FOOD SECURITY BEGINS AT HOME

They could get us out of a hole that successive governments have merrily dug for us.

Take a look at your shopping bill. The price of an average supermarket basket has shot up 20 per cent in a year.

World demand for food is soaring as the population races to eight billion by 2030.

Rising wealth is changing diets from vegetarian to carnivore. Twenty years ago the average Chinaman ate 44lb of meat a year. Now he gets through 110lb.

That meat needs grain and water to fatten up. The global obesity epidemic is compounding this. The Lancet yesterday said an obese population eats 18 per cent more calories than a healthy population.

Meanwhile, the World Bank says that in the past two years the drive for biofuels has pushed up the price of maize for animal feed by 60 per cent. Yet our benighted Government’s policy is to rely on imports.

“Domestic production,” it says, “is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for food security.”

It is a policy described by Shadow Environment Secretary Peter Ainsworth as “shockingly complacent”.

Wolf packs of U-Boats may be long gone but a brief glance at history shows that food security begins at home.

We will always have to import food but our self-sufficiency in what we can grow here is plunging – from 85 per cent in 1996 to 74 per cent last year.

Our farmers need more help to reverse this trend, whether through Government policies such as less red tape and better research and development, fairer deals from supermarkets or all of us buying local more often.

But blithely relying on imports in the face of soaring global demand is at best neglect and at worst madness.