Sustainable food the Liberal way

Globally, the way we produce food is unsustainable. In the UK alone millions of tonnes of food are being thrown away, soil quality is deteriorating and dairy farmers are shutting up shop on a daily basis because of crazy supermarket price wars.

At the moment 800,000,000 people are 'food insecure' meaning they go hungry periodically. Not many are predicting the situation to improve, there is forecast to be a 69% gap between the crop calories produced now and those needed by 2050.

I see the problem as divided into 3 main sections: not enough food for a growing global population, an increasingly unsustainable global food production system and resource intensive diets.

It seems that many of the solutions to those problem are not instinctively liberal. China style 'One Child' policies, tax increases on carbon intensive foods or even the return of rationing might help the food system become more sustainable. But I believe that a more liberal approach could incorporate these advantages with increased social and economic benefits, without compromising personal liberty.

So how can those three issues be addressed using liberal policies?

One way of giving farmers more of a chance to farm sustainably would be to slow global population rises.

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the world's hungriest places and its population is forecast to grow enormously in the decades to come, yet if replacement level fertility could be achieved there by 2050 the world's food gap would shrink by 10%.

Better education, especially for girls would be a very beneficial way of dealing with this. Research shows birth and child mortality rates fall when the number of girls going to secondary school goes up, as well as having wider economic benefits.

With UK International Development spending on education standing at around £900 million annually I believe the case for increasing DfID spending above 0.7% of GDP is strong.

Moving on to the second point, the global food production system needs to be made more sustainable. A quarter of food is wasted between field and fork and 30% of wild fish stocks are overfished with an additional 57% already being fished to capacity.

Working together with the international community is crucial and has many success stories in improving these problems. The European Union for example has banned discards in Europe's fisheries, a policy which saw up to 50% of fish caught being thrown back dead as a result of quotas.

It isn't a liberal approach for governments to try and control what we eat. Yet Western diets often rely too heavily on unsustainable foods: overwhelmingly too much meat which uses far more energy to produce than arable crops. Beef for example converts about 1% of animal feed energy into food for people and its production is worryingly forecast to grow by 92% by 2050.

As a chef I have a rather woolly belief that people will eat less meat when they learn how delicious the alternatives can be. However government has a role to play in creating policy to ensure that food in hospitals and schools as well as other public sector establishments comes from sustainable and preferably local sources.

Creating a sustainable food system by addressing growing populations, bad food production practice and unsustainable diets is a fiendishly difficult task. But by taking more personal responsibility and working together in the international community they can begin to be addressed. Whilst it might be temping for policy makers to drift away from liberalism when looking for solutions, I believe it is always the liberal policies which are capable of not only addressing the issues themselves but also having wider social and economic advantages.

* Sam Lomas is a Lib Dem member, a River Cottage chef and a former LDHQ press office intern