"They can pay more for their food" - Jay Rayner meets Marie-Antoinette

I'm going to leave aside accusations of vanity, self-promotion and smugness because we are all guilty of such vices. I'm going to focus instead on the vexed question of whether it is ever morally defensible to argue that governments should enact policies people should pay more for something as fundamental as the food we eat.

Here's the argument:

British consumers have become too used to food being sold too cheaply. In an age of austerity when many are struggling it is a tricky argument to make, but the fact remains. We need an agriculture sector in a position to invest in its base to help improve our productivity and therefore our self-sufficiency. The 10% of income (down from 20% in 1970) that we spend on food does not enable that. Many may find this unpalatable but the fact is this: unless we improve our self-sufficiency, we will be at the complete mercies of those international markets. Unless we pay a little more now, we risk paying vastly more later. This is an argument that farmers, retailers and the Government needs to engage with.

This is the core of an argument made by food writer, Jay Rayner, as a sort of cod justification for refusing to give the benefit of his knowledge and expertise to the UK Government. Now I know most people think Rayner's article is about the unfolding terrors of Brexit but it isn't, it's about how Rayner thinks the UK (note the UK not Europe or the EU) needs to be more self-sufficient in its production of food because lots of terrible things might happen if we're not - most of which, surprisingly, is about food prices:

...the UK sits with dwindling self-sufficiency, in a stormy world in which food has become one of the great economic battlegrounds. Added to that is the appalling folly of Brexit, forced through by a cabal of ideologues happy to trot out falsehoods about the sunny uplands of economic joy that leaving the European Union would bring.

Instead it has resulted in a devaluation of the pound, making imports more expensive and the exporting of our food more attractive.

If, as many fear, a bad deal is done for Britain resulting in huge tariffs and penalties on trade, food price inflation is going to be in double digits for years to come. That’s if we can get hold of food at all. The people who will suffer the most, of course, are those who already have the least. For them the buying of food will use up a massive proportion of their expendable income.

Now there are a few things here that do rather matter with the first being the presumption that a UK government would impose "huge tariffs and penalties" on trade in food. And, given that this would be necessary to have the policy he wants of greater self-sufficiency, why he has such a problem with such impositions? Or, to put the question a different way, how does Rayner propose to increase the proportion of UK food consumption produced in the UK? And wouldn't this be completely impossible if we remained a member of the EU?

To give Rayner his due, he refuses to wholly embrace the 'supermarkets are totally evil' line used by many of those supporting his mission of expensive food. Rayner also slaps down the urban growing fad:

They are interesting educationally. Allotments are good for mental wellbeing and general fitness. But the carbon footprint of the food produced tends to be appalling.

The problem is that, in criticising localism, Rayner undermines the basis for his argument on food production and self-sufficiency.

...do not be fooled by environmental arguments around localism. What matters most when judging environmental impact of food production is the full life cycle: you need to look at the carbon (and other inputs) not just of the trucks getting produce from field to fork, but in the farm buildings and machinery, the fertilisers and the workforce.

It's hard to find a more compelling argument for international free trade in agriculture than this one. A world where food is grown in the place most suited to its production rather in a less fertile location just across the road. If food miles aren't the problem (Rayner cites transport costs as 2% to 4% of total food cost) then what are the arguments for self-sufficiency at any level below the whole world?

It seems to me that Rayner, if he is to make his argument for remaining in the EU, has to recognise that the shared competence on agriculture needs to be viewed at the level of the whole union not individual member countries. And just so we're clear what this means:

It turns out that the EU is not self-sufficient in terms of all the nutrients normally locked in agricultural products and principally available for different usages: The respective self-sufficiency ratio is only 91 per cent.

I hate to make Rayner's pro-remain argument better than he does but being 91% self-sufficient in food is better than being less than 50% self-sufficient in food - and this is without any change at all to our current approach on food prices. Rayner makes a localised and protectionist argument (one that, incidentally couldn't be achieved if we stayed in the EU) focusing solely on UK food production rather than EU food production within a single market.

Rayner doesn't set out how his proposal to increase food prices, perhaps even to double those food prices will be achieved. It seems from his article that the model is essentially to dramatically reduce the area under production through environmental regulation and, therefore, to increase the costs to UK farmers. Obviously such a policy can only be achieved if two things are done: huge tariffs amounting to de facto import bans on foods that can only be produced expensively in the UK and the introduction of VAT on food so as to fund, in part, the subsidies necessary to sustain newly uneconomic farm businesses. And, to be blunt, no government is going to get away with imposing a huge tax on food, so the only way to deliver Rayner's policy is through preventing (or at best, severely restricting) imports of food. Fans of the corn laws will be delighted!

It shouldn't surprise us that Rayner doesn't get to the financial and economic logic of his argument (preferring instead horror stories about horsemeat and vague suggestions that the European Food Safety Agency, EFSA, regime would be scrapped) because it makes almost no sense at all. Not only does the logic of his argument about the EU tell us we are already more-or-less self-sufficient but also that doubling food prices has to involve a massive tax hike on food.

To return to where we started - is it morally justified to argue for government action to hugely increase food prices? For my part, I don't think it is an ethically defensible argument. Food is essential (and especially the basic nutrients Rayner considers when he talks of the 2007/8 food price spike) and government should prioritise policies that reduce prices such as relaxing planning rules to allow more efficient supermarkets. Rayner, like Tim Lang, the lefty food policy wonk of choice, fails entirely to see that the very people who lose under their policies are the poorest. And to suggest otherwise as Rayner does, is to propagate a terrible misrepresentation - the massive hike in prices his policies demands can only reduce the quality of life for millions of families in Britain. I'll be OK, Jay Rayner will be OK, but the poorest and most vulnerable in our society won't be OK.

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No Professor Lang, Brexit won't lead to food riots...

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Tim Lang, Emeritus Professor of Food Policy at City University thinks Brexit could lead to food riots:

But given that the WTO rules are “the lowest common denominator” and the Codex Alimentarius is determined in meetings that are “dominated by big business and lobbies [making] the EU look like the most democratic organisation in the world”, this is far from ideal. The result would be food riots, says professor Lang.

Yes folks, this eminent food 'expert' thinks there'll be food shortages, huge price hikes and general chaos because we'll be outside the CAP and subject to the 'common external tariff'. Here's a sample:

The immediate impact of the decision to quit the 28-member state bloc looks like rising food prices in a country that produces and grows less than 60% of the food it eats and is particularly reliant on imports from the EU for fruit and vegetables.

Speaking to FoodNavigator yesterday, Tim Lang predicted it could take five to 10 years for the UK to become food self-sufficient in food products, if that extreme scenario ever arose. And in the meantime? “People will pay more for food. The British people have voted to raise the food prices," he said simply.

Now, given that Prof. Lang and his pals have been agitating for more expensive food for ages, you'd have thought they'd have loved all this but let's take them at their word. Do they really think those Spanish tomato growers, Italian orange farmers and French wheat barons are suddenly going to whack up the price of the stuff they're selling into one of their biggest markets? Or - as Professor Lang seems to hint - stop selling to us entirely. For a Professor of Food Policy this seems incredibly ill-informed on the basics of trade.

There might be an impact on prices if the pound falls against the Euro. But set against that the UK having better access to non-EU markets in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa - all of which grow the same crops as those Spaniards, Italians and French farmers - and it might be that us having more choice will actually drive prices down for the fruit and vegetables Professor Lang is so bothered about.

We have no need at all - none - to become self-sufficient in food because leaving the EU increases the security of our food supplies by taking us outside the anti-trade restrictions of the CAP and other EU controls. That a Professor of Food Policy doesn't see this should worry us. But then it's Tim Lang and he's nearly always wrong.

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Professor Tim Lang. Not just a food fascist but completely wrong about every aspect of food policy.

The sort of food Tim Lang disapproves of..

Quite a few years ago I want down to the Borough Market to a conference about markets - the foodie sort of market not the economics sort of market (although the former is a subset of the latter). I was speaking about what we were doing in Bradford, trying to use markets as a driver of regeneration. And apart from meeting Thomasina Miers and sitting on a panel with Will Alsop, this was my first experience of Tim Lang.

Professor Lang (as he might have been back then but I don't recall) is a certain sort of foodie's favourite academic. The kind of academic who provides a rationale for those who don't like cheap food, abhor supermarkets, hate McDonalds and prattle on endlessly about urban growing, 'independents' and food deserts. All this means that the professor gets plenty of space to promote his views. And, as I found all those years ago, Tim Lang's views are deeply and profoundly unpleasant yet somehow they appeal to a constituency of middle-class, urban greens.

I've written about Lang's obsessions a couple of times before but they can be summed up quite quickly - we eat too much meat which is destroying the planet, we eat to much cheap carbohydrates which is destroying the planet, and we eat too much processed food which is destroying the planet. Onto this main meal of climate change wibble Lang sprinkles a liberal covering of health warnings mixed up with a sort of militant semi-vegetarianism. At the heart of Lang's argument is the belief that food is too cheap.

Which bring us to the news about Tesco reducing the sugar content of its soft drinks (I'm guessing by substituting it with some sort of artificial sweetener). And unsurprisingly Prof Lang has weighed into the argument:

But not even mighty Tesco can sort out obesity. That would require a re-engineering of the entire food system which works hard to over-produce food, and flood markets with ever-cheaper salty, fatty, sugary non-food foods. We’d also need to build exercise into daily living, and curtail out of town supermarkets which can only be reached by gas-guzzling obesity-inducing car culture.

Here we have the distillation of the trendy foodie greenie left's position on food. Who cares whether we make food more expensive so the poorest in our society find it harder to feed their families. Who gives a monkey's about the idea of choice. And let's pretend we're going to save the planet by producing our food in a less efficient, more resource intensive manner - a sort of Sally does Subsistence Farming approach to the food economy. I love farmers markets, trendy delis and artisan baking to bits. And I'm rich enough to be able to indulge myself on the produce these folk are selling me.

Anyway Prof Lang has got himself even more hyped up over the matter of sugar - despite the fact that in the UK sugar consumption has fallen - presenting it as the core element in the food culture he dislikes:

Sugar is put into a vast range of food and drinks today, as is salt. Hence these two ingredients being targeted by public health advocates. They symbolise the world’s uptake of ever more processed, factory-made, instant satisfaction non-food foods and snacks, and the rise of the “permanently eating” culture among those populations who have access and can afford such products.

Note the last part of this quotation - "can afford such products". This is of course the man who, like many of his Guardian reading fans, thinks the solution lies in more expensive food:

Observers of food policy certainly believe that cheap food is a problem or, as Professor Tim Lang of City University tells it, that too much of the true cost of food is born not by the consumer or the retailer. The environmental and health damage caused by modern food production and its transport, as well as by excessive consumption, entails vast costs, often picked up by people far away from Tesco's catchments. But it is the supermarkets' eternal price wars – their one-track marketing philosophy where "value" trumps all other qualities in food – that have driven prices so low.

That's a Guardian editorial - an endorsement for the idea that the poor, the working classes the left purports to love, should be made to pay more for their food. Yet what these people fail to appreciate is that much of our food waste isn't about markets or the policies of supermarkets but is a consequence of regulation, agricultural policies and the failures in food education - all things that are down to government not markets.

But there's a bigger point here about the environment. Nearly all (about 83%) of the carbon emissions in the food chain are generated by the production process. This is the case regardless of the actual production process - it applies just as much to free range poultry as it does to factory-farmed chickens. However - and this really is important - the fewer imputs to food production the less it damages the environment. And this means that large scale agriculture and food processing is less carbon intensive than the small scale production systems that Prof Lang and his fans promote:

Agricultural economists at UC Davis, for instance, analyzed farm-level surveys from 1996-2000 and concluded that there are “significant” scale economies in modern agriculture and that small farms are “high cost” operations. Absent the efficiencies of large farms, the use of polluting inputs would rise, as would food production costs, which would lead to more expensive food.

Us trendy foodies don't want this to be so. We want high welfare, grass-fed, free-range, rare breed meat to be less damaging to the environment than the products of machine agriculture but the terrible truth is that it's not Big Food that's destroying the planet but an unholy alliance of us trendies with out resilient local economies and the subsistence farmers who're chopping down and burning all the forests. Think about it for a minute and it becomes clear. Imagine the big industrial coffee plant where they squeeze every last bit of coffee flavour out of those beans while trying to minimise the cost of doing so and compare this to your home roasted , home ground beans. Per cup of coffee who's generating the most carbon dioxide? You are of course - Big Food (and the bigger the better) is where we should be going if we want to reduce carbon emissions and stop damaging climate change.

And the really great thing here is that, not only do we reduce damage to the environment by intensifying food production but we are also able to produce the food a whole lot cheaper. This means we can feed more folk and free up money and time for those folk to spend on other things than where the next meals coming from. All this means less resource use, more economic growth, healthier people and a boost to the world's happiness as fewer folk are scratting at the soil from dawn to dusk so as to keep body and soul together.

Prof Tim Lang and all the folk pushing his green version of food fascism are not just wrong, they're dangerously wrong. These people want to make poor people poorer simply because they've decided they don't like the choices such folk have made. And in doing so they not only reduce economic growth but also increase the damage being done to the planet by the production of food.

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Does Laura Sandys realise what she's saying about food policy?

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Let us take her comments:

The Prime Minister is right to use the Olympics to focus on global hunger. But while the main focus of this summit must be to address the problem in poor countries, it’s important to remember that food poverty exists in every country – rich and poor – in the UK as well as Somalia. Food banks are emerging in our cities, and charities like Fair Share are becoming part of daily life in our most deprived communities. In 2010, public health officials calculated that malnutrition costs the NHS £13bn.

Now I'm not going to comment on the public health guffle in this quotation except to say that the last sentence is probably complete and utter tripe. Nonsense that will be repeated again and again until - like the lies about obesity and the misinformation about drinking - it becomes accepted truth.

But for now let us accept that all this is true and that Laura's later comment is also true:

We must increase food production and overcome our squeamishness to modified crops

If there isn't enough food then increasing production is the right thing to do. However, Ms Sandys then dredges up a load of protectionist nonsense that runs entirely counter to the need for greater production and lower food prices:

...our import levels – the largest in the developed world – expose us to currency volatility and export bans

It beggars belief that, having concluded that intensification, genetic modification and greater efficiency is needed to meet demand and reduce prices, Ms Sandys then proposes a measure that will cut supply and increase prices. This is the crass myth of "food security" that results in gluts and corruption in developed world agriculture while at the same time seeing thousands of Africans barely subsisting for want of markets for the products they can grow.

The idea of "food security" is just protectionism bundled up as something else. And protectionism is just a tax on consumers transferred to a selected group of producers.

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Why "food security" is just protectionism rebadged.

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This exploration of so-called “food security” starts with an article in the Sunday Telegraph by Bee Wilson.

“Will we soon be stockpiling canned mandarin segments and clawing one another’s eyes out over powdered milk in Tesco?”

Apparently “food campaigners” have been begging us to face up to this dark future for some time now. According to the doyen of such food campaigners, Tim Lang, Professor of Scaring the Pants Off Us About Food at City University suggests (according to Bee) that we are “sleepwalking”:

“…into a future where our food security was likely to be undermined, whether by natural disasters, rising fuel costs, climate change or the massive pressures placed on the global food system by a rising population.”

Be afraid, be very afraid…we are all doomed unless…unless we buy into the food security deal. Which takes us to the prosaic little document entitled “Food 2030” that the former Department for Agriculture has produced. Littered with words like “resilience”, “sustainable” and “healthy” this is where it’s at when it comes to the future strategy for our supply, consumption and attitude towards food. And the big deal is another producer-driven protectionist ramp – “food security”.

“Food 2030” starts (after the sick-making foreword from Gordon Brown) with the usual lecture and an assumption that the “challenges” are solvable through a “more joined up food policy”. Once it has settled down a bit it takes us to a strange, Stalinist world where markets, the creativity and innovation of individual farmers and the choices of consumers are as nothing besides the issue of “food security”.

Suffice it to say I don’t agree. I don’t believe the world is in imminent danger of running short of food and the “food security” argument is about protecting already wealthy farmers, powerful food distributors (aka supermarkets) and the role of bureaucrats in the food and agriculture sector.

In essence “Food 2030” for all its greenery, self-righteous smugness and “consultation” is a proposal to reduce free trade in food, to build protectionist barriers and to direct money to the food industry at the expense of us consumers and those who grow the basic raw produce. Nothing new in any of this, of course, but now it is wrapped in the language of greenery, of sustainability and the saving of the planet. It’s no longer about ensuring our farmers can afford a new Range Rover but about reducing carbon footprints and making us all more healthy (and I’m sure the Range Rover will be a hybrid).

I will be writing about protection in agriculture, the wrongness of geographic designations and the continued capture of food policy by food producers and distributors – mostly to the cost of us consumers. I might even throw in a recipe or two!

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We need free trade in food not "food security" to feed the world

Today the Government released its "food security" strategy with much hurrah. Hilary Benn - MP for one of the UK's least rural constituencies, Leeds Central - made much noise about the environment, buying British and unspecified "threats" to food supplies. And favoured academics like Professor Tim Lang popped up on the TV and radio to lecture us about our eating habits, the environment and food safety.

But nobody challenges the Government's facts or asks about the real problem - it's a given that we need to grow more of our own food. That farming subsidies are benign. And that agricultural protection is important because of food security. We wouldn't want to depend on all those nasty foreigners for our food now would we?

At the same time the "food security" strategy frightens us by describing how a vastly increased world population will - like locusts - devour everything. So we stop them by not importing or exporting food? That's going to help!

I have a suggestion Hilary - the world produces enough food to feed current populations and, if we stop trying to grow petrol as well, we can feed a substantially bigger population. But only if we improve the distribution of food across the world. To do this we use a well tried and efficient mechanism call free trade. So scrap the Common Agricultural Policy, remove the immoral trade barriers preventing third world producers from accessing western markets and stop dumping our surpluses on developing markets and in doing so destroying those markets.

And while you're at it Hilary stop the food safety fascists trying to stop artisan food production in England - when did someone last die from eating cheese made from unpasteurised milk? Why can't the farmer slaughter his own meat? And when are you going to stop supermarkets aggressively forcing low quality standards and homogenisation on small producers?