Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

eggs raw
Growing concern
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Hundreds of acres of cultivable farmland will be cleared to make way for houses as far as the eye can see. In the coming months, Mid Sussex District Council will hear applications from developers wanting to build 1500 houses between the villages of Ansty and Cuckfield. As well as residential properties, there will be shops and amenities in addition to a headline-grabbing 30% allocation of social housing. Whether or not the developments will ever release as much as 30% for social housing remains to be seen, but it needs to be there at the outset..

This major development plan faces problems, however. To begin with the new homes will generate additional demand for water in a part of the world where demand for water is already comparabl;e to desert regions.The loss of 250 acres of farmland is nothing short of disastrous: the UK cannot afford to throw away productive land.

City life customs clearance
Global factors keep pushing up UK food prices
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Over the past two years, climate change and rising energy costs have been the two biggest sources of food price rises. Analysis by The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) suggests that even if energy costs ease, climate change will carry on pushing up food prices in years to come. With hundreds of acres of UK farmland covered with floodwater as I write, the water levels will lead to lost crops, forcing farmers to write off produce that would otherwise have counted towards the UK’s economic activity. Replacements will be required for the lost stock, which may need to be imported,

Climate change cost UK consumers an extra GBP 171 in 2022, rising to GBP 192 this year. While the ECIU expects energy price rise to ease in years to come, the think tank still reckons that households have had to find just over GBP 600 for environment-related price drivers in 2022 and 2023. Dr Tim Lloyd, at Bournemouth University, argues that energy pricing is behind 59% of all UK food price rises. All over the world, drought and heatwaves are affecting basic commodities such as olive oil, canned tomatoes, sugar and rice. Food prices are rising everywhere: this is inevitable, given the way food is traded.

Fast forward to 2024 and UK voters go to the polls. Next year, six years later than promised, the UK government is promising to phase in the plant and animal checks that were a part of the EU border control infrastructure. This inspection activity does not come cheap and will be added on to the cost of importing food. Just when consumers thought things were settling down, they can look forward to an unexpected surge in the cost of imported food.

Brexit's legacy customs clearance
Late, random and arbitrary
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One of the most frequent arguments trotted out for Brexit was that it was time to take back control of international borders. The ‘take back control’ mantra was somehow an irrefutable justification when all else fails. It remains more of a fig leaf than a reasoned argument.

Having regained third country status to make this dream come true, the UK has obtusely dragged its feet over implementing the veterinary aspects of border control. The simple truth is that the commitments which come with international borders were not in fact a top priority for British politicians. There has been little political appetite to ensure full compliance with post-Brexit structures from day one, possibly because the necessary skill sets are in short supply.

The declaration of a 10km Temporary Control Area for blue tongue around a dairy farm in Kent came as a wake-up call the UK government. It was as if Westminster was caught out taking a calculated risk that there might not be any significant animal health issues. There may not be a serious risk of the notifiable disease spreading, the real problem is the political fallout from gaps in the UK’s veterinary provision under international animal health treaties.

This autumn has seen the implem entation of the first phase of the UK government’s Target Operating Model (TOM), marking greater reliance on digitised documentation and a move away from visual inspections. If all goes according to plan, the next twelve months will see the implementation of sanitary inspections by customs staff. The laboratory and testing fees will be charged to the owners of the goods concerned,. The additional costs will be significant but randomised. The testing will have an inflationary effect, but this will neither be directly attruibutable nor constant. It will b e impossible to predict reliably, but will generate resentment.

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Coincidental good fortune
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A recurring theme in Chris Packham’s series Earth is the timely coincidences that came with planetary events. Having just re-watched the third of the five part series, it is striking how the twin-track development of what later evolved into plants depended on some shared resources with what later became fungi. The proto-fungi extracted minerals from bare rock that nourished evolving plants, while the early plants gave glucose to their fungal partners. Without this leap in evolution, we would not exist today.

City life
Unbearable pressure
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Town dwellers in Japan have faced a rising tide of attacks from black bears, which are driven by a lack of food to venture into what were previously uncontested spaces. A story in The Guardian puts the number of casualties since April at 158 as well as two lost lives. Unlike the United States, where black bears are a constant risk for human misadventure, there is strong evidence to suggest that the bears are being driven by disruption to their normal food supplies rather than selecting centres of human activity as easy pickings for a quick meal.

A museum reconstruction of the Sankebetsu bear confrontation over a century ago. Pic: Wikimedia

Human fatalities arising from attacks by bears have figured in Japanese history for years. The museum reconstruction of the Sankebetsu episode on Hokkaido in the early twentieth century is pictured here. It came about after human incursions into virgin jungle. A conflict of interest with the formerly unchallenged top species was resolved on human terms. The current spate of bear attacks has broken a previous record high recorded in 2020, with many incidents being logged in Honshu, the largest island in Japan.

Unofficial estimates of Japan’s bear population range up at 44,000, nearly three times the 15,000 recorded officially in 2012. Without a corresponding increase in territory and food sources, there is no avoiding a state of constant conflict between species.