Food Future

[Eric de Haas]

The Dutch foundation Oxfam Novib, started a new international campaign called 'Grow' which focusses on our current foodsystem and aims for a sustainable future with a fair and solid foodsystem for everybody. Some key elements for achieving these goals are: Investing in small scale agriculture, regulation of food prices, prevention of 'land stealing' and dealing with climate change. Quite ambitious indeed. To kick-off the campaign, they presented a research report, called Growing a Better Future. This report contains some shocking figures (well,not new for some of us, but still shocking) about the doubling of food prices in the coming 20 years, the unequal distribution and the madness of logistics and waste. One thing that was slightly underexposed in this report and could have a significant impact is the current issue of 'food safety'. The current 'cucumber crisis' shows the vulnerability of our food system in a different way. Ofcourse the report deals with 'sustainable production' (p 29) which automatically relates to food safety, but somehow the impact that bacterial diseases could have on crops could have a drastic effect on top of these already shocking figures. You can read more here and download the report here.