George Scott Robertson Memorial Lecture

Alongside sex and drink, food is one of our three most basic needs.

During our adult lifetime, each of us in the UK will, on average, consume more than 60,000 meals amounting to some 50 million calories. Or to put it another way, we each tuck into 1,400 chickens, 13,000 loaves of bread and 5,000 kilograms of potatoes.

It is therefore not surprising that we all regard ourselves as experts on food! For some, expertise elides into evangelical fervour about how our food is produced or what we should and should not eat.

By launching into a discussion of the future of our food, therefore, I am bound to offend some, if not all, of you!

When I grew up in post-war Britain, food for most people was fuel. Choice was limited, luxuries were rationed and people on the whole had a rather puritanical approach to eating.

In comparison, food in Britain today has lost its simple innocence.

Your eating habits are a lifestyle statement (are you couscous, sushi or McDonald's)?

Food and cooking are major forms of mass entertainment – celebrity chefs rank alongside other media stars as cult figures. Most of us are unashamed about the hedonistic, social and cultural pleasures of food.

The choice, variety, and availability of food in shops and restaurants is overwhelming in comparison with 40 years ago.

Although it is hard to get precise figures, our food is probably safer than ever before.

Just to take one example, a report to the Ministry of Health in 1942 estimated that, between 1912 and 1937, 65,000 people died as a result of drinking raw milk and contracting bovine tuberculosis. In 1938 a bill to make pasteurisation compulsory failed in the House of Commons.

Now no one dies of this cause in Britain, because of pasteurisation and tuberculin-testing of cattle.

Yet food and food safety is a high profile issue for campaigning organisations, politicians, and the media.

• Should we be pro or anti GM?
• Should we eat organic food?
• Are we being poisoned by pesticides and other chemicals added to our food?
• Should British farmers continue to get half their income from the taxpayer for growing food?
• Can we trust imported food? Are the same standards being applied and how do we know?
• What should our attitude be to food trade with developing countries?
• Is it ethically bad because it adds air-freight 'food miles' to our environmental debit sheet – depleting stratospheric ozone and producing greenhouse gasses?
• Or is it ethically sound because it supports economic development and lifts some of the world’s most needy people out of poverty, as has been argued by distinguished development economists such as Amartya Sen?
• Is junk food responsible for causing the epidemic of obesity?
• Who can we trust to look after the safety of our food?
• Surely not the government, after the many food safety scandals of recent years, for instance dioxins, salmonella and above all BSE?

To avoid disappointment I should confide in you now that I am not going to answer all these questions, but I hope I will shed a little light on some of them.

Before venturing into the delicate territory of our present and future food supply, let us put things in context with a few snapshots of our food history.

100,000 years ago our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, living off a diet high in meat (probably 70%) supplemented by fruit, nuts and berries. To judge from their physical stature, our hunter-gatherer ancestors were well nourished, although their total world population never reached more than a few million.

About 10,000 years ago, the domestication of plants and animals for food began simultaneously in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and in China. Agriculture arose independently in up to seven other parts of the world during the subsequent 6,000 years.

Agricultural man was less well-nourished and more disease-ridden than his hunter-gatherer contemporaries, but nevertheless hunter-gatherers were soon displaced by agrarian societies.

Agriculture, by providing surplus food, led not only to a population explosion but also to the emergence of societies in which many individuals did not need to take part in food production, and could therefore specialise in other tasks – craftsmen, soldiers and rulers.

In the words of Jared Diamond, agriculture not only 'provides most of our food today, it was prerequisite to the rise of civilisation'.

Our next logarithmic leap forward in history brings us to Victorian times. At this stage in the UK the food lives of the majority of the population were grim. John Constable's romantic image of horse-drawn ploughs and rich fertile landscapes belies that fact that many of the rural poor died of starvation.

William Cobbett in his Rural Rides wrote that he 'was ashamed to see countrymen reeling with weakness; their poor faces nothing but skin and bone'. Life expectancy of those surviving to the age of five was only 40 years and a grown man was not much taller than today's 14 year old.

This summer I went to the Museum of the Tolpuddle martyrs in Dorset. The martyrs' income was 9 shillings a week and the bare minimum cost of living was 13 shillings!

By the beginning of the 20th century, malnutrition was, according to Eric Ross, 'worse in England than at any time since the great deaths of medieval and Tudor times'. Military recruitment statistics give us an index:

• in 1883 the minimum height requirement was reduced from 5’6’’ to 5’3’’,
• and in 1902 it was reduced again to 5’0”,
• 40% of Boer war recruits being rejected on physical grounds.

By the late 20th century, in my final snapshot of food history, we see two contradictory trends.

In the developed world, and increasingly in the developing world too, there is an epidemic of obesity – we are eating too much in relation to the energy we spend. But at the same time an estimated 800 million people worldwide do not get enough to eat.

In developed countries, poorer people are more likely to be obese, whilst in developing countries it is the rich that are more likely to be affected.

Overall, food has become more plentiful. Since the early 1960s, the world’s population has doubled, and yet, as a result of the green revolution, there is now on average 25% more food produced per person with only a 10% increase in the amount of land used for agriculture.

So against this background, what of our food today?

Food risks: perceived and real
I said earlier that our food today is probably safer than it has ever been.

For one in seven of the world's population, food risk consists of not getting enough to eat. Living, as we are, in a world of plenty, we can afford to shift our attention to other risks, which might seem trivial to somebody on the breadline. We enjoy the luxury of fear of our food.

Does this mean that our food is safe? Everyone remembers the image of a former Minister for agriculture feeding his daughter a hamburger and claiming that 'beef is absolutely safe'.

The fact is that Government cannot guarantee absolute safety of food: life is not risk free, and food is no exception. So the simple answer to the question 'Is our food safe?' is 'No'.

Lord Phillips in his 16-volume, £30m inquiry into BSE drew the conclusion that 'The Government does not set out to achieve zero risk, but to reduce risk to a level, which should be acceptable to the reasonable consumer.' This of course begs the question of what is acceptable and what is reasonable.

If you ask people an unprompted question about what concerns them when they buy food, safety comes only tenth in priority. Most of the time, people assume that the food they buy and eat is relatively risk free.

If on the other hand you prompt people and ask: 'Which of the following risks do you think are important?' you typically get responses that put food poisoning, BSE, pesticides, additives, animal feed, and GM in the top few places. Of course the results of this kind of questionnaire depend on the questions you ask!

The scientific evidence, with all its imperfections, tells a different story again. One crude measure of risk is the number of deaths per year. Crude because it ignores non-fatal illness, and crude because death is often caused by an interaction of many factors.

With these caveats, two food risks tower above others in their significance; the dietary contributions to cardiovascular disease and cancer. Epidemiologists suggest that about one third of the risk of cardiovascular death and one quarter of the risk of cancer death are diet related (including both the effects of dietary components that increase risk and components that decrease it). Between them the diet elements of these two diseases kill more than a hundred thousand people each year in the United Kingdom.

Foodborne illness probably accounts for about 500 deaths per year; food allergy less than 20 and variant CJD about 15 to 25 per year (although the future is still very uncertain). As far as we know, GMOs, pesticides and growth hormones (which are banned in Europe) in food do not kill anybody.

Just to put these figures in perspective, the number of people that die each year from choking to death is thought to be about 200. The number of people (admittedly mainly elderly) who die as a result of accidents sustained whilst getting in or out of bed or a chair is about 80, in the same ballpark as the number dying from food poisoning. If you want a risk free life, don't go to bed or get up!

Despite their limitations, these figures can give us an approximate scale of today’s food risks. But do they mean that food risks, apart from those related to diet and disease, are so small that they do not justify much attention? I would argue exactly the reverse: part of the reason why they are mostly quite small is precisely because of effective risk management.

In part, the discrepancy between perceived and actual risks is explained by the observations of social psychologists such as Paul Slovic, who have shown that people tend to overestimate risks that are unfamiliar, out of an individual’s control, irreversible and long term. Risks with the opposite features tend to be underestimated.

Hence most people would feel less exposed to risk riding a bicycle down a busy street than by living near a nuclear power station, even though statistically speaking the risk of death from the former far exceeds the risk from the latter.

How does this discrepancy between assessed and perceived risk play into our policies on food risk management? We cannot replace science with opinion when it comes to the assessment of risk: scientific knowledge does have a status that sets it apart from belief and superstition. But public perception does influence communication and management of risk. Here, choice, acceptable level of risk and the precautionary approach are important.

So the notion of assessing risks on the basis of scientific facts, coming to a conclusion about risk management, and then telling the public, is far too simple.

Instead we need a more sophisticated and textured dialogue. Incomplete science has to be blended with public attitudes towards the acceptability of risks and the costs and feasibility of actions to manage risks.

The judgement we reach as a result is sometimes dignified with the title 'the precautionary principle', but in the end it boils down to judgement about managing risk when there is scientific uncertainty.

Intensive food production and sustainability

In Britain, as elsewhere, over the past 50 years agricultural productivity through conventional means has increased dramatically as a result of the green revolution. This has produced great benefits for all of us in the form of more plentiful and cheaper food.

But as we have benefited, other occupants of the countryside have suffered. Increasing agricultural productivity ultimately means channelling more of the sun’s energy into the human food chain, therefore leaving less for the rest of the plant and animal kingdom.

Changes in bird numbers are probably the best-documented indicator of how other species have lost out. Farmland bird populations have declined by an average of 40% since 1970. A staggering 5 million skylarks are estimated to have vanished in the past 30 years as a result of agricultural intensification.

Agriculture is also the major polluter of our water and is responsible for 40% of methane and over 80% of ammonia emissions to the atmosphere.

So everyone accepts the need to find ways of producing plentiful, affordable food, both locally and globally. Ways which work with, rather than against, the grain of nature.

This is Gordon Conway's 'Doubly Green Revolution'.

I could at this stage spend the rest of my time on reform of the 40 billion euro, Common Agricultural Policy, which currently creates surpluses, high food prices and environmental damage.

The current plan to decouple subsidy from production and put more emphasis on environmental stewardship is an important first step, but because the beneficiaries of the current arrangement stand to lose so much, we should not hold our breath.

For some, environmental stewardship means going organic. And we can all join with the aspiration of the organic movement to produce food in a more environmentally friendly way.

But I think it would be pity if the debate about the future of food and farming remained polarised into 'organic versus conventional'. Instead, we should be looking for the combination of old and new technologies that will provide the best mix of efficient production whilst minimising environmental damage.

Our search for the best mix should be one guided by evidence rather than assertion and blind belief that 'natural old fashioned ways are best'.

In fact a recent environmental audit of organic farming by DEFRA tells us that whilst there are clear hints that in some respects organic farming is better for Nature, the jury is still out on whether or not this is true as a whole and whether the same benefits can be gained from conventional farming.

And we should accept that there may be trade-offs, As the Economist put it: 'Food cannot be green, cheap, local, safe and varied all at the same time'.

The word 'cheap' in that quotation is particularly important, since consumer research shows that most people do not want to pay more for their food. And for the poorest 20%of households in the UK that already spend about a third of their take-home pay on food, paying more is surely not an option.

So how does technological innovation help us to produce food ?
Synthetic fertilisers are arguably the most important development in food production since the dawn of agriculture.

In 1920 Fritz Haber discovered how to turn nitrogen, the most abundant gas in the atmosphere, into fertiliser and by now, on average, half the world’s nutrient input into agriculture comes from synthetic fertilisers. Vlacav Smil calculates that without chemical fertilisers about 3 billion people worldwide would starve to death.

And yet there are those who argue on environmental grounds that we should eschew chemical fertilisers and rely on manure or other more natural means. Even if this were possible without condemning nearly half the world to die of starvation, would it help the environment?

The world's longest running agriculture experiment is the one started by John Bennett Lawes at Rothamsted in 1843. For 150 years wheat has been grown on plots with either chemical fertiliser or high rates of manure application. Yields have been similar.

But pollution of both the atmosphere and water is actually worse with manure.

This is not to say that the use of chemical fertilisers is by any means problem free. In the past 35 years, nitrogen input to agriculture globally has increased seven fold, and currently as little as one third to one half of the nitrogen applied goes into crops. The rest is lost to water and the atmosphere.

The aim for the future must be to increase the proportion of nitrogen absorbed and hence reduce the total amount used, by application at the right time. This will be inherently more difficult with manure than with synthetic nitrogen, because the latter can be absorbed by plants more quickly.

GM food
Probably the most contentious new technology for food production is GM. Worries about GM include food and environmental safety, and the effects on the developing world.

For some, genetic modification is simply an extension of the selective breeding that has steadily improved agricultural production over the centuries, whilst for others it is 'tampering with nature' in a way that could have unpredictable consequences.

The FSA is neither pro- nor anti-GM. Our job is to ensure the safety of food and the proper labelling so that people can choose for themselves.

Can we guarantee that GM foods are absolutely safe? As I have already said, there are no absolutes, so the short answer is 'no', but I would give the same answer for non-GM food.

The fact is that GM foods are more rigorously assessed for safety than almost anything else we might eat. The criterion for approval of each GM food, case by case, is that it has to be judged to be as safe as its conventional counterpart.

If many of our familiar foods, potatoes, peanuts and kiwi fruit, for instance, were put under the microscope in the same way they would not be in the shops today.

The first GM food to be marketed in the UK, in 1996, was tomato paste made from GM tomatoes. It was clearly labelled and initially it outsold conventional tomato paste: it was slightly cheaper and tasted better.

By the start of 1999, public attitude had completely shifted and the major retailers announced that they were removing GM ingredients from their own brand products. Today, although GM is not at the top of public concerns about food, most people say they don't want to eat it when they are asked in opinion polls.

Why was there such a sudden and total transition in public attitude? Was it a result of pressure groups, some of which are using GM as an icon for globalisation?

• Was it because of media hostility - the memorable term 'Frankenfoods' captured public imagination?
• Was it irrationality and ignorance on the part of consumers?
• Was it lack of trust in scientists and Government following the BSE crisis?

In the complex mix that influences public opinion, all of these may have been important. But in addition people felt that something was being foisted on them, because foods containing GM soya and maize were not labelled.

Although UK consumer rejection of GM soya and maize can be portrayed as a triumph of fear and ignorance over rationality and enlightenment, it can also be seen as a perfectly rational response to risk. 'The scientists can’t be 100% sure that there is no risk to human health, and I see no benefit, so why should I accept it, especially if I am not given a choice?'

The fact that the same people who reject GM foods appear to be more than happy to accept GM medicines underlines the importance of benefit in influencing consumer attitudes.

As a former US agriculture secretary once said to me 'When there's a tomato with a gene for Viagra, people will buy it.'

Our own consumer research shows that on the whole, people in the UK have a poor understanding of what GM is all about. An anecdotal illustration is the restaurant owner who told me last year when I sat down to dine that 'None of my food contains any genes.'

It used to be fashionable to talk about the Public Understanding of Science, assuming that the problem with public acceptance of new technology was that that people didn’t know enough. All you had to do was the tell people and it would all fall into place

But the new buzz-words are 'dialogue' and 'debate' and 'engagement'. The recently completed public dialogue on GM, initiated by the Government, including its three strands of economics, science, and public debate, reflected this new approach, listening and responding rather than telling.

The debate showed, as expected, that people are not keen to eat GM food, although the in-depth work, including that carried out by the Food Standards Agency, revealed that outside the pressure groups, attitudes are not as hard and negative as sometimes portrayed.

The results of the farm-scale trials have also just been published. To give a very simple cartoon sketch, the trials showed that for two crops, beet and rape, weeds and insects did better in the conventional variety than in the GM, whilst for the third crop, maize, the reverse was true. Importantly, the differences between the different conventional crops were bigger than any of the GM/non-GM differences.

What does it all mean? The results are rich in detail and people will emphasise different points. But any effects of GM on biodiversity have to be viewed in a much broader context of which crops we grow and how we manage them.

If we aim, as I believe we should, to find ways of managing our countryside that are friendly to wildlife and effective for agricultural production, we should not just focus on GM and non-GM.

The global food supply
Many of the most vociferous campaigners for organic farming also argue for a major shift to local food production and consumption. But in many respects this seems to be based on a romantic vision of a non-existent past.

As a small, densely populated country with rather poor conditions of soil and climate for agriculture, Britain has relied heavily on imports for a long time. For instance, in 1939 we imported 70%of our food and even now half of our food still comes in from abroad.

Going back to the 19th century, George Dodd wrote in 1856 'Let the query be, whence does London obtain its butchers’ meat? ...Bacon from Ireland, ...hams from ...Germany and Spain... rabbits.. from Ostend. If the daily bread of the metropolis be the subject of enquiry, we must travel yet farther to trace the sources of supply.'

Some of our most familiar foods, which we now think of as totally British, started out their life as imports.

When potatoes, for example were brought to England in 1586, they were viewed with deep suspicion, especially because the alkaloids they contain could make people ill.

Imported food brings many benefits to consumers – for instance choice and value for money – as well as contributing to global trade and prosperity.

But does it pose particular problems for food safety? In answering this question, it is of course important to remember that one person’s imports are another person’s domestic food. I want to briefly make three points.

First, global movement of food inevitably must bring risks of disease transmission.

The foot and mouth epidemic in which 6.5 million animals were killed, cost the country around £8 billion. We will never know for certain how the virus got into Britain, but the chances are that it came in on imported meat.

FMD was not a food safety issue, but it shows that global movements of food, legal or illegal, carry risks as well as benefits. The answer is not to prevent global trade, but to develop the correct systems (for example biosecurity and traceability) to control problems when they arise.

My second point is it will never be possible to check everything that comes into a country.

In Britain, for example, 2 million cargo containers are imported each year. At one seaport alone, Felixstowe, there are 150,000 containers of foodstuffs per year, each of which may contain up to several hundred separate consignments. 100% of consignments of legally imported products of animal origin are checked and about 2% of non-animal origin consignments.

Third, imported food does not show up in our surveys as being consistently riskier than domestic food. Of course we need to act fast if we find problems, wherever they may be.

Obesity
I want to turn now from production to consumption: briefly summarised as 'too much of the wrong nutrients'.

I’ve already mentioned what the Chief Medical Officer for England has called the obesity time bomb.

In the UK, obesity has trebled in 20 years and more than half of adults are now overweight or obese. And there are similar trends for children. All this is alarming because of the disease risks that are linked to being too fat. The National Audit Office says that by 2010, given the current trends, obesity will cost the country £3.6 billion a year. The NHS will just not be able to balance the books.

Why is obesity on the increase?
The reasons are much debated, but in the end reduce to a change in the balance of energy intake and expenditure.

Expenditure has gone down because we exercise less, keep our buildings warmer, and have replaced many of the energy consuming everyday tasks such as going up stairs with energy-saving devices such as lifts.

It has been estimated that 50 years ago all of us expended additional energy equivalent to running a marathon each week!

As for intake: for one thing food is in relative terms cheaper than ever before (chicken, to take one example, is a quarter the relative price it was in 1960).

For another, many of the cheapest and most readily available foods are also high in energy. Against the nutrition experts' advice we tend to eat too much saturated fat and sugar. Because our body tells us to stop eating when our stomach feels full, we pack more calories in if the food we eat is energy dense.

What, if anything can the Government do about it? Any move to tell people what they should and shouldn’t eat is bound to draw the accusation of 'nannying', so one option is to let people get on with it. But as I have already said, the costs of doing nothing will, in the end, swamp the NHS.

The Health Development Agency has recently reviewed the efficacy of different ways to help adults and children lose weight, or to stop them gaining it in the first place. The message is that it’s easier to work on intake than expenditure. Don’t forget that half an hour pounding flat out on the treadmill in the gym barely burns off a small bar of chocolate.

The Food Standards Agency is currently looking at one particular aspect; the effect of promotion and advertising of energy dense food on children’s diets.

We commissioned a review of the evidence, which concludes that contrary to the claims of some in the food industry, promotion and advertising is not just about brand loyalty – whether to have a Mars bar or a Kit Kat - but it also influences choices amongst categories – whether to have a Mars bar or a banana, for instance.

Our next step will be to publish the policy options and generate a public debate. At this stage my own view is that 'do nothing' should not be an option.

So what can we say about the future of our food production?

First the global picture, which is stark when put simply. Cereal production has doubled over the past 40 years and it will need to double again in the next 50 years in order to feed the world.

But the gains in productivity of the green revolution have already begun to tail off.

And already half the available land for agriculture is used, as well as more than half of the available freshwater.

So feeding the world will mean squeezing more out of less, by using whatever technologies can be brought to bear to improve efficiency of water and use and to maintain soil fertility, whilst fighting pests and diseases.

Let me turn now to a more parochial UK perspective, looking first from the point of view of consumers, then producers.

In the articles and debates it seems to me there is often a disconnect between a romantic vision of food and reality. I have argued that there is no past nirvana for the majority of consumers in this country, to which we might aspire. Most of us have better food lives than ever before, and we should look forward rather than backwards.

Market trends and consumer surveys show that what the majority of people want is cheap, convenient food, with year-round choice, innovation, and quality.

Local food, and environmentally and welfare friendly food will always have a place - but not in the mass market. For instance 5% of consumers are committed organic food buyers, accounting for the majority of money spent on organic food, and they are primarily older, more affluent consumers.

For producers in the UK a key issue is comparative advantage.

The UK starts out with disadvantage relative to many competitors because of its environment. With its shortage of land, short summers, unpredictable weather, poor soil, and uneven terrain, much of the UK could be viewed as marginal country for agriculture.

And for the south and east of England, water shortage is predicted to become a problem within the next 50 years, as a result of global warming.

A simple calculation illustrates Britain’s climatic disadvantage. All other things being equal, plants grow twice as fast for each 10&#degree;C rise in temperature. Or to put it another way, a farmer in the North of England has to start work each day six hours earlier than his or her counterpart in central France, just to make up for the climatic handicap.

In almost all walks of life, over time, production moves from the richer to the poorer parts of the world where costs are lower. Rich countries then concentrate on added value.

In short, continued food production in the UK will depend on all the technical and intellectual resources at our disposal.

In his book 'Is Science Necessary?' Max Perutz quotes from Gulliver’s Travels. 'Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.'

Perutz goes on: 'Yet I have seen no monuments erected to Norman Borlaug the American who developed high-yielding wheat, nor to Douglas Bell, the Englishman who developed high-yielding barley. Their names are unknown to the great public.'

In thinking about the future of our food, we should remember that few us would be here tonight but for past scientific and technological innovation in food production. And this is where our future lies.