 I'm going to talk about malnutrition and development today. No doubt this topic conjures up images of starving children in the third world. But malnutrition is not the same as under nutrition. Across the world, levels of obesity are fast catching up with, or even have exceeded levels of under nourishment. And this is very, very damaging to those who suffer the consequences, shorter lives, cancers, and most prominent in the media, diabetes. Ten or 20 years ago diabetes was unknown in China. Now it is approaching ten, 20% of the population. What can we do about this? Well, the long-standing and obvious response is to seek change in people's behaviour, they're making the wrong choices because they are ill-informed, short-sighted or ill-behaved. Give them good advice and all will be well. Just eat the right things, okay? Not too much. There are two problems with this. The first is it's been tried for more than 20 years and has not worked. Just as the same is true of alcohol, drugs and smoking. People are not ill-informed. They know that they eat too much. They tend to know what is a good diet. They just don't act on it and that's why in some respects mainstream economics is impoverished in being able to deal with this problem because it assumes that people pursue their own self-interest. So what is the answer? Well, I did some research on this over 20 years ago looking at the UK nation's diet and why it was so bad despite advice to the opposite from dieticians. What I really came up with was the conclusion that our current society is subject to very, very strong pressures, both of which we all have to negotiate. The first of these pressures is the compulsion to eat. There is food available everywhere all the time and it is extremely cheap. The second great pressure is the pressure to diet. We're always being told to look out for what you eat, don't eat too much, try this product instead of that product and so on. The two most popular forms of non-fiction today are cookery books and diet books. The two things fighting with one another. How is it we can both have pressures to eat and to diet and both of them win through when they're in some sense opposites of one another? Let's think what would happen if we gave some dietary advice given this little sample of the empirical research I've given to you. If we give a dietary advice, don't eat the sugar, don't eat the cream, what do you think would happen? Well, if those sugars and creams are still being produced they have to be consumed by someone. So they will be consumed by those who need to gratify themselves through the cheapest foods and who are less susceptible to being able to resist doing so or less susceptible to taking healthy advice. To be honest, those are precisely the people who tend to have the worst diets in the first place. So if we produce the sugar, if we produce the cream and we give dietary advice, perversely we're going to worsen the situation rather than improve it. So what is the policy advice that comes out of this? And I think it's very, very simple. The policy advice is that we have to make agriculture policy, we have to make food policy and we have to make health policy all compatible with one another. If we subsidise a production or if we encourage a production of cream or of sugar and so on, it's going to find its way into our diets. But really what's driving our eating disorders, our compulsions to eat and our compulsions to diet in the present world is the imperatives of the profitability of the food industry. In the absence of a coordinated food, health and agricultural policy, it's the imperatives of the food industry which turn out to be paramount. And these have to be dealt with. I have to tell you I don't think the prospects for this are good. I served with the food standard agency for the last nine years over which I found its power undermined or taken away, partied by government, partied by the food industry itself. And of course the diseases of affluence such as obesity and its consequences are about the diseases of excess. And let me just finish by noting that the leading example of this is climate change. That's another story but it doesn't give us cause for hope for food any more than it does for the environment.