 Rwy'n rhan fwy fydd yn cyfrifoedd ar ôl yn ysgrif iawn. Rwy'n rhan wnaeth y byddanwch a'n gweithio dros eu ddiweddau bod ynaラf i greu bod hynny, teithio eu cyfforddau yng Nghymru, ac efallai ymgyrchau o'u oesgrifoli yn hynna i'r cyfra워eth a'i ymgyrch chi yn mynd i mi yw wedi'u gofynny'r cyfforddau fe wnaeth yr ydylliannol i'r holl yn ysgrifionaeth yng Nghymru. O'r ffordd, mae'n fawr, mae'n fawr o'r pwysig i'ch cyfleoedd. Rwy'n ddigon nhw'n gwybod gyda'r panel. Felly, bydd yn fawr o'r ffastafol a'r fawr sydd wedi'u gweithio'r fawr, byddai'n gwybod y fawr ar y dyfodol yn creu'r cyffredinol a'r cyffredinol yn y fawr ddweud o'r fawr o'r fawr ac yn y fawr o'r fawr o'r fawr o'r gweithio'r gweithio. A'r blaen wedi'u arbennig aethan o'r gweithio, rises and think about the questions you like to ask, then we'll reconvene and have about 50 minutes for QA. So, please, do hold on to those questions and come back to experts later. Let me introduce our panel. First to speak tonight is Professor Helen Tsang, she's at the Roslyn Institute in Edinburgh, where she's personal chair in vertebrate molecular Her research is primarily concerned with developing GM chickens which are bred to be resistant to bird flu and she's also worked on the production of transgenic chickens which produce molecules, drugs that we can use for medical use in their eggs. Then we have Vicky Herd who is the senior campaigner for land use food and water security at Friends of the Earth and is also a consultant on food and environmental policy. She's worked on a number of reports and publications and is the author of a book, Perfectly Safe to Eat, The Facts on Food. Vicky's also been involved in, she's the chair of the Eating Better Alliance which I'm sure we'll hear more about later. And finally we'll be hearing from Richard Tiffin who's the director of the Centre for Food Security at the University of Reading. Richard is also a professor of applied economics. He works on policies which aim to improve diet and health so Richard's worked on things like fat tax and sugar tax to try and improve people's diets. And so I think he's going to be talking a bit as well about whether we can do the same thing for meat, could we give people an environment tax on their meat. So Helen would you like to kick things off with some information about what you've been working on? OK, so I'm Helen Sang so I work at the Roswell Institute at the University of Edinburgh and my research is funded in part at least by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. And the Roswell Institute is an animal science institute and within that my research is on chickens specifically genetic modification of chickens and many applications of these technologies but including GM chickens for food. Usually if I tell people I work on chickens I get laughter chicken jokes but actually chickens are extremely important in human nutrition and over 50 billion chickens are hatched in the world per year so that's getting on for 10 per person. So they're the most abundant by far food animal and they're very important in terms of high quality nutrition from poultry meat and eggs and it's cheap and relatively easy to be kept in small or large numbers. And the production of these 50 billion chickens in the world per year has been underpinned by very successful and effective poultry breeding genetics and this is done by poultry breeding companies and they are very effective at increasing the productivity of chickens and at distribution of chickens. So some data that come from the food and agriculture organisation on the increase in consumption of chicken products that's meat and eggs for example Brazil in the period between early 1960s and 2006 the consumption of poultry meat went up from about 1 million tonnes to 10 million tonnes and in that period in China the consumption of eggs went up from under a million tonnes to 80 million tonnes. And this is an enormous amount of animal product from chickens and as part of the production and genetics has been an increase in the efficiency of these animals so during that period the number of eggs produced by chickens per ton of food has gone from 5000 to 9000 and the number of eggs per chicken per year has gone from about 230 to 300. Genetics is increasingly sophisticated and is using new genomic technologies and so on but why would we want to use genetic modification in addition in the genetics and production of chickens? Well diseases are a huge challenge in the production of chickens and other farm animals and the disease that I'm particularly interested in working on is bird flu. So bird flu is a flu virus and it's endemic in Southeast Asia so it's a problem that will never go away and outbreaks of bird flu have huge economic losses so in the current and ongoing H5N1 bird flu outbreak that you will have heard of particularly in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and other countries it's cost many many millions of pounds in lost productivity and it's estimated between 300 and 500 million chickens have been slaughtered because the only way of controlling the disease if you get an outbreak is to slaughter all the birds. So that's very wasteful and it's also not welfare friendly at all because they're slaughtered as fast as possible using very crude methods. So bird flu is an ongoing challenge and it's not only an issue in terms of poultry production but it's very well established now that bird flu is the source of new pandemic flu viruses that affect humans and one of the best known examples of that is the Spanish flu outbreak of 1914 where 40 million people died worldwide from flu which was derived from a flu virus that had been in chicken populations. So how do you control a disease like flu? You can develop vaccines, you can consider using drugs or a genetic approach, you can look for genetic resistance. Now vaccines people are working to develop flu vaccines but I think there are issues with that if you use vaccination in farm animals it has to be a very very cheap vaccine or it won't be taken up. And it has to be applied effectively and that's a real issue to get that out to all the producers. It's not a problem I think in a country like the UK where we have a regulation of how animals are kept and produced. So vaccination has its problems in terms of genetics have said that the poultry breeders are very effective but there's no evidence that there is genetic resistance to flu so there isn't the basic genetic material for the poultry breeders to work on. So a few years ago I was approached by a colleague Lawrence Tyler who was at Cambridge University who had some ideas about how you could express a completely new gene to stop, block the infection of flu in chickens. So he is and his colleagues are developing new genes that you can express and test in cells and show that you can stop flu infection. And what we're trying to do is to put those new genes into chickens so that they have a completely new genetic characteristic that makes them resistant to flu infection. So that's one of the programs that we're doing at the Roslyn Institute in collaboration with others. And I think the important thing about that is this using genetic modification you're adding a characteristic to chickens that they do not have and they would not have in any other way. And if it's in their genetics then you know that every animal will have that characteristic so it's a very good way of introducing a valuable trait, a valuable characteristic, an important characteristic. And more recently in the last few years there are new technologies coming along and these are called molecular scissors so these are new ways of genetically modifying cells or animals or plants or microorganisms. And these molecular scissors, to explain them very quickly and without pictures, they allow us to make very small genetic changes very efficiently. And another colleague at the Roslyn Institute, Bruce Whitelaw, is very interested in a disease of pigs called African swine fever and that disease was endemic in Africa but it's got into commercial pigs in Russia and it's clearly moving east and it has a very high mortality rate. But it's known that wild pigs in Africa, war-togs for example, don't get African, don't fall sick if they get infected with African swine fever virus and Bruce Whitelaw thinks he's identified a very small genetic difference between war-togs and our Eurasian commercial pigs that may well underlie the fact that the war-togs don't get ill from the African swine fever virus but our European pigs do. And what he is attempting to do is to move that genetic difference, put the genetic difference that's in the war-tog into the European pig background using these molecular scissors. So they allow us to take a characteristic that we can identify genetically in maybe a different breed or even a different species and move it straight into our pigs which we have spent many tens of years improving genetically. So we don't want to lose the genetic improvement we have in our current animals for production but we want to be able to introduce additional valuable genetic traits. And one of the interesting things that's being discussed at the moment is that when we use these molecular scissors to make small genetic changes that have a big effect do we call that genetic modification or not? Because we're not introducing a new gene, you might be able to find that mutation if you looked hard enough in one of your European pigs in a different, maybe a rare breed or something possibly has that, we don't know. So that's one of the things that you will see being debated at the moment is can we use these new technologies in farm animal breeding and do we regulate them in the same way as we look at genetic modification? And finally I think if we're thinking about genetic modification and can it help us improve animals to make them more productive? And one of the ways to be more productive is to avoid loss due to disease because for example there's an estimate that productivity of pigs in America and North America is about 10% less because flu in pigs circulates in the pig population. So it's always decreasing the productivity of the animals. Is can we add completely new characteristics? So a project I'm discussing with a colleague at the moment is can we look at adding new enzymes using genetic modification to chickens, new enzymes that would be expressed in their gut that would break down cellulose? So it would help them gain much more nutrition from poorer quality feeds because one of the problems with farm animals and one of the expenses and one of the reasons that they are eating a lot of meat is not sustainable is that you feed a lot of grain to animals rather than just eating the grain. So if you could genetically modify animals so that it could make use and get more nutrition out of the feed that they get, would that be a good thing to do in terms of making them more productive and making them more sustainable? In terms of genetically modified food that's available at the moment, there's no genetically modified meat available in the market. What's the nearest thing that we have? So it's one of the things people think. There are genetically modified animal foods out there and there are none that have been passed for human consumption anywhere in the world. The nearest we have is the Aquabounty Salmon in the States where they've developed a salmon that grows much faster. In fact what it is is it grows throughout the winter months when normally salmon just sit around eating and not growing. They put an extra growth hormone gene in and they grow faster and that has passed all the steps of regulation in the US but it's not being signed off because no politician will. I'm all right in thinking it's been 19 years. Oh it's a very long time in development. Over to you Vicky. I saw you raise an eyebrow there at some of the things I had said. I'm sure you have some thoughts on some of these technologies. Well, yes. I'm from Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We have a separate sister organisation in Scotland and we're also part of an international network which is in 70 countries. We draw a lot from our international colleagues in terms of the impact of food and farming systems globally. We draw a lot on that but I would like to stress Friends of the Earth is very much evidence-based, science-based organisation. Despite how our work is sometimes interpreted by the media we do work with science-based. I'm probably going to say something that might annoy a lot of you in the audience. I think if we're talking about food security, feeding people sustainably and healthily, it's mostly about politics. It's not really about productivity. We actually grow and breed and rear enough food to feed ourselves now and another four billion. I do a lot of talks about food security and sometimes about genetic modification. Quite a lot of it ends up being a little bit of a distraction or a red herring. We should be talking about the governance of our food system, where it's at, who's in control, who decides how our food is used and to a certain extent what's grown. Although I think that's a lot to do with what farmers know what should be grown but they're not necessarily able to respond to what the market is telling them because they're so distant from the market. It's so manipulated by huge corporations globally and those corporations are very few in number and they're very powerful. They're powerful politically and they're powerful within supply chain in terms of prices and everything. So I have to say, I think a lot of what we need to do is political. That's not to denigrate the science and some of the work that's going on to make systems more sustainable, more efficient. Although I think there's some different definitions of efficiency that need to be looked at. But I think it's about governance and it's about how we use the food. So that needs to be about how we manage demand and diet and how we use crops, for instance, for biofuels and biomass, land use for biomass. That is all part of the picture because we're not using the products of the land efficiently and certainly throwing a huge amount of it into animals' throats. Be it chickens or beef or pigs is not the most efficient use for a lot of the crops. That's not to say that we're advocating everybody going vegan or vegetarian. That is absolutely not what Friends of the Earth is about, although that's perfectly welcome lifestyle choice. I was asked to talk a little bit about the impact but I'm not going to talk about them so much because there's a fantastic article that Rachel did on the website, the blog, which you've got some really good facts and figures and I imagine a lot of you know some of them like 75% of agricultural land is used for feeding animals. A huge amount of the agricultural water use is for feeding and the largest proportion is for animal feed and for cleaning animals in intensive systems and things like that. The nearly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, something which is a massive threat as I'm sure you're all aware to life as we know it right now, 15% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the livestock sector so there is really something to be done there and something to be addressed. A huge amount of antibiotics, the largest amount of antibiotics used in the world is for rearing livestock and I was just reading a report today about antibiotics and it really is quite extraordinary how we haven't actually got to grips with this because a huge amount of antibiotics used in the veterinary sector, used in pigs and poultry as routine preventative medicine not actually responding to a disease threat or a known disease within a flock and that is something that we really need to get to grips with in other countries in Europe are, but anyway that's stopping us being able to use antibiotics for our own use in medicine. That doesn't mean just curing diseases but actually being able to do operations full stop. The operation won't be possible if we haven't got antibiotics to sort you out afterwards with any effect. So those are some of the impacts, just very broad sweep and we could do many many more. I was also asked to talk a bit about good practice, good stuff, nice stuff and I have come across over the years some fantastic examples of good practice when it comes to livestock and one of the best ones and I was involved in a big delegation going to the UN speaking at the UN at the Rio Earth Summit last 2012 and there was this fantastic Georgian farmer and he used to have a big beef farm, thousands of animals, which he'd inherited in his father and he'd been in the Civil War and wonderful wonderful character and when he inherited the farm he carried on with the very intensive system of feed lot, concentrated agriculture feeding operation where all the feed was brought in, the animals were reared very intensively and used a lot of chemicals, a lot of medicines and he got more and more happy about what he was actually doing and over several decades he changed the system to one of mixed farming where he had cattle but he also had a lot of poultry and mixed poultry. He invested in some abattoirs and he increased the number of people working on that farm from two stockmen to 75 because he increased the on-farm marketing, on-farm processing and it's a fantastic example that people have taken to a lot at the moment and they do a lot of local retail and it was a mixed farming system so he actually grows most of his feed or gets it from his neighbours to feed the animals on the farm and he called the chickens his fertilizer because the chickens were actually fertilizing the land and sheep as well so it was a rotational system with rotational crops to feed the animals and I think that's really, really part of the solution is to have a mixed farming system but it also means more jobs and I think the economics of it are really important. I probably don't have a chance to talk about other examples. There's a wonderful UK organisation called the Pasture Fed Livestock Association which is starting to really, really do a very detailed analysis of how they can market really good pasture fed livestock that is based on a system which is truly sustainable and biodiverse rich which is really, really important because we're losing our biodiversity and we're losing the ecosystem services from that ecosystem, that biodiverse ecosystem within the farm and that's extremely dangerous route to take to lose those systems like your pollinators, your water catchment areas, your roots that stop flooding from the trees and from all sorts of things. I think the other final good thing to talk about is the fact that consumers are beginning to recognize this. I've been doing polling, I started doing polling, you got polling of the public perceptions of meat and how they would be willing to change. I started in 2007 and I did another one last year and the same question about whether consumers would know about these things had doubled, the number of consumers had doubled who knew that there was an environmental impact of food production, of meat production. That was really exciting but also what was also exciting was a lot more people now are willing to eat a little bit less meat and horse meat had a bit of a problem there, they were responding partly to the horse meat but I'm doing more polling and I think there is a general interest in the public, not the politicians but the public in this issue and eating less and better meat which is what we're advocating. We need guidelines, we need a long-term strategy to put our farming system into a far more sustainable footing where feeds we produce here are feeding animals, where we're using waste, food waste to feed animals. We used to have a system where the livestock we ate was mostly fed on byproducts or waste or grass. Now they're fed on crops and that crop should be feeding us and so we need a strategy which is thinking ahead like that, we need subsidies to be shifted, procurements, we need to have less and better meat in schools and hospitals, an awareness campaign, we need to have climate change measures which really help farmers adapt, diversify production. So that's a very big, very fast sweep through some of the things that Friends of the Earth are advocating and we started an alliance which Rachel mentioned called Eating Better which I think has about 45 members all the way from RSPB to the British Dietetics Association, Oxfam, whole range. You all recognise we've got to do something about meat and I think that's where we need to focus and I know I haven't spoken much about GM because I actually think to me it's a bit of a distraction and it might at some point in the future have a role to play and Genomics is really exciting what they're able to do. You were describing some interesting areas which we would obviously want a very strong regulatory framework for but the current GM crops just aren't part of the solution so not interested but I would like to say I did cook some insect flour, cricket flour cookies the other day for my organisation and they went down very well so we're interested in other solutions and I think it was touched on in Rachel's blog again about insects as a possible solution both as feed for livestock and also eating them direct as flour or directly and I think you could look at that but I think it's early days yet in terms of more than acceptance of insects. That's probably all I'll say. Thank you. Richard, we've heard from Helen about the science and from Vicky about some of the border issues in terms of farming and things that farmers can do to make their products more sustainable and that we really need to have policy measures in place to change the situation but it would be interesting to hear from a consumer's perspective I mean people make decisions about what they eat, they're very personal decisions they probably don't think about quite how far reaching they might be and they're also intertwined with other factors like how much it costs or how healthy it is and we're being told all the time that we need to be more healthy and have X, Y and Z nutrients in what we buy and what we eat and then you have issues with time and people have families to feed how does that play into these issues and what can economics tell us about the best ways to tackle this? I'll come to all of those points I think probably towards the end of what I wanted to say but I wanted to start and direct with the Centre for Food Security as the University of Reading as you've heard and I wanted to just start by putting what I say in the context of the challenge that we face in terms of meeting the food insecurity potentially of the world so I'm sure everybody's familiar with the challenge when it's put in terms of feeding 9 billion people in the world by the year 2050 and that needing a doubling of food production in order to meet that challenge but perhaps what people are less aware of is where that population growth is going to actually take place so in this part of the world, the developed world populations are not going to grow particularly but they will be in very different places so the urban population between now and 2050 is expected to double in the developed world and the rural population will decline to keep the population roughly static in those parts of the world but if you look at the less developed parts of the world and the very least developed countries the urban population in those parts of the world will increase fourfold between now and 2050 really really big changes in where people are going to be living rural populations will increase but by nothing like as much by about a factor of one and a half in those parts of the world and so the challenge isn't just about producing more food there are more subtle challenges that confront us first of all the challenge of logistics how are we going to get food from the rural populations into those really big cities that's a really big logistics challenge and who's going to meet that challenge but probably more importantly and more interesting to this conversation is that the type of diet that people will eat in urban areas is going to be fundamentally different from the types of diet that people eat in rural areas people eat differently when they live in an urban area and the fact that that's taking place already is reflected in the global trends in obesity in obesity rates and if you look at the top ten countries for obesity rate growth in the last eight or nine years if I list those to you the top ten countries for obesity growth are Korea, Mongolia, China, US Cambodia, Vietnam, Venezuela and Dominica and this suggests that the problem that we're going to be confronted by in 2050 is not necessarily a problem of malnutrition and starvation but actually we're going to be confronted with a lot of the western diseases in parts of the world that are currently undernourished and malnourished and I don't think enough of our attention is being focused on that challenge as we think about feeding the world in 2050 we have to think about the type of diets that people will be eating in 2050 of course we've already heard that overall greenhouse gas emissions from food and agriculture are a very significant part of what's produced globally they have declined, we have reduced greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by around 15% from 1990 to 2008 in this country but there's evidence to suggest that that's now plateauing that we're not getting the same rate of decrease and the sources of those greenhouse gas emissions nitrous oxide which comes largely from artificial fertilizers applied to the land but also methane which is around 36% of the greenhouse gas emissions from UK agriculture from the livestock sector so this is why livestock starts to become a substantial part of this debate I think that potentially are gains both from a human health perspective and also from a greenhouse gas and sustainability perspective sorry my computer is causing me some problems this evening if it starts making a funny noise I'd apologise but it's on its last legs ok so I was asked to make a few remarks about what's happened to consumption and production of meat in the UK over the last 10 or so years so we've seen beef consumption fall by about 7% there have been a number of factors that have caused that foot and mouth disease was a factor and increasing prices I think probably have also had a significant impact poultry consumption has increased by around 2% and significantly again in the context of the remarks I made earlier about people's diets changing meat based ready meals have increased by about 8% over that period from 2009 to 2012 in terms of production we're producing less red meat in the UK again foot and mouth disease I think was a significant factor in that so the production levels now in 2012 in comparison with 2009 are about 82% of what they were in 2009 we've seen slight increases so in 2009 the level was 77% it's now 82% of what it was in 1990 and so as we've heard, meat has become a target for change with some claiming that it's an inefficient use of feed in the sense that we use feed that could be fed to humans to feed a lot of our livestock it leads to unhealthy human populations and it also emits significant amounts of greenhouse gases but it's also worth just pausing to consider the benefits that livestock production begin to convey in particular in developing countries livestock production is a significant route out of poverty for many families and many households so if you acquire a cow and you're able to produce dairy products it's a very easy way of getting your access into the market and generating a surplus on your farm and moving from a subsistence agriculture to a market-based agriculture livestock plays a very important role in that context ruminants of course eat grass we can't eat grass and so by using ruminants we're able to produce food on areas that are probably not suitable to producing many other agricultural, many other arable crops so that's the second impact and also livestock contribute to maintaining the delicate ecosystem balance that exists in those parts of the world, in particular in the upland areas and I heard an interesting anecdote just last weekend about this which suggested that midge populations in those parts of the world where livestock is moving away has fallen and I thought great that's lovely if I go walking in those hills I'm not going to get bitten to death by midges but of course midges are food for birds and so as you move the livestock out of those areas you're removing an essential food source for the bird life that lives in that area why does the livestock support midges? Well because the poaching of the land creates pools of stagnant water around the fields in places where midge larvae can breed and reproduce clearly not a major influence but it does illustrate the impact of livestock production and the delicate relationships that exist between our agriculture and the ecosystems that support agriculture and support our life however nevertheless it's probably fair to say that some dietary change is desirable and my work focuses very heavily on the driver of change being at the consumer end of things I think that fundamentally if we want to achieve change in terms of what we're producing we have to start by influencing what people are consuming so I've done quite a lot of work recently on well not recently over the last five years really on looking at fiscal instruments as a way of influencing people's diets but first from a health perspective but then subsequently in terms of greenhouse gas emissions so the first piece of work that I'll talk about first of two simulated the impacts of a so-called fat tax where we taxed food products in a way which was designed to put a higher tax on products that had higher saturated fat content so we simply looked at the saturated fat content of food products and we raised the price of those food products by one percentage point for every percentage point of saturated fat that there was in the product so milk and cream went up by 1.82% beef went up by 6.28% and we also combined that in order to keep it ffiscally neutral which means that the net revenue to the government was zero with a subsidy on fruit and vegetables and it produced a very large subsidy on fruit and vegetables of 27% now I'm not necessarily advocating that as a sensible policy but there are some fairly big price changes there which one might expect to produce fairly effective changes in people's diets and remember that study was primarily directed at understanding what was happening or influencing people's healthy eating choices the good thing was that we moved the average level of fruit and vegetable consumption into the 5 a day range but that was the only good piece of news all of the other nutrients in the diet were still outside the range that was recommended by SACEN when they put together their reports and if you looked at the impacts on health in the population if you look at the average level of relative risk across the population of coronary heart disease compared to the situation where it would be if we ate according to dietary guidelines that average level of relative risk fell from 1.78% down to 1.72% so really tiny changes in the healthiness of the population and if you think about it the reason why that happens or why you don't get big changes is very obvious because all you do is you just shift the distribution very slightly in the direction that you want it to so the mean consumption changes but you're still left with people who have very poor diets eating slightly better but their diets will still be poor a ffiscal instrument will only ever produce marginal changes in people's diets so if you're interested in getting significant changes in poor quality diets that is not the instrument on its own that will meet your needs so again a similar story when you look at greenhouse gas taxes or taxes that are based on greenhouse gas emissions so if we tax food categories according to their carbon emissions we produce a policy that has a price rise of 10% for meat which we might expect but of course all food emits some carbon emissions so if you apply that policy you'll also raise fruit and vegetable prices by 3.5% which you don't want to do if you're interested in increasing people's healthiness of their diets overall what happens is that greenhouse gas emissions will fall by 5% to 6% but very importantly and another thing that we observe with taxes on food products is that the poor bear much the larger burden of these taxes relative to the rich it's the rich that have a significantly less burden than the poor so as I say taxes produce marginal changes in diets and what we're talking about what we need to achieve is a much more profound change in the diet and there is a temptation I think in doing that for us to move or to try and think about a single policy which will produce those kinds of profound changes in people's diets that we're interested in but actually if you think about it the instances where single policy instruments have produced profound changes in people's behaviour are very very small I can think of two there may be more but the first one is the smoking ban I don't think that putting prices up on cigarettes was the thing that changed the way in which we are cultural of smoking as we have observed in the last five or so years it wasn't the taxes it was the ban on smoking and it's made it much more socially unacceptable to smoke in public and the second one is seat belts people don't wear seat belts because they're worried that policemen are going to be looking over their shoulder and finding them and people wear seat belts because the law was there and the culture of sitting in the car changed but there aren't many other examples of policy changes of that nature where one instrument produced a complete change in policy what we actually need and in the case of food it's really clear to me that the complexities and the way in which our diet is linked to all sorts of different features health, greenhouse gases, sustainability of the environment and other lifestyle choices as well that we need a much more nuanced approach to policy making than those kind of single hits and if you like it's much more Bradley Wiggins than Lance Armstrong that we need to be looking at in this case different people choose different diets for different reasons and in fact different people sometimes choose the same diet for different reasons and let me just illustrate that point I'm coming to an end I'll shut up in a minute I promise if you think about the time poor income rich single male and an income poor time rich single mother those people if you look at their shopping trolleys they may well have very similar shopping trolleys in terms of what's in them there are lots of ready meals lots of convenience food in those trolleys but the reasons why those two people are choosing those trolleys are completely different the single male is choosing them because he hasn't got time he can't be bothered cooking and eating for himself he just wants a quick hit the single mother is choosing those meals because she can't cope she isn't rich enough to afford to buy raw materials and cook from first principles and really importantly when you come to design policy in those two contexts those two people will respond completely different to different types of policy measures so if you go back to the tax example the single male won't care if you put the price of his products up by 10% because he's rich enough to afford it the single mother will be really significantly impacted and probably will change her diet significantly so what we need to do and I think this is a piece of evidence that perhaps friends of the earth need to think about is a much more careful understanding of why different groups of people are choosing the diets that they're choosing I don't think we've got an evidence base that explains well enough the reasons why people are choosing the diets that they are and I would go further than that and say I don't think we've got a clear evidence base for why people are actually choosing the lifestyles that they're choosing food choice and dietary choice is just one component of a much wider lifestyle choice that people are making and I think we have to understand all of that complexity if we're going to make realistic strides in designing effective policy probably heard enough from this side of the room for a little while so does anybody have any burning questions to kick things off? yes in fact I've just been talking to some people here about resistance you can obviously genetically modify poultry to be resistant to flu but flu might we know that flu changes all the time you get the odd mutation and that happen quite quickly how long is it likely to last for and if you do find a solution will you have a totally different variety of flu in a couple of years time which will also affect the poultry stock? the approach we're taking is to try and develop a novel gene that will target all varieties of flu but I think we have to accept that it's very likely that there's the potential for the flu evolving around it but it's much like vaccines and antibiotics that they're only effective for a certain period of time so we would have to have the same sort of strategy that we should have done with antibiotics and we're almost forced into with vaccines is changing it so it would have to change you wouldn't use one new GM modification and expect to use that forever you would have to change it and maybe cycle them so that you use one for five years but we haven't got as far as modelling that and we'd have to do that sort of thing definitely you couldn't expect it to last forever you mentioned that one of the problems with vaccines is that not everyone can afford them so how would that work with the GM chickens if you think about small hold farmers in places like Vietnam where bird flu comes from how would they get their hands on these GM chickens? so it's not so much that people can't afford it it's that they add to the cost I think it would largely be within the bigger production facilities but the production of poultry is really very rapidly going into big facilities in African countries as well as in Asia so the majority of birds will be big producers and if you cut down the risk for the small producers as well Any more questions? Hello, my name is Hilary I run a sort of think tank on responsible innovation and how we sort of involve society in thinking through some of these complicated issues around technology and in fact I'm hopefully doing one on artificial meat and you have talked about artificial meat I'm quite disappointed but one of the things about what this sort of new phrase of responsible innovation is that society is involved in thinking through these issues but every time seems to come a little sort of microcosm of what we've had tonight which is, you know, one speaker speaks and you think, gosh, yeah, that's really interesting why, yeah, yeah, she's right another one goes, no, it's not about that it's about something, oh gosh, she's right he's right and then poor old society is supposed to try and help us all navigate all this and I wondered what your observations were about how, you know, how governments and how we all are supposed to make sense of what we choose and what our choices are given the fact that no one seems to agree everybody's statistics seem to contradict each other and we don't quite trust any of you anyway and I wondered if you had any observations on that can I respond to that? Yes I think, you know, that's a very fair point that's one of the reasons we started the Eating Better Alliance because we were getting the messages that people were confused about what we were all asked for in context of the meat in this area so we have worked very hard to bring lots of different public health developments international development environmental conservation groups to a common message, common facts, common understanding and I think you're right and we've got a website and we're trying to create that debate but whether we're reaching the public is another thing and I would say, sometimes I say this especially and actually I don't think a lot of the public want to care and I think it's government's role and business's role to make sure that those that don't want to care don't want to read a label don't want to read an article about it don't have to they should be absolutely sure that what they're buying is doing the least harm both to them and to the environment and to labourers globally and things like that so I think, you know, there's a big role for government and business in this but it sounds like in some cases the government has stalled so in America the FDA has been criticised just last week for taking 19 years to debate over whether or not this summons should be allowed on the market so if it takes the FDA that long to not come to a decision what can we do? because they're worried about what the public's going to say if they go for it and in the meantime it's stifling innovation people are saying or nobody's going to want to invest in these kinds of technologies that they're never going to get to market my response partly would be do we really need to? we actually have a lot of the solutions already we've got a huge amount of very highly productive farming there's a case for increasing and reducing the yield gap in some parts of the world but that case of salmon we don't actually need to super salmon we actually need to invest in herbivorous fish to be honest because that's a much less intensive much less harmful production system but FDA have just approved a new crop very very quickly which is going to be stacked gene technology using two 4D pesticide resistant genes within a crop so it's going to be resistant to glyphosate in two 4D and this is stacked gene, single gene technology stacked in one crop so you'll be able to use loads of different herbicides on one crop and that was quite quick so I don't think they're always that slow Helen did you want to respond about this idea that GM is a distraction and I agree that GM is a distraction in that there's been a huge amount of effort in to resist introduction of GM technologies and I think that it shouldn't be the technology because we know that there's no evidence really that the technologies in themselves are unsafe or risky there's huge amount of GM crops grown now and I think that so it's a distraction we should be looking at what the purpose is so for example you can get herbicide resistant rapeseed through genetics and it's not regulated and through GM and it is regulated so we should look more at is the purpose a useful purpose is it a valuable thing are the things we need to consider in allowing these things and to me GM is one of our tools in making animals and plants more productive more environmentally safe in many ways and if we don't use all the tools that we have then we will be less able to deal with all these challenges we have in feeding the world and getting people to have a good diet and so on so I do think the effort that's been focused on being anti GM has been a distraction I'll take some more questions I think we've got on here I notice in these kinds of discussions on things like food security that one of the things that's often not covered as much is population growth and policies on actually limiting population growth we're looking at different solutions to kind of help redistribute resources or introduce new ones to help feed a growing population but the growing population part doesn't mean to be cruel or anything but I don't know much about how policies have been implemented for curbing population growth encouraging people to have smaller families or whether that even works do any of you have any comments on that? So if you're talking about direct birth control direct intervention to limit people's family sizes I think that's a really bad idea and the reason why I think it's a really bad idea is the processes of economic growth increased food production population growth are all intimately connected so as incomes go up well as populations go up it increases the income and the productivity within the population it gets people out of poverty as people move out of poverty they start to voluntarily restrict their family sizes and so the danger is I mean it's quite complex the interrelationships between these things but the danger is if you intervene and you put a block on one of those things then you're unwittingly going to stop some of the other things that you want to happen happening and the one that you will trap people in poverty that's what will happen income growth will not happen you will not get migration from the agricultural sector into the industrial sector or the economic growth taking place but population growth works if it is done voluntarily as a part of that overall process and that will happen automatically people will restrict their family sizes as they become richer Any other questions? No mention has been mentioned said about advertisers which obviously make a big difference with what people actually eat I mean that's a brilliant point to be honest I've written a ten point plan for food security and that's one of the points we need to curb advertising of foods in ways that is really sensible as I was saying we need to do it in ways which help people not punish them or make them feel bad about themselves I think there is a case for having quite strong curbs on advertising of unhealthy foods and particularly targeted to children there is a huge amount of very insidious covert advertising of really junk foods to children and that's having a massive effect globally and so I couldn't agree more it's really slightly neglected and I would confess that I've slightly neglected it and we ought to be doing something about it I think it's an issue isn't it that people go from poor nutrition straight to the pattern of nutrition without going through the improved nutrition but again you have to be very careful because the vast majority of people who see adverts actually benefit from those adverts they actually make an informed choice they understand something and it contributes so you cannot growth there are small parts of the population that respond very badly to adverts and the reasons why they respond very badly to adverts are particular to those groups of people and so it's the same message that I was giving when I was talking earlier that we have to understand why those people are so susceptible and children are a really good example of that I completely agree that that is a really good example of where you can intervene in a targeted way in banning children's advertising of certain types of food but there are all sorts of other types of advertising that affect all sorts of other groups of people in society so we have to be careful not to say let's just hit the advertisers and let's hit commercial interests let's find out where the problems actually are and then target those specific problems I would say it's marketing as well as advertising it's obviously much wider than advertising If we flip the idea from advertising food products to advertising campaigns, marketing campaigns you've worked on a number of different campaigns to reduce meat consumption or what would you like to see marketed and advertised to people Well, I mentioned the Pasture-fed livestock association that's tiny but it would be really nice to see that survive and grow that people are actually becoming more aware and more people, not just high income earners, we're actually aware of the process of production and could choose less but better meat products I don't have the money to do big marketing I don't have any money to do it so I rely on social media and media coverage and I would love to have the kind of budget that Nestlé have produced, you know, all done on for marketing their sugary yoghurtine dairy products you know, and we have to counter that so it's quite, it's a difficult one actually quite a hard one so you know I do try and campaign in reaching as many people as I can but it's quite hard I've got a question over here Yes This is on? Hello Basically I have a problem with the idea that advertisement is the solution I mean there has been a lot of studies especially with children where it has been explained about nutrition to them and then they will have a healthy treat and a cookie and they will always choose the cookie even after everything has been explained to them so at least in the children part they will choose the sweet so from that side I don't think children are susceptible to advertisement they just like the sweet and there has been some studies especially in the US done about that based on that and on the other hand the children don't buy the food, it is the mothers and the family so I come from Venezuela and basically we eat a lot of home cooked food but it's not because my mother is cooking it it's because we have a great working class of people who are very poor who will be happy to work as a house helper and this person cooks delicious food and they eat them themselves so actually the nutrition of the Venezuelans but it's because society is really bad here in UK we have the opposite problem we have a great big middle class who is doing very well for themselves but they are all working in the offices in the city and they have time to cook so do you think really a person working in the city will say yes I will take less hours to work for my big company to cook a healthy meal or would I rather earn the wage that I wish to earn in order to live how I wish to live well ok no that's the question but with with information I have to be careful I don't want to say information but understanding where their food is coming from and understanding what's in the products that they're buying can influence some people rich people to make better better choices about what their food so we're not talking about I don't think we're talking about going back to the old ways the old ways in which we used to prepare food but what we are talking about is consuming the food that we want to consume now but doing it in a more responsible and sensible way I think we have about three questions in this corner so perhaps let's take all three of them and then we can answer them together I'd like to ask and Vicki heard more about the interesting point you made about environmental services of biodiversity in the farmed environment and recently there's been a lot in the scientific press from Lynn Dicks from Cambridge and Charles Godfrey and Oxford and others about how we need to value and look after these things but I wondered what policy instruments there are in place because it's my perception that regulation of destruction of biodiversity in the farmed environment has become weaker with the present government I think the lady in the red top I was interested to listen to Michael Pollan on the radio yesterday the food activist and his mantra is eat food not much mostly plants and he's currently promoting his book which is a sort of love affair of cooking as a way of reconnecting people with food in the first world as a sort of political act and I suppose in reference to what you just said about encouraging people to know more about their food in the first world where it comes from on what they're eating I think one of the points that he is making is that that's very difficult because the way in which large manufacturers produce food and promote food in ways that is very obfuscating about what is contained in that food and so I wondered if the panel could comment on that and also comment on the reality of cooking as a sort of political act and whether it can change the way that we eat and our public health relating to diet I think there was Hi I think it was Vicky who mentioned that the argument that there's enough food to go around full stop and I think and it's a governance issue as to how that's redistributed and I think I would have agreed with you kind of 10 years ago when this argument's been made a lot but it strikes me that it's more complicated than it's just a governance issue it strikes me that it's a cultural issue it's a transport and storage issue and so I'm just interested to see is that still a valid argument that globally we provide enough food for everyone I think if that was the case then we wouldn't be spending that much money on UK aid for malnutrition in developing countries and so is there space for new technologies like GM to bring that on so I'm just interested in your argument in that space If we take that last question first and just to add to that we mentioned earlier some of the other capabilities that come with GM and if you think about GM crops that have added vitamin D children who have deficiencies in certain countries it's not just about producing more food faster there are also added benefits to GM crops that address some of these issues so perhaps let's start with that question and then move on to the other two in reverse order on the governance issue going backwards it's absolutely more complex than I had to say in about two minutes so I would agree that there are a lot of different things that would need to happen in terms of governance, trade rules how the food the very concentrated food system treats both the consumers below and the farmers above because it's like an hourglass you've got a very small number of buyers in the middle and that small number of buyers have huge control as I said so that's one part of it but waste absolutely there is a fantastic report by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers identifying some of the incredible loss of food at the farm and supply chain end and then there's the huge waste that we as domestic consumers and retailers lose at the domestic end so this whole I could write a book on the governance issues it's not simple at all but I absolutely disagree with you that it's no longer valid because for instance the University of Minnesota released a report last year very detailed analysis of what crops are being used for and we could feed just on the issue of feeding crops to livestock and this isn't what we're advocating but if you stop feeding crops as opposed to crops and things you could feed 4 billion more people and that's the University of Minnesota really detailed modelling and there's many studies I'm seeing practically every week with similar kind of figures and I'm not suggesting we're going to go all that way but I'm saying chicken is an incredibly cheap protein and is very much advocated globally but what the chicken is fed on is very important as you noted and it's a huge amount of grain and the more chicken we eat because it's very cheap the more grain you need and the more protein you need so there's a vicious circle because it becomes cheaper and more accessible then you grow more of it and if you need more land and so it might be very efficient but you're demanding more and you can't grow crops so I totally agree and I have written loads of different things on this it's very complex going on to the issue of cooking as a political act I'm into your mind about that because I think yes and I think Mark Pollan is great but I can't help feeling that there's a generation of people that are River Cottage lovers and have got time and the inclination to think about these things a lot and yet there's the rest of us and you know I love Hugh Foglant I still love Mark Pollan but I think as I said earlier I think an awful lot of role for government to intervene so yes and no but I think cooking is a political act This question of how difficult it is to know where our food comes from what can be done about that Richard do you have any thoughts on that? Well I think there's lots that can be done and I echo what Vicky's just said that I think that that strategy with certain groups there's a danger of me sounding like a crack record here but it works with some people but it doesn't work with everybody I think that the food industry the food processing and retailing industry is actually becoming really interested in this and you see it already in waitrose with the picture of the farmer on the product that kind of tells you where that's come from and what I hear when I talk to I don't know whether there's anybody in the audience from supermarket but when I talk to the supermarkets now they are really really interested in this and what they're really interested in doing is using some of the new data models and techniques that are available so for example you could put a QR code on your meat product and you would be able to see every step on your phone, you'd scan it with your mobile phone and you'd see every step that that product has been through on the way from the farmers field in wherever Peru through to the supermarket so you'd understand but that's not going to work with everybody it will only work with those people that are interested in being reconnected to the farmers but I think the food industry is interested in doing that that's what I hear from them Would you say that the supermarkets don't really mind if they have to change their model that they work with as long as they still make the same amount of money so they know if they can make the same amount of money about from selling people smaller amounts of food where they've invested more in allowing people to know where it came from they probably won't mind changing but surely the issue is that the huge increase in consumption isn't coming from the western world it's coming from Africa and India and China and that's these sort of questions about knowing where your food comes from are not on their agenda yet but I think they will be very quickly and as I was saying the fact that the populations are going to be urban we're going to see very similar sort of patterns and demands coming from those populations as we see here and I imagine that while Tesco hasn't done it very successfully recently but other supermarkets are thinking about how they move into those markets while I know they are While we're on this issue of understanding where our food comes from Helen, how do you see that being tackled with GM food how can we know how much GM is influencing the food that we buy if there's any cross-contamination how can you really take that back to the source I think it is at the moment regulated but the animals we eat are probably fed GM Should that be on food packaging? Well if I talk to colleagues in the US they think that GM food should not be labelled because they are not effectively different from non-GM there is not anything that you are writing by labelling each genetic model that you are identifying that makes them different I think because people are interested in knowing whether it's GM or not you should label it but it is rather meaningless because it's GM for what and what does that affect that particular maze or soya or whatever what is the effect and how would it influence it as a food for a person So it's quite a complicated I think a very complicated issue the whole labelling thing but I think in the States they are rather arrogant about this actually and don't understand that you can't just ignore the concerns of people as you say of some groups of people anyway I think that's a really important point actually to just if I could encourage the natural scientists in the audience to go home with one message tonight it's that you have to engage with the food consumer and carefully explain and get them to understand what genetic modification actually is about I mean the process is complicated and I was interested in the question that came from the middle from that perspective engaging with the consumer and I was worried when you said we're worrying about whether we're going to call snipping GM or not because in a consumer's mind as soon as they hear that that you're snipping around in the genes it won't matter what you say I would agree with you there but the fact is that you can make a change in the lab that could be you could find had occurred spontaneously because a huge amount of genetic variation between us and it's identifying that I get it but I don't think we should say trying to make the case that is not GM because then people would just begin to think that we're trying to pull a fast one and that's very not constructive can I come in there because I mean there's a lot of evidence that consumers are obviously concerned for reasons that they want to know what's in their food and I think the GM products that are available now aren't similar to products that you could get a GM soy is not the same as non-GM soy round up ready soy or BT but you can put BT as an acceptable organic pesticide so you can add it you can add it so you can have a choice whether to buy that or not but if you haven't got a choice whether to buy GM not GM it should be what the modification is not that it's genetically modified but I think there's a wider point which actually comes into what you were asking about what is the system which GM or not but I think GM exacerbates it is sustainable in the long term and there is actually a huge drop in interest in biodiversity and the ecosystem services despite the fact that we have a natural... That doesn't relate to being GM because we don't have it in this country so it relates to our systems of agriculture I would argue GM current available GM crops would exacerbate that problem as they have in America you've got a huge increase in herbicide use and potential threats to things like the monoclip population but you know it's interesting that we we haven't actually covered what you were asking about because actually those systems of natural capital that we rely on to provide our pollinators to provide our wonderful areas that we go and visit to provide our water catchment areas are neglected at the moment they really are they're not part of the equation and I hear that all the time from people who are in stakeholder groups at DEFRA or talking to bodies around the country lots of budgets for natural England or for the environment agency it's a very dire situation and you know I think GM is part of that, it's one part of it if we have to have GM coming in next year which this government seems to want we would have glyphosate resistant oil sewer rate being grown in the UK which you might argue doesn't increase glyphosate as a herbicide use on those crops that would slightly go against the point of that crop that has big impact on biodiversity but I mean I think the pressures are such that we should be prepared to use all the tools that we have to be to increase our productivity without increasing our land use I think there's issue for protecting land use but as we've already discussed there is actually enough productivity and we're just using it already well there is now but we know the demand will be increasing there's enough for billions more we're wasting an awful lot people waste a lot in their houses but also the supply chain is a lot of waste I'll take a few more questions there's one in the middle there and two there one in the middle let's take these two first and then we'll come back to the others my question is there's an unseen carnivore at the feast which we haven't mentioned it's the pet industry and there are millions of dogs and cats not just in this country but around the world increasing number and I don't know how much they eat in the way of meat but I'm guessing it's an awful lot of food production goes into pets which are essentially useless apart from as well yeah I'm saying this is my opinion that they are useless they don't do anything for us so I'll take this other question as well now and then if I could just add to that Magnus Pyke years ago actually said that the best part of the animal was actually fed to cats and dogs now because it sold the internal bits which are mainly protein and the thing I was going to add was one of the problems is that people want food which is refined and things like this and therefore a lot of byproducts were actually fed to cattle to use up the skins and all the other bits and the potatoes which are too small or wrong shape or what have you that are not displayed on the supermarket shelf so how much impact is the pet industry having and are we being too fussy about what we I don't know do you know any figures about them? I don't know any figures but I have to say I am adjacent to a vet school so I have a lot of colleagues who are companion animal vet but I do concern myself about the amount of meat that is fed to pets and also interesting if you think about GM and genetics if you look at dogs the genetic variation with many deleterious effects for the animals that you get by just simple selection dogs is quite an issue I think as well but people want their pets I don't know this but I suspect that quite a lot of what is fed to the pets is waste and what I think the point that comes out of what has just been said in the absence of the knowledge about exactly how much is fed to pets is the complexity of the waste issue actually it is tempting to say let's look at this figure or whatever it is the food that is produced on the farm is wasted but the way in which it is used in alternative ways is complicated and it is not necessarily the case that all of that 30% would be available for human consumption and one thing that really irritates me slightly about that figure is that in that figure is all of the grain that is fed to livestock that could potentially be fed to humans but the steps that have to be gone through in order for that grain to be fed to humans are not made clear at all and I think that there is a bit of creative accounting if you like that is done in that area because of that Just of my point we are actually supporting something called the pig idea which is looking at how we can get more waste or not call it something else surplus food that can't be fed to humans that could be fed to pigs as there used to be one of our digesters and there is a lot that has already been done a lot of bakery surplus is actually currently fed to pigs and there is quite a thriving industry it could be a lot bigger there are a lot of perceived barriers that actually aren't real barriers to doing that and we are supporting a campaign to get local authority officers to encourage it at the county level and actually we would like to see a removal of the ban on feeding of more catering waste as long as it is done very responsibly and carefully which was brought in after the foot and mouth so that is a very good point on the pets I can't say but I do know how difficult it was for me to introduce a meat campaign of friends of the earth if I introduced a pet campaign I'm a political realist so I think it would be very difficult but that's no excuse it needs to be looked at yeah we need different pets I did keep stick insects it was very good pet stick insects for a bit of ivy and that's a fantastic pet we've got about five more minutes so let's take some more questions we've got one at the back there and this gentleman here there's one over there we'll take those three now so yep I wanted to ask a question that Catherine you alluded to which was about GM crops for specific deficiencies in diet so there is this large amount of wasted food which we could better use and there are some easy wins there but what about and I'm thinking vitamin A here I read an interesting article about GM bananas which are being developed for Uganda which can solve a problem there potentially with vitamin A deficiency in the diet do we think there's a place for that if not now maybe in the future that's a good question Helen I presume you're going to say yes I would say yes I don't see why you would not use that root to you know to benefit the populations particular populations Helen sorry I think it's interesting that this question well there'd be particular rice golden rice which you're referring to has been in development for a very long time and hasn't quite delivered initially using the wrong kind of rice and actually the farmers it is the farmers who are actually saying we don't want it a lot of them but I think it's interesting that we tend to neglect and there's an awful lot of other options for actually ensuring that a really good balanced diet using a lot of more leafy vegetables and actually helping communities and farmers to actually diversify in order to do that and I think that's true in many instances where we're looking at GM and narrow technologies to solve these problems where actually in the long term we need to diversify production to actually deliver a healthy sustainable diet I think in some crops there's papaya in Hawaii was nearly wiped out by a viral disease and they used a GM approach and it saved the farmers and saved the local diet and I can't see that there's any reason to object to that using GM I think we have to be really careful here as we sit in this lovely room with our stomachs full with our children healthy at home when we start saying these sorts of things because I think that a golden rice story is scandalous frankly the fact that this is potentially a life saver for thousands well millions of children in the developing world and the fact that it hasn't got out and into the food system is really because the regulatory framework is so demanding on that production it took more than 10 years to get golden rice through the regulatory framework I accept that farmers don't want to grow but you have to ask the question why don't farmers want to grow it's because the whole GM thing has demonised things and I think we have to be really careful as we sit here comfortably and we make these kinds of pronouncements and think about what could actually happen for some really really poor people in parts of the world that don't get the choice but I also think we've got to think about who's in charge who's in control who earns a patent which is actually to engender ultimately even though they've left it for open source there's a lot more questions but they're calling the patent and that makes farmers nervous because they've seen what happens I think that's another an important issue possibly let's get in one or two more questions in the final minutes gentlemen did you have a question do you just wait for the microphone do the panel think that laboratory grown meat is inevitable we've avoided that topic lab grown burgers is it inevitable is it even sustainable I think we talked earlier we can't see why you would bother it's very likely to be very expensive to produce because if you're going to grow cells in culture medium and so on it's got to be all sterile and that is very expensive ensuring those conditions and personally I would much rather eat much less half as much meat a week than bother with something that isn't really meat at all I agree with that I mean it's a long way off ever becoming something that's really commercially available and there's a lot of hype around it there's a lot of technologies and you've got to really look behind the hype I think the issues around how to grow it it would actually involve an awful lot of electricity an awful lot of inputs bovine fetal serums and also they haven't found solutions to that yet but I just don't think it's a solution for here and now or for the next 10 years let's just take one final question so we've heard a lot about the problems in farming heritage etc but I'd be really interested to hear what your thoughts are on how UK farmers should be responding to some of these questions and how the government and policy makers could be helping and facilitating those changes big question Richard do you want to start? what do I want to say we have to do our bit we're a small country but we do produce food and it's a very significant part of our our economy in this country so I think we do have to we have to think about ways in which we raise productivity in our agricultural system for both the domestic interest and also for our in terms of contributing globally and I suppose that's more important when you recognise that the parts of the world where population growth is going to be most significant are also the parts of the world where it's predicted that there's going to be the most severe impacts of climate change on their agricultural productivity we might even see an increase in agricultural productivity in this country as a result of climate change so it's beholden on those parts of the world I think to do something we have to do it in a way which is different from the past though and I like the term sustainable intensification I think it's a useful peg to hang thoughts on I don't think we've done enough thinking about exactly what it means and so for example do we sustainably intensify across all of our agricultural land in this country or do we do it in pockets of land do we intensify in pockets of land which are more suitable to intensifying and keep the sustainable bit if you like in other areas of land that are less suitable to food production we haven't thought that through carefully enough I think but the message is clear that we have to do something and we have to do it in a way which is different from the way in which we've done things in the past I've taken me a very long time to see all the things I think Government should do I'm not sure the retailers are playing fair we have a new grocery code of practice and ombudsman to oversee it but it doesn't do enough to tackle low prices consisting low prices for instance in the dairy sector which really pushes farmers in their own direction and race for the bottom I also already mentioned proper guidelines and things around sustainable diets and procurement having shown leadership through what you buy for the government of state and in schools and hospitals actually having a new diet that fits the future and climate change it's amazing we haven't mentioned it more actually having really good helpful adaptation support for farmers and landowners and that would include shifting the subsidy system which is obviously the big money in farming apart from what they get from the food system so shifting subsidies and investment in farming towards more sustainable systems and mixed farming systems and globally I think probably should stop then I don't think that's this is an area in which I can have an opinion like anybody else here but I don't have more information really I think it's about time to wrap things up thank you very much for your questions I'm sorry we didn't have time for all of them I think it's customary for the panel to have one final question to take home I was going to ask if there's one thing that changed your mind or surprised you from the conversation this evening or perhaps let's just go with if you could see one change made whether it's to policy to people's diets consumer habits or to communication what would it be if you could only pick that one thing starting with you Richard thank you off the top of my head very quickly I suppose one thing that I think occurred to me when we were talking earlier this evening actually one thing that I missed opportunity I think in terms of forming people's dietary preferences is late teens and early 20s we talk a lot about changing people's diets when they're kids and intervening with kids we talk a lot about aged people but if I think about when I learnt to cook and when I actually learnt to cook spaghetti bolognese it was when I was a student so I think intervening at that stage represents a missed opportunity that we could actually pick up and try and use well that's amazing because we have a get gobby competition for students which is to do exactly that so students can win £500 if they enter and win our competition but that side I think I've mentioned a lot of things that want to happen I think the government actually having a showing leadership and having an integrated strategy on food and farming would be my dream I don't see it happening anytime soon particularly with the coalition government but that would be a strategy which shows that as Richard was saying there's no single bullet we've got to have a proper strategy and strong vision for food and farming in the UK which is sustainable and equitable I think I guess because animal breeding and production is global I think I would like to see GM regulated globally in terms of product and rather than the technology