regardless of the scientific evidence.  This has implications for food security policy.

Meat consumption in Asia and China has grown rapidly recently and the impact of meat production on climate change is acknowledged to be significant. Our Global Security Forum in Shanghai last year had several papers that demonstrated these aspects of meat production and consumption.  And from these papers and the Forum’s discussion some solutions and ideas for research were generated. Amongst these were low carbon productions systems and less resource intensive diets (less meat consumption).

However, one lesson that we might draw from meat consumption statistics and consumer behaviour in the West (if we agree that less meat consumption is needed)  is that consumers in Asia may slow their growth in meat consumption because of health and food safety issues if their meat providers and media allow the creation of negative perceptions. Even without the scientific evidence global peak meat consumption may arrive sooner than we might have thought.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, says we should look to China for a better way of tracing our food — and to avoid a repeat of the ‘horsemeat scandal’. 

The horsemeat scandal in the UK food industry chain isn’t the first example of contamination in the UK’s beef supply chain.  The BSE/mad cow scare in the mid-1990s began a train of actions that resulted in “traceability” systems being introduced for the UK and European beef industry. At the time this was world class and the UK farm and food industry showed real innovation in creating the Red Tractor scheme  – albeit farmers and processors have often complained about the costs of applying the new “assurance systems”. But the latest scare demonstrates a big weakness of the current traceability system for meat – the reliance on form filling and regular audits.

Clearly, checking meat and food products in the UK (and the rest of the world) will always be necessary and the application of monitoring and testing procedures is part of this. Traceability through the chain  is part of this but as such systems have become more comprehensive  the record keeping and auditing procedures have become more costly and time consuming – and they are heavily dependent on form filling and labelling by humans. Worse, as the present scandal seems to show, they are open to criminal manipulation.

Before we despair about the next hike in costs that more audits or form filling imply it’s worth recalling an earlier blog that demonstrated how this sort of fraud can be prevented – and that can reduce costs. That blog illustrated how Chinese researchers in Chengdu, Sichuan have designed and implemented a traceability system for pork and for vegetable products that guarantees an electronic, paper-free trail from the farmers’ fields to the consumers’ tables. In other words, a system exists (and is being rolled out to other cities in China) that would have prevented the horsemeat scandal that is now being played out on our TV screens.

The traceability system in Chengdu does not rely on form filling – it uses the three technologies of RFID (radio frequency identification), wi-fi, and Cloud systems of data collection and analysis. Simply put, the Chengdu system records each stage in a product’s journey through the food chain electronically. Audits can occur at virtually zero cost (even by smartphone) and any fraud would require tampering  with electronic records (not impossible but rather more difficult than re-labelling boxes of horsemeat and creating a false delivery note).

What does this example of innovation in China teach us about the way we deal with food traceability systems in the UK?  Well, firstly it shows that it’s possible to have traceability without big increases in costs and, secondly, that these new “electronic” systems will be less open to criminal manipulation than current ones. The costs of the current horsemeat scandal and the associated product recalls are significant and may yet run into millions.

The damage to brand reputations will be even greater.  As an academic who has researched the costs of food scares and who ran a meat and fine foods company for four year I can testify to the size of the “hassle factor” in the current meat traceability system and it would appear that at least one part of the criminal fraternity has demonstrated its weaknesses. The time has come to learn a lesson from the Chinese on how to avoid more horse trading in the UK.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, wades in on recent reports regarding food wastage in the UK and the claim that we throw away half of our food. 

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers (IME) has hit the headlines this week with its report on waste in the global food system. The report makes some bold assertions and estimates that, because of  poor practices in  harvesting, storage and transportation, as well as market and consumer wastage, 30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food is wasted. That’s  a bold claim and I am not going to question the mathematics here. (But I do note that the supermarkets in the UK have refuted the IME’s claim that supermarket promotions and a reluctance to stock produce that is not visually attractive, are part of this waste problem).

Whatever the level of waste it seems commonsense to believe that reducing “waste” is part of the set of solutions for achieving global food security.  Indeed, at the University’s recent food security forum in Shanghai recently, two of the speakers highlighted the waste issue.  Dr Yuelai Lu from the UK-China Sustainable Agriculture Innovation Network (SAIN) noted that one of the key actions needed for food security was to “reduce waste” and Professor Lin Erda from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change detailed a key recommendation of the Commission to, “reduce loss and waste in food systems, targeting infrastructure, farming practices, processing, distribution and household habits”.

But what is “waste”?

In my experience of the agri-food chain, and with my professional economics hat on, I can only say that “waste” is what we do not value and it is a concept that requires some care in our discussions. And, mostly, the marketplace ensures that valuations give us good guidance on what is, or is not, wasteful.

A few examples  will help us understand how the definition of waste changes according to market conditions. If you are ever lucky enough to visit the Caribbean or any sub-tropical climate you cannot fail to notice the amount of tropical fruit that lies rotting by the roadside. This fruit is waste because the cost of storing it or transforming it into a nutritious food product is very high, and by the fact that there are plentiful supplies of fresh fruit to replace any fruit that is not eaten in prime condition.

We can always reduce waste by a technical process but if the cost of doing so means that we cannot use financial resources to, say, improve sewage provision, supplies of clean water or access to medicines we have not helped anyone by reducing food  waste. On the other hand, a fresh produce producer in East Anglia in the UK will know that the costs of removing the waste green matter or rejected vegetables from his production site to a landfill destination will be very high and so will attempt to reduce his “waste” or transform it into another use e.g. compost or biomass for energy production. In the East Anglian situation the comparison of costs and alternative uses of finance is quite different than for the sub-tropical region.

The marketplace

But in both cases the marketplace guides our view of what is waste and what the appropriate amount of effort should be to reduce waste. It is not as simple as saying, all food waste is bad. Crucially, “food waste” is not an absolute concept – it must be considered relative to all the actions and resources available in the food system.

The IME report recommended that more technical know-how should be transferred to developing countries to help reduce waste and that Government policy should be proactive and try to change consumer expectations and retailers’ “wasteful practices”. Unfortunately, the IME missed out on one important recommendation that would have driven these know-how transfers and consumer preferences more efficiently than any government policy or technical aid programme. We need the market to operate in the agri-food system and only then can we be sure that “food waste” will be at an optimal level – where resources are allocated to production (and waste reduction) in the correct manner.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, on his recent encounter with the Women’s Institute as it launches its report on global food security.

Food for thought

A day out in York in cold, snowy December probably isn’t that appealing but I was tempted when I heard that the Women’s Institute was launching its report Food for thought: global and national challenges of food security.

This was part of its Great Food Debate  – a debate which it wants to see gathering steam next year. I wasn’t the only one prepared to endure the weather as the Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Owen Patterson, was in York too and he shared the platform with an alumnus of the University, Peter Kendall, the President of the National Farmers’ Union. Whatever the WI’s report might say these policy-makers and opinion-formers knew that the +200,000 members of the WI would be very engaged in the debate on food security in the near future.  I had high hopes of learning something from this event so the trek seemed worthwhile.

And did I learn anything from this venture north? 

Well, I didn’t get answers to a lot of questions but I did get confirmation that the Global Food Security research group at the University is asking the right questions – and that there are a lot of them. Again and again the speakers, the WI’s report, and the audience came back to the same (long) list of challenges and queries in the food security agenda and, generally, they put the emphasis on science and rational debate to answer those inquiries.  This was one learning point – that the University is right to have a multi-disciplinary evidence-based approach to global food security research and that we have identified many of the challenges that will determine the correct outcome to the research efforts in this area. Even if the destination is not clear it’s good to know that we are travelling in the right direction.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the Secretary of State approached the problems in a reasoned and rational way as he is the brother in law of Matt Ridley the author of The Rational Optimist. But it was pleasing, nevertheless, to hear a key politician underlining the need to have science-based answers to food security questions. This was another learning point and one that I was pleased to identify in the attitude of a key policy-maker as I reflected on the evening’s discussions on my return south.

The time is now

The NFU President, Peter Kendall, made an important observation as well – that the Foresight Report on food security  may have made a mistake in talking about what we needed to do by 2050. In Kendall’s view we need to be talking about what we need to do by 2025 – or a lot of people will be going hungry, and the planet will be warming uncontrollably, long before 2050 appears in the smartphone calendar or the PC’s desktop diary. I hope that I am not overly influenced by Mr Kendall’s links with Nottingham University (he is one of our graduates) but I think this is a crucial point. There is no time to waste and we should not let the policy-makers think that the answers to food security challenges can wait until after the next election – or, worse, after the next but one.

The WI’s great food debate could not come at a better time and it’s a debate that the University’s research priority group can play a part in – indeed, our recent Shanghai food security forum is a launching pad for entry into the “great food debate”. I would expect that, as part of that debate, the University’s research into global food security can offer some solutions to the long list of challenges that the WI’s meeting identified.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, on how good communication contributes to food security.

Recently I had three days in London listening to an array of speakers from far and wide about the future of farming and where the best investment prospects are in the world for agriculture. Three days might seem a lot (it is when the rest of your week’s work remains undone!) but these subjects eat up time, PowerPoint presentations, and informed debate and argument.

I learnt a lot and met a lot of business leaders and technical experts (an interesting mix) who had much to say. And almost all of what I learnt was relevant to global food security. The subjects covered in those three days included: soils, water, productivity, yields, consumption and population growth, innovation, and much more. And I confirmed a view that I had formed early on in my food security research – and exemplified by many of the contributions to this website – namely, that there is no silver bullet when it comes to working out the solution(s) to global food security. No single discipline or expert has the answer.

OK – so where does that take us? It seems to me that it takes us to an important conclusion about how global food security questions will be successfully addressed.

If it isn’t one branch of expertise or a single research discipline that can be relied upon to deliver progress then, obviously, we need a multi-disciplinary approach. Less obviously, this requires another type of expertise – communication skills. The latter are necessary if we are to move forward at the speed we need to muster.

Different experts cannot, per se, be expected to organize and communicate key ideas across research (and cultural) boundaries. We hear or see it every day in the news media when representatives of, for example, sport, politics or finance struggle to communicate their narrow fields of knowledge. Similar barriers occur within science disciplines, and between science and the social sciences, and between the Americas, Asia and Europe.  Yet global food security solutions need the mix of people I saw at the London conference last week if this communication challenge is to be addressed.

In a small way The University of Nottingham is doing its bit to take on this issue through its upcoming meeting in Shanghai on November 5 and 6. We have a programme that covers, we hope, all the key issues with speakers and participants drawn from across the globe. In one (very full) day we expect to identify road blocks and solutions, and to be able to articulate a consensus view from an audience that will contain many senior executives from the global food industry and the world’s research community.

There will be no silver bullets fired but I expect that we will generate the right sort of ammunition that can hit the food security target.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, talks food safety and iPhones…

Taking food safety to another level

Food safety isn’t an issue that suggests compromise but in certain aspects it can be difficult to deliver. In the UK we found this when Mad Cow disease (BSE) was discovered in the beef industry in 1995. My research at that time made a contribution to understanding the costs and benefits of implementing new farm assurance schemes and actions to restore consumer confidence after new technical standards were introduced post-BSE.

Those new standards included ways of ensuring that beef products could be traced back to the abattoir and farmer that produced them. In China last week I was introduced to a traceability system for pork and vegetables using software and hardware that takes food safety to another level.

Traceability systems

My trip to China was part of collaborative research with Sichuan Agricultural University on various aspects of the pig industry in China, including pork traceability systems.  Food security is obviously directly affected by waste, contamination and consumer perceptions of the integrity of the food supply chain and so an efficient method of providing traceability is a necessary condition for food security to occur.

But it’s not an easy thing to accomplish with millions of animals and meat products needing to be monitored in the economy (and you can multiply this many times when you include fish, vegetables, dairy products, etc). Indeed, it seems a huge and expensive  task.

Costly move

In the UK the introduction of a radically improved beef traceability system was very costly but the crisis conditions at that time made it inevitable. In the city of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, the stimulus to change their system came from reports of adulteration of pork products by the addition of water back in 2008. This led to various new systems being promoted for pork traceability and what I was shown by the software engineers at BoYun in the Chengdu hi tech zone last week is a system that is probably class leading.

The Chengdu system marries radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology (which identifies a carcase or product) with Cloud computing (which collects and analyses the data) and with wifi enabled weigh scales at wholesale, retail and foodservice establishments (which measure, monitor and tag pork products) so that, at any one point or time, the meat derived from 5 million pigs per annum can be traced back through the supply chain.

Where iPhones come in…

The ubiquitous iPhone (or smartphone), with an extra piece of RFID equipment attached to it, can be used to deliver data and to receive and analyse it. From the point at which the first RFID tag is applied by human hand in the abattoir the rest of the work is done without anyone hardly doing anything differently. But when a retail customer buys a pork joint the sticky label attached to it has its weight and price and the RFID-derived information so that the customer can go on-line and see which  farmer produced it: the ultimate in traceability.

It’s concepts like the Chengdu system that will deliver improved efficiencies and benefits in all parts of the food chain in the future. It’s not jujst about one city in China or one supply chain for pork, traceability systems that truly work will be able to deliver sustainable vegetables, meat, fish and food products across global supply chains. And being part of this innovative research into traceability now makes me feel more optimistic about achieving our goals in global food security.

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Dr John Strak, Honorary Professor in Food Economics at The University of Nottingham, talks vertical farming…

A meeting on our Jubilee Campus last week gave me the chance to catch up on some new developments in science and, with about 100 others, to share ideas on what vertical farming can contribute to global food security.

We were gathered together at a vertical farming workshop organised by Dr Chungui Lu and colleagues from the School of Biosciences, the Faculty of Engineering, and the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment. Over a full day the workshop’s agenda saw contributions from the University’s researchers and from external scientists and practitioners.

Vertical farming

Some of the discussions were at the very edge of the research frontier and, when I returned home that evening and was asked , what is vertical farming, I fell back on popular science fiction and replied, “It’s farming, Jim, but not as we know it”. You can see what I mean by visiting the International Vertical Farming Workshop’s website.

The discussions at the workshop convinced me that this is a subject that will undoubtedly occupy a significant amount of researchers’ time and resources in the years ahead. Vertical farming is, essentially, about how we allocate resources in a way that gets more from less – and that must be a prerequisite for actions that improve food security.

In our workshop we were given insights into: how building design might be able to accommodate crops, how plants can improve yields and the utilization of nutrients, and how vermionics and fish farming can link with vertical farming systems to increase productivity dramatically.

Chinese involvement

We were also given a presentation by visitors from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijng  on the work they are doing, and from researchers working with new forms of lighting and other technologies that improve yields for crops and animals, and an update on the engineering challenges posed by the Sahara forest project in Qatar.

From this brief summary you can imagine that there was a lot to talk about on the day and many new ideas and concepts were explored. And while these were mainly scientific issues, the discussions in the workshop also touched on the socioeconomic aspects of urban and office developments that were designed to have a role in food production.

Cutting edge research

The workshop also illustrated a wider truth about food security. Namely, that the solutions that will feed the world and ensure that resources are used most effectively in food production will be based upon the application of cutting edge research in science, engineering, architecture, and the social sciences.

In finding these solutions we will need to work collaboratively and in multidisciplinary teams, and we will test our views about the future of food production to the limit.  Most of all, we will have to be bold in our research and where it leads us – even if the resulting farming system isn’t quite as we have known in the past.

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