'Act now or face food shortages' warns farm expert
www.yourcanterbury.co.uk
A radical overhaul of food production is needed urgently or the UK will face food shortages, a farming expert from Kent has warned.
Dr Howard Lee, who runs the sustainable land management course at Hadlow College near Tonbridge, said that in as little as five years we were heading for “serious food scares”.
“We are going to be face some potential food shortages and we really need to start doing something pretty radical,” he said.
“The degree I’m running produces graduates energised to make some phenomenal changes. We need to overall food production systems.”
He said the UK needed to improve its self-sufficiency in terms of domestic food production.
“We need to be more self-sufficient but actually levels have been dropping over the years,” he said.
Dr Lee said: “Climate change and freaky weather is very bad news for agriculture.”
He said it could impact on the types of crops we produce such as sunflowers and Soya beans being grown in Kent.
“It is the basic food crops I’m more concerned about. We will not have some glorious Mediterranean climate it will be hot but there will be more flash floods,” he said.
To cope with a reduced availability of fertilisers and pesticides, which rely on minerals and fossil fuels, would mean that the huge cereal farms of eastern England would have to reintroduce livestock so that their natural waste would make it easier to build up soil fertility. Read More
Most anti-agriculture groups continually point to the European Union as an example of how the United States should be regulating our food production techniques. What they never tell you is that the EU system can’t feed their population. They are literally on the verge of starvation problems in that area of the world. They are relying on other countries to grow their food rather than doing it themselves. Now that is a great example of being unsustainable. We need to stop regulating our production abilities away or else we will be facing the same issues.
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