Criminals fishing for sea cucumber to the south of Japan are ignoring the increasingly harsh penalties for their coveted catch. Japanese police arrested five poachers with a 625 kg catch of sea cucumbers last week. Valued at around 10,000 pounds, the haul was one of the largest in recent years. Sea cucumber is an overfished delicacy that faces sharp declines in population if current levels of exploitation continue. Unfortunately, there is no reliable way of calculating the sustainability of surviving stocks.
For the past eighty years scientists have been rolling up their sleeves at the Glensaugh research farm and finding robust answers to the problems facing the agricultural sector. Perched on the east coast of Scotland not far from Aberdeen, the site is set to become a carbon neutral farming environment once its building programme comes on stream, pencilled in for 2025.
BBC journalist Nancy Nicolson visited Glensaugh for an edition of On Your Farm, which aired on April 30 and is still available on BBC Sounds. Water is the key to the project, using an industrial scale electrolyser to generate hydrogen that will power tractors and heavy machinery. This will in turn be powered by an array of green energy sources, such as turbines and solar panels.
A headline figure for the project is four million pounds: this is explained in part by the additional cost of being early adopters of technology that is still in development. This project will cast a light on the current operational energy needs of a one thousand hectare estate. Investment on this scale in one agricultural location is based on the assumption that the rest of the national economy will still be functioning in the future, in a recognisable form. We are still a long way from converting urban centres into sustainable economic entities.
Listen to Nancy Nicolson here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001lhz1?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Modern sugar farming is potentially as bad for the planet as the food ingredient is for us. Take for example British Sugar, which buys in 8 million tonnes of sugar beet a year and turns them into 1.2 million tonnes of sugar.
Ever since 1996, British Sugar has been developing a profitable business from a sugar beet by-product, namely the soil adhering to sugar beet arriving at the factory gate. British Sugar’s product range is marketed under the TOPSOIL brand and is sold by the lorryload to golf clubs, housing developments, parks and gardens.
pic: British Sugar
Some 3,000 farmers across the east of the UK are literally giving away their futures with every trailer load of muddy sugar beet. Nobody at British Sugar has any particular reason to worry. But the fact remains that the farmers concerned are losing 200,000 tonnes of soil a year from their core business — about 66 tonnes each per year as an average. If British Sugar was experiencing a comparable threat to its core business, it would probably respond differently.
British Sugar is the UK arm of the much larger AB Sugar group, which employs 35,000 staff at 27 locations around the world, including a Chinese sugar beet joint venture. The AB Sugar parent company is Associated British Foods, which supplies food manufacturers and retailers with an extensive range of ingredients and finished food products. ABF is the second largest processor of sugar and baker’s yeast in the world, as well as having a significant presence in emulsifiers and stabilisers. Once a significant food retailer, its retail arm is now limited to the fashion chain Primark. This deliberate choice of non-food, avoids cannibalising the core food businesses.
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The roots of ABF go back to 1935, when Canadian Garfield Weston founded Food Investments ltd, which just weeks later became Allied Bakeries. It grew steadily through the war years and by 1956 had bought up 10 regional and national bakeries, selling 20 million biscuits a day in addition to bread.
In 2022, group profits were GBP 1.4 billion on a group revenue of GBP 17 billion. Now owned by Wittington Investments, ABF dominates the UK food sector with leading positions in key food ingredients and processes.
Gaps in supply chains are set to become a regular feature of the UK economy. In April, supermarket chain Morrisons started limiting customers to two sweet peppers per shopping trip because of procurement difficulties for salad ingredients. Cold weather in southern Europe has led to shortages across the continent, while high energy costs have deterred UK growers from planting early greenhouse salad crops. Supplies of early season tomatoes and cucumbers have also been affected.
Traditional sources for these crops are Spain, Morocco and neighbouring north African countries. The combination of higher fuel costs for imported salad crops and the cold snap has wreaked havoc.
In March, the UK recorded headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation of 10% https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bulletins/consumerpriceinflation/march2023 But take a closer look at the Office of National Statistics data and consumers will learn that food inflation is running at around 19% (CPIH 12-month rate for March 2023). Climate disruption is just one of many factors that will have a generalised effect on future developments in many sectors. Animal products of all kinds have already been heavily impacted in recent months and the sector can be expected to see further upward pressure on prices if producers are going to stay in business.
