May 30 2008 ~ "The optimists think it will all go away.."
"I do think governments have underplayed their hand.." Professor Tim Lang on the current food and oil crisis: Guardian audio "..The problem is more fundamental than that. There are fundamental problems about oil dependency, water shortages looming, growth of population, changes of diet, all the things that are beginning to emerge on the international scene....governments on their own can't do very much unless the supply chains change and unless consumers change but I do think governments have underplayed their hand; they have retreated to saying, "Let markets decide" The reality is that governments have a huge amount of involvement in the food system...not addressing the main issue which is how to make the food sytstem sustainable for the 21st century... The CAP is entering a very interesting phase..it's stopped paying farmers to produce food instead of which it is now paying them to do agri-environment things, nice things for conservation...it's got to enter a new phase of making the Common Agricultural Policy into a Common Sustainable Food policy, which is a very different thing...a sustainable food system must be low energy, low carbon, water conscious and reduce the embedded water that we have in food...it must address issues of nutrition..obesity..I think we have the criteria by which a food system can be judged sustainable but that is going to be difficult to achieve.."
Fields of Fire witness accounts of 2001