Food and Farming Conference - Feeding the World

The Oxford Farming Conference is one of the most prestigious of the farming year, always forward looking and worth going to with its wide perspective. This year the theme was “Rising to the Challenge, feed the world, protect the environment, survive and thrive.” Apart from having to rise to the challenge of digging my car out of the snow in the Park and Ride with only a saucepan. I am now safely back home and reflecting on a fascinating week.

The most interesting and gratifying thing is how very suddenly the need to feed the world has risen up the political and media agenda. After much trailing on the morning news programmes the conference started with the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, announcing the government’s new food strategy “Food 2030”. For a farmer who has been to this conference for a number of years this was a very significant speech. Even two years ago we felt we were a slight problem to government, producing too much food and problems such as BSE and Foot and Mouth, but tolerated as we were able to look after the countryside. Now suddenly, with a spectacular hand brake turn, they realise that food security is the problem of the future both for this country and around the world. By 2050 there will be 9 billion people to feed in the world and how we do this sustainably set the tone for the rest of the conference. In a later paper John Parker, Globalisation Editor of the Economist, reckoned that food production will need to increase by 50%. Suddenly farmers are important again!

And none more so than in Africa. Farmers are at the heart of the answer to Africa’s problems. Around the world there are 1.5 billion small holder farmers and all the talk at the conference of the need to increase food production enabled me to bang the drum for the work that Send a Cow is doing. Having seen for myself last year in Uganda how the giving of livestock together with training in sustainable farming techniques can lead to yields increasing by up to 5 fold, it is crucial that these farmers are not forgotten as people look for solutions to feeding the world. Inevitably during the conference there was a lot of talk about the role of GM crops and other such scientific solutions. There may be a place for these in the future, though much of the talk on them at the moment is theoretical. The importance of Send a Cow’s approach, however, is that we use appropriate techniques and technology which we already have, helping farmers make the best use of existing resources. And we have seen it work over and again.