The following is an edited interview with Andrew Woods, executive director of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society, which, in the words of its website, ‘views poker as an exceptional game of skill that can be used as a powerful teaching tool at all levels of academia and in secondary education’. The first thing that becomes clear is that for Woods, poker, online or offline, is a game of immense skill. ‘If you look at successful poker play, it is almost always dominated by skill’, he said. ‘A few years ago, research by an economics student at the University of California, Berkley, compared professionals who played poker tournaments with those who played in golf tournaments – they found that poker players are more likely to repeat success than their golf-playing equivalents. Add to that the fact that poker players come from a far wider field than golf, and the role of skill in poker becomes yet more apparent.’

Woods is not convinced that people still think of luck as the predominant factor in being successful at poker. ‘Popular perception of luck’s role has changed, particularly over the last four or five years, because poker has penetrated in a much wider way into the public’s consciousness [due to TV coverage and online poker]. What people are seeing now is that poker, as a game, is much closer to chess than it is to, say, roulette and the casino games it might have once been more commonly associated with.’

Throughout our conversation Woods was keen to highlight the nature of the skill involved. ‘Just like the stock market or real estate, the skill involves assessing the variables in the game’, he said. I asked for an example: ‘Maths and statistics are obviously very important to understand what the probability is of certain outcomes happening given the limited information you have available to you. For instance, if you’re playing Texas Holdem and you get dealt a pair of aces, you have to work out how strong that hand is versus your opponent’s potential starting hand, and be able to modify the probability and your expected value, based on what happens on the poker board. So, at the beginning, with a pair of aces you have a very strong hand, but say a pair of aces comes on the board, then that would obviously modify the expected value of your hand and you’d have to act accordingly to maximise your potential value. The extent to which maths and statistics are built into the game shows the type of knowledge and skill that informs successful poker play.’

Woods makes a stronger case for the skill element in poker. He suggests that the skills involved can be conveyed into other areas of life. ‘Historically, people have always seen chess as the thinking man’s game. If you look at chess, it has complete information. If you look at a chessboard, every possible outcome is there for you to see. It’s just a matter of your ability to process and recognise [those outcomes]. But chess involves a set of parameters you would almost never find in the real world. When you move into any realm in the world – be it a business or a personal relationship, financial markets or real estate – you almost never have complete information. The skill, which allows people to be more or less successful, is the ability to take in the information you have, but also the information you don’t have.’

‘And what poker trains you in more than anything else is what you don’t know, and how you can modify your risk accordingly. How do you put yourself in the best possible position? You succeed according to what you don’t know. And I think that that parallel holds very strongly in almost every area of life that you can look at.’ And what about online poker? ‘Obviously, it’s a different situation, given the different interactions, but the core components and strategy remain the same. It just produces a slightly different set of skills that allow you to succeed.’

What about the idea of being addicted to poker? ‘Certainly, you could say there’s a danger of being addicted to online poker’, Woods tells me. ‘But then there’s a danger of being addicted to just about everything we deal with in our lives. You can be addicted to online shopping, you can be addicted to alcohol, you can be addicted to any number of things. We do a disservice to citizens by banning things outright. Instead we should simply tackle specific problems head on, as and when they arise – otherwise you ban things because there’s a danger that a very small percentage of the population will become addicted to something.’

Woods goes even further. He argues that the poker format does not lend itself to addiction. If you’re losing in poker you’re going to keep on losing, he says. It’s not bad luck; it’s bad play. This is different to other games, such as craps, where the random element might continue to draw players in despite a losing sequence. In other words, because of the high skill component in poker, there’s no pay-off to be had from continuing to play. There’s no point in thinking: ‘If I hang out just one more time, my luck will change.’

Woods’ portrait of poker playing seems opposed to the image of the feckless, uncontrolled gambler of online nightmares. ‘Poker is all about self-control’, he states. ‘It’s all about bankroll management, chip management. If you’re playing a tournament, you have to think about how can you manage the resources you have in front of you to acquire your opponents’ resources. If you can’t manage very tight self-control, the other players will take your resources. The term for that player is being on tilt, or being a maniac. In the poker world those people will be singled out as an easy mark, the sort of players from whom you can acquire chips very easily. The idea that poker encourages a lack of self-control is just ridiculous. You couldn’t be any sort of poker player over any period of time if you didn’t have self-control.’

As for whether the companies owning casinos or online poker sites are keen to encourage uncontrolled spending, Woods again is sceptical: why would they want players to do that, he asks? ‘Room owners make their money from a small percentage of each pot. So if you lose your money, you can no longer be their customer.’ And besides, ‘when you lose your money you don’t lose it to the casino, but to the other players. In the poker company’s eyes, the ideal situation is that no one loses or wins very much – they just want you to keep playing for as long as possible.’

Andrew Woods is executive director of Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society

Working at The Economist, I think that the advantages of free trade and comparative advantage are obvious. It makes sense for people from different countries to grow different things and trade. Yet a lot of people think that agriculture and food are things to which the laws of economics should not be applied. The Economist was set up in 1843 to campaign against the Corn Law and we’ve always taken a very firm line on free trade and food. We still think that’s the right thing to do.

I think looking forward, the big question for this century is a simultaneous climate, food and population crunch. The population will rise to about nine billion by 2070 before it starts to decline and so we need to have enough food to feed everyone at that point, and we need to be able to do that in the face of a changing climate. In fact, climate change will manifest itself as a food crisis for most people.

In most of the developing world, there are many people who are experiencing that crisis already. I was in Uganda a couple of months ago and the farmers there can’t rely on the usual rules of thumb about when to plant and when to harvest. This looks like it’s a consequence of climate change. So climate change is going to affect which parts of land are fertile, which crops grow where and how much rainfall there is. If good land and access to water are in short supply, there is likely to be conflict over these things and mass migration where agriculture becomes unable to support the number of people living in a particular area.

One of the things that happened after the ‘green revolution’ of the Sixties and Seventies was that lots of people thought that food was a solved problem. As a result, the problem of food production fell off the development agenda. The amount of research and development (R&D) money that was put into agriculture fell as governments thought that agriculture was old-fashioned and they needed to concentrate on building industry. The fact is that a country cannot industrialise, with the associated surge in the urban population, without first undergoing a massive increase in agricultural productivity - that is, producing more food with fewer people. A few countries can rely on imports, but someone, somewhere needs to produce the food.

In its annual report in 2008, the World Bank confessed that it had allowed food to fall off the agenda and that this was a mistake. The idea that you can leap from agricultural development and go straight to industry is obviously wrong. We should start to see more funds going into agricultural development as a result.

Another mistake has been the opposition of environmentalists in the West to the adoption of industrialised agriculture in the developing world. These groups don’t like the use of artificial fertilisers and corporate involvement. They think it is better to leave farmers with their traditional farming practices, and these ideas have influenced aid policies. This cult of the peasant farmer meant that the late Norman Borlaug, who understood the importance of modern methods, became a “tar baby” in Washington. Having been lauded as a hero for his part in the green revolution, suddenly he was the villain, encouraging global agricultural pollution. As a result, less emphasis was placed on agricultural aid for the reason that such aid in practice meant pursuing industrialised agriculture.

The food price crisis reflected these earlier mistakes. But it was also clearly influenced by the economic growth, not only in India and China, but also in Africa. That has meant that people want to eat more and they want to eat more Western-type diets. That means producing even more food to feed animals for meat, which in turn has pushed up the price of grain and soya. The shift in production toward biofuels was probably a factor in the price rises as well, along with some weak harvests around the world.

Anyone who tells you that the food price crisis was caused by a single one of these things is wrong. It was a combination of things, but in some ways it has been very helpful because it has put food back on the agenda. There was a big supply response last year and lots of investments made in places like Ukraine, which is a great place to grow wheat. Food prices came down, but a very bad monsoon in India is causing problems again this year.

Another environmental argument against food trade is the notion of ‘food miles’. I think most people recognise that the environmental impact of a particular foodstuff cannot simply be reduced to how far it has travelled. It is not as simple as that. It’s not just a matter of how far you ship things, but the amount of fuel per mile per tonne of food that matters. In truth, most of the at the carbon footprint associated with transport of most food in Britain is actually associated with driving two bags of groceries backwards and forwards in a three-tonne SUV rather than shipping it around the world.

The most striking numbers are those for New Zealand lamb, where the shipping emissions are actually a tiny fraction of the overall carbon footprint. Even when you transport New Zealand lamb halfway round the world for sale in the UK, the carbon footprint is still smaller than for home-produced lamb. That’s because New Zealand is a very good country for producing lamb, it’s relatively empty with few people, the lambs can graze and eat grass whereas in Britain they need to be reared in a heated shed and they’re fed processed feed delivered to them in lorries.

Another good example is Kenyan flowers (and, most probably, Kenyan vegetables). Growing flowers in Kenya and then air-freighting them is still better in terms of carbon dioxide than growing flowers in greenhouses in western Europe. It makes sense for a country to grow the things it can grow particularly well. In the UK, we’re good at meat and wheat, but we’ll always be better off importing other products like coffee.

In terms of food production methods and innovation, I think there is a worthwhile analogy with energy here. When it comes to generating electricity, there is no one right answer; we’ll need wind, nuclear and a variety of other sources. And, just as with food, different countries will have different strengths. In Morocco, solar power will be abundant. In the UK, wind and wave power will be the predominant renewable energy sources. With food, too, I think what we need is a portfolio approach where we find the best solution for the local situation, whether it is no-till, GM soya in Argentina or organic methods elsewhere.

Where I have a big problem with the organic movement is with its fundamentalism. To say that the right amount of chemicals is always zero is wrong, but if you know tricks to reduce the amount that you need then that’s a good thing. We need the biggest toolbox we can possibly get, and organic methods should be included. For example, when I was in Uganda, people were making pesticides out of milk and fermented urine. That is, technically, an organic method although some of these homemade recipes for pesticides use substances that you’re not allowed if you want your production to be called ‘organic’. Fortunately, people in Uganda don’t care what the Soil Association thinks about these things.

In my book I go through some of the past crisis points in food production. For example, there was a crisis right at the beginning of the twentieth century because farming was starting to become dependent on fertiliser at that point and it wasn’t artificial fertiliser. This was before the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, so the necessary nitrates were coming from Chile. Indeed, there was a war in Chile over the nitrates in the 1870s and 1880s. It became clear that Chilean nitrate was not going to last forever, but there was little additional land that could be brought into production, so it looked as if the limits of output had been reached.

Indeed, the adoption of agriculture itself was in a sense a response to the increasing populations of settled communities not being able to support themselves from hunting and gathering. The industrial revolution in Britain was basically a response to agricultural crisis because we didn’t have enough land to grow food for all these people so we switched to producing industrial goods, exporting them and using the money to buy imported food. This was the model that Malthus was responding to when he claimed that we couldn’t sustain ourselves in the long run. The flip side of this equation was that the Industrial Revolution was not only a response to a food crisis, but helped to solve it by increasing agricultural productivity.

In fact, Britain did go too far down that road. By the end of the nineteenth century, the UK ended up importing 80 per cent of its wheat. Then the First World War happened and we realised this was a terrible situation to be in, so we frantically rowed back from that and we’re now 65 per cent self-sufficient.

Time and again through history, we have reached points where it looked like we wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves only for some technological change to appear that fixed the problem. We should never underestimate the ingenuity of the human race. I am an optimist and I think we’ll find a way to do it, but it won’t be easy.

I think genetic modification will be part of the answer and there is an interesting historical analogy with the potato, which was heralded as a wonder food in the seventeenth century when it first showed up in Britain. The Royal Society thought potatoes were great, that they were going to feed the poor and famine would be a thing of the past – pretty much all the things the Royal Society says about GM crops today. But people wouldn’t eat them because they didn’t know what they were, they thought they were devilish, they were unnatural, they weren’t in the Bible, they gave you leprosy, and so on.

It was only a series of wars and famines in the eighteenth century that forced people to eat potatoes because that was all there was. Once the French fry was invented in the 1770s, there was no looking back, you could say.

I suspect the same thing will happen with GM crops during this century. Already, resistance to GM in Africa is starting to weaken. It was essentially based on the idea that if you had GM crops in your country you wouldn’t be able to export anything to Europe because of the EU regulations about GM and the general anti-GM climate here. But African countries are suddenly much less keen on exporting to Europe and certainly much more keen on being more self-sufficient, so that’s less of a problem than it used to be.

I don’t know how much longer the Europeans will hold out against GM, but I suspect that once we get GM crops that do things that address the issue of sustainability, like being more efficient in the use of fertilisers and water, or grow well in salty soil, than that might change people’s perceptions of them.

Tom Standage is business editor at The Economist. His latest book, An Edible History of Humanity, is published by Atlantic Books. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

This is not misplaced optimism; the FAO realises that, as it has in the past, technological progress will continue to increase crop yields with promising developments like genetically-modified drought-resistant crops.

The FAO’s predictions fit nicely within a trend of increasing crop yields and increasingly efficient use of resources such as water and land in agriculture. Despite claims of a ‘population bomb’ in the 1970s, from the mid-twentieth century until recently, global food supplies grew 50 per cent faster than the human population. The Nineties saw malnutrition halve in Latin America and fall by two-thirds – to 10 per cent – in East Asia.

So why then has the number of malnourished people recently increased to more than one billion, reversing decades of progress? Why do a full third of African children continue to suffer from malnutrition in the first five years of their lives?

Simply, getting food past government barriers and to those who need it most continues to be a struggle in many developing countries. When food does not cross borders, hunger does.

The politics of starvation

It is estimated that more than 20million people currently face a new famine in East Africa. Once again, the media has been only too happy to associate images of emaciated children with headlines of drought, climate change or population pressure. But there is nothing inevitable or ‘natural’ about these recurrent food crises. The given explanations are straw men – and governments, the most obvious culprits, have largely gone unmentioned in news reports and political statements.

These countries are unable to deal with dry conditions because their governments have continually discouraged investment in agriculture and kept food prices artificially high. They refuse to allow trade in food, not only with neighbouring states, but also within the country.

The 2006 Horn of Africa famine is a telling example. While crops were abundant in southwest Kenya, people in the north of the country were starving. This is an oft-repeated pattern. Modern famines, such as the one in Bangladesh in the 1970s, are caused by bad policies.

With weak rule of law and high intervention in the economy, many African countries are hardly investment- or business-friendly environments. Barriers to trade are four times higher in developing countries than in high-income countries. Farmers are hit especially hard: overall, African farmers pay 60 per cent more in export taxes than other African businesses. More generally, many developing country policies have disadvantaged and exploited their agricultural sectors, in order to subsidise more grandiose urban activities. Food marketing boards and heavy tariffs on the agriculture sector have deterred investments that would have increased agricultural output.

Despite the widespread failure of protectionist policies in agriculture, many Western NGOs continue to support the idea of self-sufficiency and protectionism. They argue that developing countries which are so reliant on agriculture should be able to protect themselves from the vagaries of the market. But as appealing as these ideas may seem, they are at complete odds with reality.

According to agricultural economist Professor Douglas Southgate, ‘many of the poorest countries in the Sub-Saharan region actually have relatively high indices of food self-sufficiency… however, this is no mark of success’. Malnutrition and poverty rates remain high and, despite involving 70-80 per cent of the workforce, agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa only provides 30 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).  Conversely, food security has increased and food prices have decreased in countries that have opened their agricultural sectors and engaged in trade.

Restrictions and bans on exports begin by keeping domestic food prices artificially low, but this is true only for a short while. Farmers soon lose the incentive to grow more, so crop prices rise, both domestically and abroad. This is exactly what has happened in the Ukraine and Argentina, two countries with fertile lands and weather fit for farming.

If Ukrainian farmers were allowed to sell to international customers, they could easily double cereal production and export 50 to 80million tons more each year ― enough to feed 50million people in China. Argentina could easily produce 30million more tons of cereal for export every year, if it weren’t for steep export taxes.

Barriers to trade shrink the global harvest and drive up prices. The impacts on poor consumers are devastating. Nobel economics laureate Gary Becker estimates that a 30 per cent rise in food prices over five years would cause a 20 per cent fall in living standards in poor countries.

Trade barriers also lead to waste. Up to 50 per cent of food is inedible by the time it reaches its intended customer in developing countries, having rotted during lengthy and bureaucratic customs checks.

The future of hunger

Many governments have repeatedly accepted the need to lower tariffs on food and agricultural technology. In 2008, governments from all around the world agreed that reducing tariffs on food was the best way to reduce prices and hunger. Yet, 40 countries have applied new restrictions on food trade in the past year, according to the FAO. Fifteen of those are in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region that is worst afflicted by hunger.

Similarly, there is a general consensus on the importance of land rights to increasing crop yields and wealth. The right to own and exchange property encourages farmers to invest more time and money into their land. It also allows them to use their land as collateral to obtain loans meaning they can invest in improving their farming business by buying fertiliser or hybrid seeds, or in their families’ health and education. Yet, progress in recognising and enforcing land rights is slow in many developing countries.

While the FAO speaks of ‘cautious optimism’ about feeding the world of the future, food prices are out of control for the very poorest. Prices may have fallen significantly following their peak in 2007 and 2008, but they remain high in many sub-Saharan countries.

With stifled markets and top-down control, and largely absent or poorly enforced property rights, the region’s farmers have found it hard to bounce back and recover. Just a few months ago, maize prices in Kenya and Ethiopia were still twice as high as they had been before the crisis.

The debate in agriculture has largely centred on investment and developing new technologies in recent years. Yet, as Africa’s recurring famines show, focusing on food production is meaningless if food cannot be transported and sold freely. Removing barriers to the sale of food is crucial if Kenya and Ethiopia’s famines are to become a horror of the past.

Caroline Boin is a project director at International Policy Network.

But how to do it? There didn’t seem to be much in the way of political leadership from the big parties, particularly around the environment. So I thought it might be worth seeing if we could create a model town in my home town: Todmorden in West Yorkshire. I got together with my friend Mary to see if we could make the town, which has a population of 15,000, significantly self-sufficient in food, in the process promoting environmental awareness, greater resilience and a worthwhile legacy to our children.

For us, it was a question of finding a way to make these issues and changes accessible to ordinary people. So we built it round the idea of ‘local food’ - it was what we called our Trojan horse. And we thought about who we would try to involve, and how we would do it, through three things: community, learning and business. We like to explain what we do through the image of a plate-spinning show: everyone can spin their own plate, and each individual plate is interesting and worthwhile in itself, but only if you spin all three plates do you get a ‘show’: a sustainable community.

We think that is something people are now ready for, taking control of their own lives to some extent. People don’t want to wait for someone else to do this and they do want to contribute something from their own experience to make life better for themselves and their kids. It’s been the most exciting bit of work I’ve done for a very long time.

This is an entirely bottom-up initiative. We couldn’t wait for either money or approval from anyone else. What we wanted to show was that a community working on its own could get a heck of a long way in a short time. The principle we’ve adopted is: let us, as a community, get on with what we want to do, whether it’s as a farmer, a shopkeeper, a teacher or a parent. Where we have approached local government for help, it’s not been on the basis of going cap-in-hand for cash, but on the basis of getting more land to grow food and getting access to council publications to advertise what we do.

For example, six months in, we went to the council and asked for more land. The council did a survey, found out what they owned and whether it was being used or not. Then, the council created the first-ever community licence for land. Now, a street just needs to turn itself into an association of some kind, give the council a tenner for the licence, and then take on the running of that land for the purpose of growing food. It’s not permanent - the council can always take the land back later - but in the meantime we can use it. Forget waiting lists for allotments - find a bit of land, get permission, and grow on it.

The most successful of our ‘plates’ has been the community work. We wanted to create a cultural shift where people grew food in their own gardens rather than thinking it’s all too difficult. The problem is that we’ve had two generations now who are disconnected from the land. Grandparents know how to grow food, but the current crop of parents and children don’t. So we started with ‘propaganda gardening’, growing food on pieces of land in prominent, town-centre positions: verges, derelict sites, whatever it might be. This really captured people’s imaginations, and we had some great leaders there who cleared land, planted herbs and vegetables, built raised beds where the land wasn’t good enough, and so on.

We are not saying that you can feed a whole community just by doing that kind of thing. But we’re trying to stimulate debate, and get across to people that they can actually do it themselves. People are seeing food growing around town and getting used to the idea of taking it home with them. It’s trying to set up a notion of mutual exchange: ‘I’m growing this food, and you can just have it for free. But why don’t you trying growing something to share, too?’ It’s all about creating an ethos of community and sharing.

It’s had a positive impact on the area, too. Despite assumptions to the contrary, these growing areas are not vandalised. On the contrary, these were often bits of land that were neglected. Now they are no longer dog toilets or beer-can dumps, but attractive places that people are used to going to get their veg. Mary has been at the forefront of this by making her own front garden a place where people know they can come along and get vegetables. It’s also kicked off an environmental debate, because people then wonder about the pollutants from cars and what it means for the food we grow. So even though we didn’t start the project to have a discussion about the local environment, that discussion has arisen naturally as a consequence.

Now we’re doing seed swaps, we’ve got courses starting on how to grow things, we’re encouraging people to be community champions. We’re working with the local social housing organisation, Pennine Housing, to go to the estates, do roadshows, talk about what it could mean for everyone. Anyone who has ever watched Jamie Oliver cooking with food from his own garden could be doing exactly the same thing themselves.

We’ve recently had a new polyclinic - a kind of large, expanded doctor’s surgery with lots of extra services - opened in the middle of town. As usual, it had a few plant beds around it full of prickly shrubs. With a bit of negotiation with the council, the developers and after getting planning permission, we took out many of those shrubs and replaced them with edibles. Now we’ve got fruit trees there instead: apple, pear and cherry, plus blackcurrant bushes. We’re putting in raised beds for the staff to plant herbs and the like in their lunchbreaks and generally use growing food as a way to de-stress. And the doctors are, unsurprisingly, right behind the idea.

This is all about slowly changing people’s attitudes to food, not just in the sense of growing their own, but also about the decisions they make when they go to the shops and buy things.

That brings me to the learning ‘plate’. This isn’t just about kids in school, but about how we can do something meaningful above and beyond growing our own food. We need to have a culture in this country of young people coming through, who understand the importance of good soil, sustainably grown products, and connecting with the local farmland and the hills and how that is all managed.

Because of the strength of interest locally, Calderdale Council put forward Todmorden High School to be the local centre for the Diploma in Environment and Land Studies. So now young people in the area from 2011, rather than feeling failures because they can’t do calculus or brain surgery, will have the opportunity to get a qualification and do apprenticeships in land management skills. Hopefully, in 10 years time, we’ll have a group of young people who can see a career ahead in land management, farming, horticulture and market gardening.

It’s also about using land around schools. So, behind the high school there is a lot of empty, open land. We’ve now put in for a lottery grant for £750,000 to build glasshouses to produce, among other things, fish using aquaponics, to the highest environmental standards; the nutrients in the water from the catfish, prawns and the like will be used to help grow vegetables. We’ve also got a market for that food, through selling it back to the school, to local old people’s homes, and through the town’s market itself.

The scheme will be run as a social enterprise, with the kids from the school having somewhere to get hands-on experience of growing food. It’s also a first, in that the school has created an initiative with the community at its heart. The headteacher is very keen to put local food culture at the heart of teaching, too, whatever the subject being taught.

The result is that kids are growing up in an environment where growing food is central. Indeed, this all begs the question: why not build schools from the outset with sustainability in mind, rather than believing that the answer is to just bung a couple of solar panels on the roof?

The third ‘plate’ is business - and specifically, farming. We want more restaurants serving food grown immediately in Todmorden or within a 30-mile radius. We don’t just want farmers’ markets, we want local produce sold in our mainstream market every day.

We’re saying to local farmers that we believe there is real interest and support for what you’re producing here in Todmorden. One of the local farmers, thanks to this support, has produced the first Todmorden organic cheese. It’s fantastic and he can’t produce it fast enough to meet demand. Another wants to turn her farm into an educational establishment with schools giving her a bit of money to take a look round a real working farm. A third farmer has expanded her stock of free range chickens and rare-breed pigs, and is expanding into other meat poultry.

These are not huge changes, but it does mean with local support at least three farmers are going to get better incomes out of it. If we can get an increase of 10 per cent in what’s sold to the immediate locality, that’s got to be good for supporting local farms. We’ve tried this out specifically with our ‘Every Egg Matters’ campaign, where we’re aiming to get every free range egg in Todmorden to be locally produced. We’re encouraging everyone to keep their own chickens, Pennine Housing are allowing their tenants to keep chickens, and we’ve created an ‘egg map’ of people selling eggs locally. Now we’re trying to make that more viable by setting up an egg cooperative, so that people really can go into a shop and buy Todmorden eggs.

We’ve been very successful in raising awareness and creating debate through growing food right where people live. But we also know that we cannot be sustainable as a town by planting up verges. We need people to do their own thing, learn about local food, and support local business. We’re not doing this because we’re particularly passionate about growing veg. We doing this in an attempt to find a way to give our children and grandchildren the chance of a better future. Making food production local and sustainable is a vital of that.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Pam Warhurst is co-founder of Incredible Edible Todmorden.

In garden centres in the UK vegetable seeds have begun to out-sell flowers; a hundred thousand people have put their names down for allotments. In Totnes, there is Garden Share; in Todmorden the people compost in the park. In London, there are vegetables on balconies, canal barges, and in skips. On my estate in Hackney in east London, I can see the last tomatoes of the season ripening on at least a dozen balconies. It’s rumoured that DIY chain B&Q is soon to sell pig sties for the back garden.

This month, we opened our exhibition ‘The Good Life’ with a debate which explored the phenomenon – and asked ‘What next?’ Will the momentum continue into 2010?

To Geoff Stokes, national secretary of the Allotment Association, it began two and a half years ago. Until then, his job was to stop councils selling allotments to developers. But the phone calls changed: how do I get an allotment? Can I make an allotment?

It’s about the environment, of course. It is also about physical and mental health. Scientists have produced data to prove what gardeners have always known: digging and weeding cheers you up and keeps you fit. And it’s also about a change in our approach to food. There’s no such thing as a typical allotment holder, but there is no doubt that many newcomers are middle-class female professionals who want to be in control of what’s on their plate. The change in gender is a huge shift.

At the debate I was struck by the importance of community. Alys Fowler showed her project in Birmingham in which strangers met on Facebook and transformed a lawn into a veg patch in a long, muddy, and cheerful summer’s day. Neighbours became friends. (My tip for next year: it will be about community orchards, not allotments.) And ‘grow your own’ is being phrased out for ‘grow it yourself’. You grow, but you share.

Most remarkably, it’s the economy. An upward curve in interest became exponential when Lehman Brothers collapsed. In the USA there is a waiting list for backyard chickens. The last time that happened was in the months before the Millennium. It’s irrational but it’s true: people buy chickens when they are anxious about the future. In a recession we like to have roots, soil, and belonging. As a woman who grows plants on the balcony of a council flat put it: ‘When you have a little bit of earth all your troubles go away.’

At the debate, Alys Fowler sat beside her heroine, Joy Larkcom, whose journeys to Europe in a camper van the 70s to collect new varieties of vegetables put the crunch and the spice into the British salad bowl. I’m an old Good Lifer too, added Bob Sherman, a soldier who became a food grower and director of operations at Garden Organic. We do seem to be re-living the late 70s. In 1978, waiting lists for allotments increased by over 1,000 per cent. But in the consumer boom of the 80s, the plots were abandoned. Will it last this time? Or will we go back to the supermarkets as soon as the economy picks up?

This time is different, agreed the audience. To grow an element of what you eat has become integral to the modern lifestyle. There is the change in gender balance. Above all, it is the mass recognition of environmental finality. We’re living at one of those moments in history when people know that society must change: like the 1970s, or the 1920s, or the 1880s, when William Morris imagined a new London in News from Nowhere. Trafalgar Square would become an apricot orchard; manure would be piled up in an emptied Houses of Parliament; the corrupt, dark, traffic-choked city would become a community of woods, meadow, and smallholdings. It’s a book to re-read at a time when we know that the modern city must change.

So what are the challenges? Land, first. There are glimmers of hope in the councils handing over their parks. Lambeth council has given our Museum staff an allotment in a local park – and the Mayor’s office has funded Capital Growth: for a grant of £2,000, residents can plant raised beds in the car park of a tower block. But new housing schemes must increase growing spaces. That is yet to happen.

Next, there is knowledge. In a hundred years of urbanised society we’ve lost our ancient connection with the realities of Nature. Cities, and bureaucrats, live in denial of the seasons. What I enjoy, personally, is picking fruit from old, abandoned trees in London. This evening I will pick bucket loads of eating apples from an old tree beside the Olympic Stadium, and on Saturday will cycle to another favourite in Green Park. But I will be the only person climbing the trees. This August was a great plum harvest in Hackney. I remember picking plums outside a coffee shop in Broadway Market. Not a single person looked up from their copy of the Guardian.

Finally, there is winter ahead: months of drizzle, mud, cold fingers, and aching backs. At bottom, growing food is hard work. At times, it’s a battle. To my mind, the biggest challenge is our own self-indulgence as consumers. Globalised supermarket food is easy and cheap to buy. Too cheap.

What I found most inspiring at our exhibition opening and debate was the personal optimism of the ‘Good Lifers’ who crowded the room to chuckle and share memories of sexing chickens, homespun sweaters, and the blissful exhaustion in front of wooden fires. They remind us of the value of individual action, combined with national campaigns such as Garden Organic. The first step is to climb a tree and pick an apple. Do it yourself.

Christopher Woodward is director of the Garden Museum in London.

Depending on which player you ask, they will tell you that poker is either predominately skill or predominately luck. In reality, poker has elements of both. If it didn’t, poker would become like chess and only the best players would win. However, there are many times when the absolute worst player walks away a winner. Let’s take a closer look at the role that both luck and skill play in the game of poker.

I’d Rather Be Lucky Than Good

Some players make the statement, ‘I would rather be lucky than good’. A player that relies on luck to win is approaching the game of poker like it was a game of dice or a slot machine. They are not taking into account other elements of the game, such as the other opponents’ cards, player tendencies, etc.

A player that relies on luck to win has a tendency to play too many hands and will usually be a calling station. They are hoping that their cards will connect in a meaningful way with the board, and when they are hitting, they can be very tough to beat. However, these same players usually are not capable of making a bluff for a pot or making any other type of move to push people around. 

Skilled Players Have Many Tools

Skill is an entirely different matter. Most poker players realise that the skillful player will be the winning player over the long term. A skillful player takes all the elements into consideration and has tools that he or she has developed over time that can be used to produce a desired result.

Skillful players will take into account not only their own cards, but also the cards of the other players. In addition, they pay close attention to the players’ betting patterns, the cards that they showdown at the river, and even the action that forces them to fold. Some will even go so far as to indulge in a bit of psychoanalysis on other players and adapt a style of play against that player accordingly.

A skillful player has also developed a set of moves and plays to be used in various situations. They may bluff into a paired board, check-raise a flush draw, or even try to bully other players out of pots with aggressive betting. The skillful player is aware of pot odds, hand odds, and even implied odds of the hands that they are playing. There may be a hand where they know they are behind, but they may have odds to draw at their straight or flush. 

Tournament Poker

Tournament poker has a higher degree of luck on average over a cash game. The main reason behind this is that in a tournament, the blinds and antes are constantly going up, forcing a player to make decisions. A player cannot buy his or her way back into a tournament and as the stakes go up, so does the chance of ruin. Sometimes a player will have to gamble with an inferior hand in the hope of doubling-up and staying alive in a tournament. 

Cash games, depending on stakes, tend to have less luck involved than tournaments. The primary reason is due to the low blind to stack ratio. If you are playing $2-$4 NL Holdem and have an $800 stack, the blinds are not going to be the same concern as if you were in a tournament with the same stack at $100 - $200 blinds. This allows players to exercise patience and play skillfully. Also, if a player busts out of a cash game, they can buy back in and try again. If he or she took a bad beating, they can reload and try to win the money back.

Sometimes You Can’t Beat Luck

The point should be made that no matter how skillfully you play, there are still times when luck will win out in a poker game. You can move all-in pre-flop with pocket aces and get called by pocket kings and still lose if a king falls on the board. You can flop the nut straight and still lose on occasion to a runner-runner flush.  The 7-2 will crack pocket aces on occasion. This is a normal part of poker, but over the long run, the superior cards will be the winner.

The appeal of poker is the fact that it is a skillful game that involves a degree of luck. If poker did not involve luck, most new players would not stick with the game long enough to become great players. The skillful players will also tell you that they prefer the lucky players to play because over time they will donate money to the game. The debate rages on in US Congress whether poker is a game of luck or skill. The truth is that poker has elements of both. Luck plays a part in the game and helps to keep the game interesting. However, in the end, the skillful player will come out on top. 

For example, the debate about organic food has been going on for 70 years. Yet organic is an impractical system of food production that is unsustainable, primarily because it is simply incapable of feeding the world.

The problem that lies at the heart of the organic food movement is fertiliser. Most people seem to think that organic arose because of the use of pesticides and was invented in the Sixties in response to Rachel Carson’s claim in her book, Silent Spring, that pesticides were wiping out birds. In fact, the organic movement started much earlier, as a reaction to the use of manmade fertilisers.

Nitrogen is a vital component of food crops. Proponents of organic argue that we should only fertilise land by growing crops that can draw in nitrogen from the atmosphere, like clover, or by spreading manure on fields. The trouble is, those sources simply won’t supply enough nitrogen to feed humanity. We know this for sure because a hundred years ago we were mining bird droppings from Pacific islands off the coast of Peru in order to fertilise land. It was when we exhausted those sources that we invented the Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia, the basis of modern fertiliser. Without that process, we’d be up the creek without the proverbial paddle.

Today, the organic movement has added an environmentalist aspect, based on the fact that manmade fertilisers are currently made using fossil fuels. The claim is that fertilisers must be made this way and this inevitably accelerates global warming. That’s just a myth. Fertilisers are currently made using natural gas - not from crude oil, as many people claim - because it is an economical method. We could use a similar process powered by solar or wind energy. Frankly, we could use hydrogen from water and power the process using energy from hippies riding bicycles if we wanted.

Nor is it a case of running out of natural gas. We’ve got 200 to 300 years’ worth of natural gas in methane hydrates that we could use if we so wished.

As for the claim about global warming, I believe it is becoming increasingly clear that the wheels are falling off the global warming bandwagon. There has been a lack of sunspots in recent years for considerably longer than we would expect. Solar scientists who study the correlation between solar-cycle length and the reduced intensity of the sun say that we’re looking at a two-degrees Celsius drop in global temperatures over the next 15 years. That is three times more cooling than we’ve had warming over the last 30 years.

If in doubt, it’s worth bearing in mind that none of the computer models predicted that this year would be so cool and it is not a coincidence that the coolest periods on Earth correlate with the periods when the sun has been less active. This correlation is strengthening, which tends to suggest that there is a causative relationship between sunspot activity and Earth temperatures.

It’s not just the organic movement that has becomed unduly wary of manmade chemicals, but it is a sentiment with direct and dangerous consequences. For example, the European Union (EU) has a sustainability directive that says that whenever feasible you must use non-chemical means in whatever business you’re in, including growing food. Perhaps the EU should call it the ‘unsustainability directive’. It is just about possible to control weeds with mechanical methods, but the problem is that constantly churning the soil will increase soil erosion dramatically and soil erosion is the most plausible sustainability problem we face. Using chemical methods to control pests and weeds has tackled that sustainability concern to a very real extent and yet proponents of organic agriculture still argue that their methods are more sustainable.

A health warning at this point: from time to time, there are claims that organic methods result in less soil erosion. The problem is that this research tends to compare an organic system with old-fashioned methods. For example, Rodale, which is the equivalent in the US of the Soil Association in Britain, has had a long-term comparison going on in Pennsylvania. The comparison is between organic crop rotations and a non-organic crop rotation that uses chisel tillage, which is actually an old plough, a very primitive weed-control method. Unsurprisingly, Rodale are able to claim that the organic method is better.

But three quarters of the corn and soya bean in this country is no longer managed with chisel tillage; it’s expensive, because it takes a lot of fuel to drag a chisel plough through the soil to control the weeds, and it causes soil erosion. US corn and soya bean is managed with some form of what we call ‘reduced tillage’. It’s either no-tillage production, where farmers never plough or till, or it is low-tillage, where farmers plough only very shallowly and occasionally, but use but use safe and sustainable herbicides to control weeds most of the time. Chisel tillage is only used in very damp conditions where the soil needs to dry out and where soil erosion is not an issue.

If we can get away from such mistaken arguments, I’m optimistic that the application of new technology will enable us to grow a lot more food.

For example, I think that one important new technology for the future will be to go much further in understanding and controlling far more subtle genetic traits than we’ve been able to do so far. So it’s one thing adding a gene to confer herbicide tolerance or to find a natural adaptation for herbicide tolerance. It’s quite another thing when you’re looking at drought tolerance or tolerance to stresses, which we’re finding is often controlled by possibly dozens of genes. Understanding and then successfully breeding these traits is much trickier, but that’s what we’re beginning to see just the first inklings of now.

For example, there are a couple of drought-tolerant crop varieties due to come out in the next couple of years and this is the tip of a very large iceberg in breeding stress tolerance into crops.

Unfortunately, I think we’ve hyped the threat of global warming so much that we are not prepared for the possibility of 30 years of significant cooling. We’ve been breeding for the wrong future. A cooler planet, for example, is going to be a wetter planet not a drier planet. Drought tolerance will be valuable to have, but so will frost tolerance and we haven’t spent a lot of time on that.

Another big issue has been food safety. In the United States we’ve had a real increase in the number of food contamination incidents. It started in 2003-2004 and it really hit national attention in 2006 with a national recall of organically grown spinach infected with E.Coli 0157, which was traced back to cattle on a low-density, grass-only, eco-friendly ranch. Yet the incident is still reported as if it was due to industrial-farming negligence.

Since then we’ve had tomato recalls and, more recently, problems with cookie dough and peanuts. It’s not because our food system’s getting more contaminated, it’s because we have instituted a new, more comprehensive surveillance system in the US. The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control created internet systems and then instituted mandatory reporting. This enabled infections with the same cause to be linked for the first time.

In the past, we only knew that a particular infection had a common cause if it was immediately obvious - for example, if everyone at a particular event became ill. But from 2002, because of genetic fingerprinting and mandatory reporting, we could link a particular infectious agent in Oregon to one in Virginia, then look for common factors. This has led to an increase in the number of reported food contamination incidents, but it is really only that we’re uncovering cases of a kind that was there the whole time. It doesn’t mean our food is less safe than it used to be.

Why is it that the United States doesn’t have massive milk contamination problems and massive contamination problems with canned food? It’s because we treat every batch of milk and every can of food as if there was a deadly pathogen in it. We heat and sterilise every can of food, that’s why canned food lasts up to 140 years. We pasteurise all milk because we know that there are likely to be some pathogens in all milk.

Part of the reason that food-borne illnesses have gotten worse is because the organic fad has also brought with it a new religion that unpasteurised milk is better and every year now we get dozens and dozens of children put in a hospital with kidney failure because of illness they’ve gotten from unpasteurised milk.

I think there has to come a point where society is going to realise that the only rational way to deal with our food is to assume that Mother Nature isn’t our friend and pathogens are everywhere. That means employing the full gamut of technology to prevent infections. For example, we can use radiation to pasteurise things like fresh fruits and vegetables, not just gamma radiation but electron beams, x-rays, ozone packaging, ultra-violet light treatment and so on.

We’re not doing those things as much as we should and that’s got a lot to do with the ‘yuk factor’ response to new technology. Tackling food safety using new technology is the next big struggle with society and food.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Alex Avery is director of research at the Centre for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute.

Feudal estates had re-emerged, owned by plutocrats and guarded by mercenaries against the depredations of semi-feral bands seeking some form of survival outside the crowded cities, where the masses subsisted miserably on genetically modified algal protein. The middle classes muddled on between these extremes, avoiding the industrial food-system by growing their own food in their back gardens and allotments.

It would be easy to dismiss this dystopian vision as predictable coming from such a reactionary source, harking back to a lost rural idyll where peasants deferred dutifully to the landowning class and the urban was clearly demarcated and distant from the rural. But there’s some prescience in the piece in its warnings of future food insecurity for the UK and the rest of the world, with governments grasping at unpalatable technological fixes to feed rising populations, whilst those that can afford to by-pass such measures do so.

A glance at any supermarket’s shelves today makes it hard to conceive food security could become a real issue for the UK. Yes, nearly a billion people are undernourished in the world’s underdeveloped South, but here and in other developed countries it’s over- not under-eating that’s the problem, with some two billion people being overweight or obese worldwide.

But despite appearances, our food system is far from resilient; it is dangerously dependent on enormous quantities of oil and other fossil fuel-derived inputs. It takes 400 gallons of oil in food production, processing and distribution to feed the average American annually – 10 calories of energy burnt-up to make each single calorie of food energy. Similar ratios apply to the UK food system.

The trumpeted productivity of British agriculture, the recently harvested wheat, barley, oil-seed rape and almost everything else grown in the UK is reliant on off-farm inputs of chemicals, especially artificial nitrogen fertiliser. Fertiliser manufacture alone accounts for 40 per cent of all energy used in agriculture – it takes a tonne of oil to make a tonne of the stuff. This heavy use of fossil fuels and consequent emissions of greenhouse gases makes industrial farming unsustainable and vulnerable.

Depleting our remaining reserves of oil when production has, or may shortly, ‘peak’ is reason enough to question the long-term sustainability and security of our food system, but its companion – climate change - undermines any remaining foundations. The UK government has accepted the scientific consensus for an 80 per cent overall reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, with agriculture slated for 60 per cent cuts. The obvious way to achieve that figure is by reducing the use of artificial fertilisers and oil generally.

Ahead of the Copenhagen climate talks, scientists revised predicted sea-level rise upwards to over a metre. Nearly 60 per cent of the UK’s currently most productive farmland sits below sea level. Along with the threat of saltwater incursion onto farmland, climate change will bring reduced rainfall – parts of the south east of England already receive less rain than Spain. In a recent interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the government’s chief scientist, John Beddington, warned of ‘a perfect storm of food, energy and water shortages’.

Our food system is poorly prepared to weather this storm. Since the country’s last food security crisis during the Second World War, when German U-boats cut our extended food and fuel supply lines, the UK has fallen back into greater reliance on imports. Overall, UK food self-sufficiency stands at around 60 per cent, which the government considers fine for ‘a developed economy… able to access the food we need on the global market’. But 40-50 per cent of vegetables and over 90 per cent of fruit consumed here are imported, with 12 per cent coming from Africa.

Those African imports point us to another problem: the inequity and unsustainability of consuming food from a continent where 66 per cent of the area is dryland, desert or water-stressed. The ‘embedded’ water – the water that is used to produce crops that are then shipped overseas, and so is not available to produce food for Africans - is a growing concern. Every stem of imported green beans has soaked up four litres of Africa’s precious water. In developing countries particularly, large areas of farmland are being built over or degraded through inappropriate farming methods. The UN estimates that 50 per cent of the world’s arable soils will be ‘unuseable’ by 2050. Our government’s faith in the global market to provide our food indefinitely seems shortsighted.

The case of China confirms the mounting pressure on global food production. Containing one-fifth of the world’s population, China has less than one-seventh of the world’s farmland from which to feed its people. It’s not that China’s agriculture is backward or simply in need of technological improvement. Over the past half-century, Chinese grain production has increased four-fold. By the mid-1990s, China had overtaken the US as the world’s leading grain producer, and for the past decade has maintained around 95 per cent self-sufficiency.

But China can no longer satisfy its growing population and their changing diet. As the head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences observes, if national diets mimic those of the more affluent coastal provinces which have already adopted a more westernised diet, with higher meat consumption, ‘China will have to import 400million tons of grain from the world market. And I am afraid, in that case, that all of the grain output of the United States could not meet China’s needs.’

Rising populations, degrading soils and less reliable rainfall are brewing up Beddington’s ‘perfect storm’ and provoking a range of questionable responses. Farmland poor, but cash-rich countries like China and Saudi Arabia are buying up or leasing land in Africa and Asia in a new form of colonisation to grow food for their burgeoning populations.

The UK isn’t directly participating in this ‘global land grab’, but is hugely dependent on ‘ghost acres’ overseas. Take London’s food footprint. It has been estimated that to produce the capital’s annual food and drink needs takes some 20million hectares spread across the globe. To put that into perspective, the UK’s total area of farmland is 18.5million hectares – so feeding London’s current consumption patterns alone from our own land resource would use all that and more. A ‘global fairshare’ of farmland would require Londoners eating 70 per cent less meat, 40 per cent more local, seasonal and unprocessed food, and reducing their food waste by one tonne per person per year. A shift like that would represent a healthier, more sustainable diet for people and planet.

Politicians faced by such statistics blanch at the complex cultural changes and diverse means needed to make the transition to more sustainable patterns of consumption, instead grasping desperately at whatever tech-fixes offer the illusory hope of least adjustment to the present system. Genetically modified (GM) crops are the current favourite - despite the fact that after 20 years of development, not one GM crop is feeding humans directly, has increased yields to any significant degree and all require the same heavy inputs of artificial fertiliser and other oil-derived agrochemicals. The recent resurgence in both GM crops and nuclear power reflect policy-makers lack of courage, imagination and their woeful underestimation of the public’s capacity to accept harsh truths and change behaviour.

Fortunately, people aren’t waiting for far-sighted political leadership. Many farmers in developed and developing countries are already reducing reliance on costly chemicals and oil. In Africa, farmers have found that agroecological and near-organic methods are not only more affordable, but also give higher yields and greater resilience to drought. Suburbanites and city dwellers demonstrate a common-sense approach to coming challenges by taking practical steps to reduce their reliance on the corporate-controlled food system. Previously the preserve of old codgers growing monstrous leeks, allotments are now more desirable than overseas holiday time-shares; vegetable seeds outsell flower varieties, and a growing body of people are relearning neglected domestic skills of pickling, jam-making, bee and chicken-keeping.

This surge in suburban smallholding and greater self-sufficiency is more than ‘Barbara and Tom Good Lifery’, but reflects a well-founded anxiety over the sustainability and security of the food chain. Less than a decade ago, the blockade of a few supermarket food hubs and oil refineries by truckers and farmers angry at rising diesel prices brought London to within three days of running out of food, so testing the old secret service maxim that society is ‘only nine meals from anarchy’.

London’s ‘Food Czar’, Rosie Boycott, has tapped into the zeitgeist with her plans to create 2,012 inner-city food-growing areas by the time of the London Olympics. This might all sound piecemeal. Yet making mainstream farming less dependent on fossil fuels, reducing our reliance on unstable global markets, and increasing the number of people involved in growing food at the farm scale and individually is a sound strategy for contending with the coming shocks of peak oil and climate change.

Cuba, offers a practical blueprint of what such a future could be like. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended Cuba’s imports of oil and agrochemicals. Within a year, Cuban farmers had cut pesticide use from 22,000 tonnes annually to just under 2,000 tonnes. Concurrently the percentage of people employed in food production increased dramatically with some 15-24 per cent of the overall population engaged in food growing at any one time. Food security was achieved but not without enormous national effort. The challenge of replicating that effort in the UK is clear when one considers that less than one per cent of our population works in farming, compared to 15 per cent at the end of the Second World War, and 40 per cent in 1900.

But that is a challenge that must be taken if we are to avoid stumbling into a food-insecure future closer to Country Life’s dire dystopia.

Robin Maynard has worked on food and farming issues for the past 20 years for organisations including Friends of the Earth, FARM and the Soil Association. He has recently taken on an allotment, where he is attempting (badly) to turn theory into produce.

Until only recently, the game of poker was looked down upon by the general public. Many still consider the game a ‘hoodlum’s game’ or illegal gambling.  Some consider it an outright sin and immoral.  Starting with the poker boom, the game of poker has begun to gain acceptance by many members of the general public, but some are still convinced that poker is evil. Let’s take a look at some reasons behind this general sentiment.

Poker’s History

If you ever watch an old western movie, you will see that gunfights are started over one of three things in most cases.  They are started because one person has killed someone close to the other, they are fighting over a woman, or they are fighting over a poker game. The American west was famous for many altercations over the game of poker. ‘Doc’ Holliday was a renowned gambler that killed men over poker games. ‘Wild Bill’ Hickok was shot dead while playing poker. The hand that he held when shot is known as the ‘Dead Man’s Hand’, which is two pair of aces and eights.

Playing poker in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s was also a precarious proposition. Many games were crooked and most of the players were armed. Long-time gambler and professional poker player Johnny Moss told a story one time about how there was a person in the ceiling with a peephole so that he could see players cards. Moss told the owner of the place to tell the person to come down or he would shoot. The owner did not believe him and Moss opened fire, shooting into the ceiling and wounding the peephole cheat.
 
Many poker games in the past have either been run by or had regular players that were part of criminal organisations. It was not uncommon for someone to have a winning night and then have themselves either assaulted or murdered for winning. At one point, great cash-game poker player Chip Reese was forced to give half of his winnings to a member of the mob in order to ensure his safety.

Poker’s history is not always a proud one and is the main reason that many people have taken a negative view. However, there are others that take a moralistic view towards the game and the impact that it has on people and families.

Poker Considered Immoral

There have been many Biblical debates as to whether gambling and even poker is immoral.  Many will point to how the bible teaches us to not covet what our neighbour has. Poker essentially promotes covetousness as we want our opponents’ money. To many people this is enough to consider gambling immoral and a sin. 

Another argument against poker is not that it is a sin or immoral, but that playing the game can lead to immoral activity. For example, a player that becomes obsessed with playing poker many times will neglect his wife or girlfriend, his family, his kids, and other obligations to play poker. Other players will lose all of their possessions or become destitute trying to make money by playing poker. There are other players that will get into fights over games and in extreme cases, they will even take someone’s life. Just last year, a man was killed at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City after getting into a fight over a poker game. 

Poker and the lifestyle around it has led many players into other addictive or destructive habits.  Poker great Stu Ungar lost several bankrolls in sports betting and eventually lost his life to drug addiction. Players like Mike Matusow and Layne Flack have battled drug problems in the past.  These types of destructive behaviours are common among gamblers and poker players as many that play these games tend to have addictive personalities. 

As one can see, poker has a history that lends itself to be criticised as immoral. However, people do need to remember that poker is a game played by people. These people make the decisions as to whether to play and how to play. It is ultimately up to them to make choices on how to live their life.

I live just north of Bordeaux. There’s a small town near here with a population of about 5,000 people that has a bigger market than London’s Borough market, plus five independent butchers and four independent bakeries.

The town also has an enormous supermarket. The supermarkets here are fascinating in that there is a strong degree of localisation. If one goes to the supermarket in that town, and then goes to the same brand of supermarket in a town 20 kilometres distant, you find completely different goods. I don’t mean toilet rolls and fly sprays, but perishable vegetables, meats, charcuterie, cheeses etc.

This means that the supermarkets are supporting their local economy; it also means that the food is fresh. There is a very apt saying in this regard: the French measure freshness in hours, the English measure it in weeks. This kind of support for local production is almost absent in Britain.

One of Britain’s problems is the Uniform Business Rate, a tax that is levied by central government nationwide, the effect of which is to jeopardise small businesses and allow the march of the supermarkets to go unimpeded.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Spain, for example, there is positive discrimination in favour of small shops - big chains pay much higher business rates and the number of hours that supermarkets are allowed to open is restricted. None of this seems likely to apply to the UK, given the country’s mania for corporatism. There is a cross-party consensus in support of big business and, if ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron gets elected, we can be absolutely sure that nothing is going to change.

There is a received idea that the Anglo-American way of doing things is on the march and that the French café and restaurant are in some kind of terminal decline. There is some truth in this, but not much. This idea derives partly from an unspoken Francophobia and partly from the fact that the coverage of food in Britain tends, for the most part, to concentrate on the atypical and chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and his hideously over-mediated Fat Duck and Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli. It’s rather like writing about music concentrating exclusively on Peter Maxwell-Davies and Harrison Birtwistle.

Besides, these ‘high end’, self proclaimingly innovative restaurants are a tiresome joke at the expense of a gullible public. I went to a restaurant of this kind in San Sebastián called Akelare, where the coup de grace was provided by the dessert. It was some kind of lactic thing, with a curd in a solid state and a sauce in a liquid state and you mixed the two together so that the curd became liquid and the sauce solid. It was like a third-form chemistry experiment. I did go to Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant shortly after it opened. It was indifferent, because he didn’t seem to have the technical ability to pull off the stuff he wanted to produce. And his pseudo-science is alarming.

French cooking is conservative. It’s not noticeably exciting, unless you seek out great excitement, but it seems to me to maintain a balance between what is sane and healthy and what is gastronomically attractive. The main thing is that the quality of produce used is simply much better than you find in Britain.

One difference is the effect of tradition, both in the production and the cooking of food. Another factor is the agricultural structure of the country, much of which is not susceptible to industrial agriculture because of the terrain. Industrial agriculture requires big, flat fields and because great chunks of France doesn’t have such things, you get smallholdings. In Britain, there are very few smallholdings and agri-industry is the norm; in France, it is the other way around.

Perversely, given the supposed benefits of large-scale production, food is considerably cheaper in France. The only thing I can think of that we pay more for than in Britain is lamb - and that’s simply because we do not live in a lamb-producing area. Virtually everything else is cheaper and it is of higher quality. The same situation probably applies in Spain, too.

That said, while French and Spanish food is better than British food generally, it would be wrong to slavishly copy the cuisines of these two countries. While Elizabeth David popularised Mediterranean cooking in the UK in the 1950s and 60s, her ultimate effect has actually been quite malign because she was encouraging the British to eat aubergines, peppers and other foods that won’t grow in the UK, and to adopt a kind of diet which was climatically unsuitable.

If one wants a model of how Britain should eat, it would be better to look at a country like Belgium, which has the same climate. Belgium is nutritionally self-sufficient and its culinary repertoire relies on a far smaller gamut of products. The norm in Britain now is that everybody wants food from Thailand, Sri Lanka, Central America and so on. The result is a tendency to overlook what is traditionally British. Britain borrows from other culinary cultures far more than almost any other country. It’s like deciding to invent a vocabulary in which you borrow some words from French, words from Danish, words from Greek in Greek script and throw them all together, to create a rather unhappy sort of métissage.

Another, related aspect of food that has really been brought home to me since coming to live in France is the way in which British food is still heavily class-based. While a lot of Britons probably eat better than their parents did, food is still very much divided in Britain by class and income. In most of continental Europe, the most important factor that determines what you eat is the area you live in; in Britain, it’s how much money you have.

The chief executive of a company in Bordeaux will eat pretty much the same repertoire of dishes as someone who works on the shop floor. It won’t be the same kind of thing that is typically eaten in another region of France. In Britain, building labourers across the country will eat the same kind of thing, which will be very different to what the company directors will be eating.

British people would eat better food, probably more cheaply, if they took the same attitude to what they eat as continental Europeans. Firstly, by revisiting traditional foods and focusing on produce that grows well locally. Secondly, by encouraging small-scale production, perhaps through taxation and planning laws, so that the big supermarkets cannot trample over every local producer.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Jonathan Meades is a commentator and novelist and former restaurant critic of The Times (London).

I’ve been at the BRC for about four-and-a-half years and I spent about seven years at the National Farmers’ Union before that. Our members include companies that sell over 90 per cent (in value terms) of groceries in the UK, including all the big supermarkets.

An argument frequently put forward in discussions about food is that supermarkets are the enemy both of farmers and the environment. I want to explain why these criticisms are misplaced.

Although they don’t directly deal with many farmers, retailers’ relationship with them is much stronger than any other part of the food industry. If you take the dairy industry, for example, the top 10 prices paid at the ‘farm gate’ for milk are all paid by retailers. That makes sense because retailers need a sustainable supply of milk and reward their farmers to ensure they can reinvest in their businesses.

As consumers have become more concerned about food security and ensure they are getting the right type of food in terms of provenance, retailers are increasingly working with groups of farmers very closely to make sure that they can meet that demand. In turn, retailers reward these farmers through the prices they pay. Retailers not only pay a sustainable price, but also feed back information about consumer demand so that farmers can then adjust their production.

The problem is that retailers don’t account for the whole of the food market. Going back to the dairy industry, all the retailers are paying well above the average milk price. But less than 50 per cent of milk produced by UK farmers is sold as liquid milk by food retailers; the rest of it goes into processed products, which could be anything from skimmed milk to yoghurts. The milk in those products is bought by processors and manufacturers and the final price is influenced by global commodity prices.

UK food retailers have little influence over that other half of the market, so it’s completely wrong to blame food retailers for unsustainable prices.

The good thing about the food debate at the moment is that the UK government and others are putting a lot of evidence and information into the public arena, helping to dispel the myths about our supply chains and challenging pre-conceived ideas about how our food is produced and sold.

Supermarkets have driven improvements in the way our food is produced and sold. Food is now of a higher standard than it was in the past: it’s more traceable, it’s safer, and yet it is getting steadily cheaper in real terms. That’s because supermarkets have reacted to what consumers want and passed on that demand back up the chain by working with farmers and producers. By driving efficiencies to make sure consumers get what they want at the right price, we have a better product with better labelling than ever before. Improvements in food and clearer information are helping to tackle some of the well-known problems of nutrition and provenance, and delivering the main changes in food that we all need.

There have been concerns expressed about supermarkets using their buying power to squeeze out smaller producers. Of course, in promoting greater efficiency, we’ve seen less efficient farmers, processors, and retailers going out of the market; that is inevitable, but it doesn’t diminish our support for the UK supply chain.

It also doesn’t mean the end of all small producers. In fact, many goods, including niche products and regional produce, have experienced a big growth in interest. In those areas it’s actually small producers that have an advantage over large producers because they can use sourcing and the story around the product to their advantage. As our market fragments further and we develop a more mature food market, there will be more opportunities for small producers, giving consumers something different and interesting.

When it comes to the question of sustainability, critics often point to supermarket distribution systems and claim that they are environmentally inefficient. How, they ask, can it make sense to move big lorry loads of food up and down the country? Recent reports by the Cabinet Office and others have highlighted that this type of analysis is far too simplistic. What you need to look at is the environmental impacts throughout the chain.

For example, it may be better for the environment to grow tomatoes in Spain and ship them to the UK rather than raise them here in heated glasshouses or polytunnels. We need to assess what is sold in terms of its overall impact, including the use of water and energy and the emission of greenhouse gases. That’s what supermarkets are doing and working with government policy makers to highlight the contribution our supply chains can make in reducing environmental impacts. Supermarkets’ supply chains are highly sophisticated and efficient and constantly under review to reduce the impact on the environment.

That’s a more sophisticated approach than simply saying we need everything to be produced and sold locally. Even where you have local production, for example, you may have multiple van journeys taking the produce from one farm to another to a market in another town. That could actually be less efficient and more of a burden on the environment than highly centralised, very efficient supply chains. Food retailers’ supply chains are looked on enviously by other industry sectors because they are so efficient.

Taking a look at the wider picture, it’s a good time to have a wider discussion about food. There are so many demands that we make on food in terms of the environment, health and nutrition, and ethical support. I think we’d all agree that we need to aim to have a food system that is affordable, accessible and also pays true attention to its impact on the environment. The problem has been how to meet so many diverse demands.

While it is easy to blame a small number of big companies for problems, it is easy to forget that our food market is actually driven by consumers. Academics and policy makers often aspire to a different kind of food supply chain, but if you can’t take consumers with you, then you can’t make that change. It’s the people going to the supermarket every week to buy food that really drive the changes that are made.

The best thing we could do is give consumers a better understanding of food and what it means for us: constructing a healthy diet; understanding the impacts of the various processes that go into providing food; appreciating that the bulk of food waste is created in the home and learning how to reduce that.

Consumers hold all the cards. The problem is that consumers tend to react to things on the basis of a lack of knowledge and that’s what needs to change. For example, cast your mind back to when we trialled genetically modified (GM) foods in the UK. It was consumer reaction that ended that, and that’s why retailers don’t sell GM in this country. On the other hand, look at the growth of free-range eggs in supermarkets (and now even in processed products). That’s driven by consumers saying they now understand this element of animal welfare and want a product that has better welfare standards.

The market is incredibly effective in driving change in the supply chain and moves quicker than any intervention. Consumer demand is key and that relies on consumers understanding the issues and reflecting that in their shopping choices. Some issues are more complex than others and may take consumers longer to grasp but they will continue to drive improvements in the way our food is produced and sold in the UK.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Andrew Opie is food policy director at the British Retail Consortium.

But at the same time, you have to say what a great market we have in the UK, full of great ideas and exciting innovation. The speed with which people have responded to the challenges of the recession is impressive, which only shows that this is not a complacent market, but a highly competitive one.

At The Grocer, our audience is food retailers, by and large, and there are a number of negative and positive changes going on that affect retailers.

First, the negatives. I don’t think that food inflation has gone away as a threat, not least because recently oil prices have started to creep up again. In addition, certain commodity prices, like those for sugar and cocoa, remain high. The pound is still weak against other major currencies and there’s no sign of it strengthening any time soon. That means that the food we import is going to become more expensive.

Then there is the legislative framework. There are simply more and more regulations for manufacturers and retailers to deal with, around issues like saturated fats and sugar, advertising restrictions, and so on. The UK Competition Commission has advised that an ombudsman be appointed to cover food retail and that a revised code of conduct be introduced.

These are proposals that the major retailers are challenging to various degrees because they do add complications to a market that, in many respects, has been shown in the past couple of years to be highly competitive. While there have been suggestions that price fixing is going on amongst the major supermarkets, this has never been demonstrated and I think there is genuine variation in product prices and different strategies for attracting customers.

While the big supermarkets are slugging it out, there’s plenty of evidence that the independent stores continue to improve, especially where they are supported by the symbol groups - brands like Spar, Premier, Bestway, Nisa-Today and so on. While the number of unaffiliated independent stores continues to decline, the number of shops affiliated to these symbol groups has actually increased. In other words, there are people migrating from being genuinely unaffiliated independents to needing the support of a symbol group. There is no doubt that when they hook up with a symbol group, small retailers have got far better support and they are far more viable as businesses.

The symbol groups support retailers in terms of knowing the right products, providing marketing materials and providing advice on how to market themselves. The people at the symbol group are paid to know what’s doing well elsewhere, so there is shared learning. I would equate it to what happens at the supermarkets: a store manager doesn’t decide what the store is going to stock, he is there to make sure the shelves are stocked up. It’s really tough to be an unaffiliated independent these days, but when you’re are allied to a symbol group, you’ve got a better chance.

For example, small stores tend to be very conservative and very risk averse, so they tend to stock ambient products that last a long time. But all the trends are towards people wanting more fresh produce, ready meals and so on. It’s very hard to do that on your own. The big wholesalers and symbol groups have invested a lot of time and infrastructure to support greater fresh produce displays, more stuff that goes in chilled lorries and so on.

While the position is looking relatively rosy for well-supported small general stores, that’s not the case for specialist shops. The decline of the specialist, small retailer is a trend that has been going on for 40 years. Over the past year or so, the number of independent bakers is down nine per cent, butchers are down five per cent, greengrocers down 22 per cent, confectioners down eight per cent. The number of health food stores and farm shops is actually up, however. This is a tough time and a very tough environment in which to compete.

That said, it’s also a tough time for Tesco, too. Just because you are huge does not mean you have everything on your own terms. Tesco might be hurting the small sweet shop, but Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury and Waitrose are all hurting Tesco. It’s not just David versus Goliath; there is plenty of Goliath versus Goliath, too.

So when an independent retailer says it’s not fair because a ‘local’ version of a big chain has just moved in nearby, I have every sympathy with him or her. But Tesco isn’t only competing against independents, specialists and farm shops, its competing against other big organisation that also have very large buying power, nationwide distribution and so on.

The power of the supermarkets leads to the suggestion that our tastes are being determined by a small group of buyers. If there were only one supermarket, I think there might be some truth in that. But as long as we have diversity in the market, there will be choice.

I think there are a number of reasons why diversity remains in place. First is the consumer’s innate desire to try something new, and second is the nature of the competition that there is out in the marketplace. At The Grocer, we celebrate that diversity and competition, whether it comes from Waitrose, a farm shop or a local baker, or one of discount chains like Aldi, Lidl and Netto. We’re not about to enter some Soviet-era environment where you can basically get one kind of potato and that’s it. For every kind of food, there is great variety on offer.

There’s plenty of innovative new products out there, too. One simple example are Innocent Veg Pots. Innocent are best known for fruit smoothies, but they’ve now expanded into these convenience vegetable meals. They’ve been a great success, selling probably five to 10 times as much as they originally budgeted for. It’s still a fairly small market, but it’s been successful nonetheless.

There are also innovations in packaging and storage that open up new markets. Take a brand like Look What I’ve Found. These are plastic-packaged stews and soups that taste every bit as good as fresh alternatives, yet they can be stored safely on an ordinary shelf for months at a time. The technology involved is very impressive.

If the market in new foods is never static, then the debate about the ‘big issues’ isn’t static, either. Three years ago when I joined The Grocer, we were very focused on the legislative environment, particularly around obesity. That seems to have calmed down a bit. That’s not to say it’s not a great concern to manufacturers and retailers, but there’s been so much work in the area that I think the government has to some extent decided it’s time to pause. There are still all sorts of targets being proposed, but the kind of witch-hunt that there was has to some extent stopped.

The recession has been an important factor in that. Instead of focusing on how much manufacturers are trying to kill a nation with their high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) products, the story is now about how much manufacturers and retailers are trying to rip us off with their high prices. The big theme now is how to get a good deal, how to live on less money.

While the obesity issue has calmed down, the environment is much more of a concern for people. People can see how food price rises are linked to the problem of sustainability. ‘The environment’ is a catch-all phrase for an enormous range of issues, but one of them is about how a growing population and mass consumerism come together with the result being higher prices.

For too long, concern about the environment in relation to food retailers meant simply asking how we could reduce the number of plastic bags and the amount of packaging we use. The environment is much more at the centre of things now because it is hitting people in their pockets. While other issues seem to come and go to a degree, concern about environmental issues in a broad sense is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Adam Leyland is editor of The Grocer.

In September this year, it was announced that interactive casino gambling would be brought to terrestrial TV in the UK, following a deal between NetPlay TV and UK TV channel Five. It was hardly a great surprise. Over the past decade, gambling has been extensively deregulated and liberalised, allowing for the deluge of gambling products now seen on the market. There is no escaping it. The invitation to gamble is everywhere; on the computer, on the TV, at the supermarket, at the corner shop, on the phone, on holiday… whereever you go rest reassured that your right to gamble is being upheld.

Underlying liberalisation is the ethic of consumption prevalent in many Western societies, supported by ideologies of freedom, choice and consumer independence (1). In other words, autonomous and self-determining consumers are assumed to be rational, self-regulating agents, capable of weighing up risk. Viewed in this way, relaxing controls seems only right, decent and democratic. Susan Dolinski of the British Columbia Lottery Corporation summed it up candidly when announcing earlier this month that the weekly internet gambling limit had increased by more than 8,000 per cent: ‘[B]y providing players the choice to set their own limit, we believe it will provide them with the opportunity to take responsibility to play within [the limit].’ (2)

The public perception of gambling is changing, too. Once viewed as an undesirable, if tolerated activity, two decades ago, poker today is seen as a firmly established leisure activity today.

However, gambling is not quite like going to the beach; it also has a darker side. Pathological gambling is a documented mental disorder identified by psychological discourses back in the 1960s. Referred to as ‘problem’ gambling in the press, it has been popularly viewed as endemic to a minority only, and not a concern for the average consumer.

Stories of bankruptcy, family break-up, lost jobs, repossessed cars and houses are a persistent gambler’s tale. But somehow these stories fail to change things. So why does it keep happening over and over? To hazard a guess, I would suppose it is because gamblers regularly don’t admit, or are not aware, that they have a problem until it is too late. The packageable binary of gambling/‘problem’ gambling that exists in the public imagination is an idealised formulation that fails to acknowledge the complex and slippery routes into addiction and acts less as a warning and more as reassurance to leisure gamblers.

Crucially the unknown factor with self-regulation, its risk, is how does the leisure consumer self-regulate when the world around him is being transformed into a giant casino? Are the new products and new advertisements normalising reckless gambling? Are the old social/cultural inhibitors being eroded? Studies showing the link between new gambling products and ‘problem’ gambling, and the transition to ‘problem’ gambling in the UK are currently being undertaken. Although early indications from the Gambling Clinic – a free, one-of-its-kind, clinician-led treatment programme in London – suggest that triggers for problem gambling are consistent with the use of new technology-mediated forms, like Fixed Odds Betting Terminals and online gambling sites. 

Let’s not forget that the regulator is essentially the government, fronted by the Gambling Commission. Valuable gambling markets have been created since liberalisation and sizable profits in duties are to be made – some £1.4billion in 2005. The 9p levy on bets was dropped in 2001 to encourage onshore betting, yet Ladbrokes and William Hill recently defied their ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the government and relocated to Gibraltar for tax issues. It will cost the treasury millions. On the other side of the balance sheet, problem gambling, framed as a public health issue, to be dealt with through clinical aid, costs little. Treatment through self-help groups, charities and private clinics are the main refuge for problem gamblers, but are not a financially viable option for most. However, momentum for increased NHS involvement is building as indicators are beginning to show that ‘problem’ gambling is on the rise. 

Internet poker, the biggest pull for online gamers, highlights the problems with a philosophy of self-regulation. Firstly, the player is removed from the social environment and gambles in isolation in any physical or mental state and at any time with a number of anonymous screen names. Secondly, the player occupies an abstract world where money is never handled, chips are never touched and bank accounts are hooked up straight to the table. Thirdly, the skill of observation, so valuable in a real game of poker, is negated as every player comes with a digital poker face.

To expect individuals successfully to manage finances under such conditions is asking a lot of their prudence. Especially considering that studies estimate the percentage of internet gamblers classifiable as ‘problem’ gamblers is as high as 42.7 per cent (3). Maximum bets, limits and self-exclusion functions – anything from 24 hours to 180 days – may temper play, but players who use it regularly are not trying to restrict their habits, they are trying to hold up their playing until they are in better frame of mind to play again. It all begs the question what are they managing, their leisure gambling or their ‘problem’ gambling? 

Just recently, the Advertising Standards Authority discovered that a new National Lottery slogan sent via email to customers read, ‘The more you play, the more likely you are to win’. Shameless, invasive and reckless. It is the regularity of this kind of encouragement that is normalising the hyperbole of gambling into our everyday lives. For self-regulation to work, players must understand that gambling is like skydiving or scaling Everest; it’s for the risk itself that you do it. Face it, gambling is fundamentally irrational, it’s not about winning. To look around and see the explosion of money invested in advertisements, sites, bookies and casinos, and then to read the life stories of problem gamblers on GamCare, it is hard to see how self-regulation is compatible with the freedom of the individual.

Julius Pasteiner is a former intern at spiked and a researcher into gambling. 

(1) Freedom, by Zygmut Bauman, Open University Press, 1988

(2) Will increasing limit make players more responsible? Don’t bet on it, Globe and Mail, 21 August 2009

(3) pp520-542, ‘Problem gambling on the internet: implications for internet gambling policy in North America’, by Robert J Williams and Robert T Wood, New Media & Society, Vol 9, No 3, 2007

I began working with the Consumers in Europe group, an umbrella organisation that represented UK consumer, voluntary and women’s organisations. We researched the impact of the Common Market, as it then was called then, and acted, in effect, as campaigners to protect the interest of UK consumers. While I was working there as a researcher, I started looking at the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on UK food prices and the impact of European policies on food labeling.

It was that work, along with a strong family background in medicine, that got me interested in food as a public policy issue. The more I looked into it, the more clear the links between diet and health were. During the 1980s, I did quite a lot of work on the connection between poverty and poor diet. I was training as a probation officer and while preparing social inquiry reports - background reports on individuals requested by the courts - I was looking at people’s income and expenditure and asking basic questions about household budgets. It was very clear to me that many people, particularly women, had very poor diets simply because of having low income. This in turn has a huge impact on their and their children’s health particularly, if they are pregnant, on their growing babies.

In the late 1990s, I was the founding deputy chair of the Food Standards Agency. Prior to this, I had been a consumer representative on a number of advisory committees within central government, notably one which was set up by the last Conservative administration called the Consumer Panel. That was a very important new model of involving people from outside government in giving advice to policy and decision makers.

In 2000, I joined the newly formed Food Standards Agency as its deputy chair of the Food Standards Agency and later I chaired the School Meals Review Panel which advised government on what the nutritional standards of primary schools and secondary schools should be and, coming out of that, helped set up the School Food Trust, the development organisation to support the transformation of food available in schools.

But my take on things doesn’t just come from a consumer and advisory standpoint. I live in a very rural part of England and I can see, particularly through family connections, some of the problems of farming and rural communities, particularly in relation to livestock farming.

The issues

In my view, there is a huge diet-related health problem that has become more entrenched in the past 20 years. If I look back and think about the communities where I did food poverty research in the mid-1980s, I would say that the dietary problems have actually become worse rather than better. We’re now seeing, for instance, second and third generations of families that can’t cook, that have poor access to fresh food and whose chances of being able to translate healthy eating advice into the everyday experience of food on the table is minimal.

This brings a number of problems, the most obvious of which is obesity, but more generally there is a problem of malnourishment. For instance, I recently visited a very deprived housing estate in the south-west of England. I remember going into a household and the mum there told me about her three-year-old child who was already grossly obese, was under the care of hospital doctors and was anaemic. Changing his lifestyle was already almost an insuperable problem for his family - and he hadn’t even started at school yet.

The food-related drivers of health inequality have inflated the National Health Service budget and add to the catalogue of misery caused by unnecessary morbidity and mortality.

Beyond health, we need to think about the sustainability the food system. We need a diet that’s not just fit for us, without the problems I outlined above, but also one that’s fit for the planet. One of the big issues is how we communicate to consumers the complexities of what it means to have a diet that is low impact from a greenhouse gas point of view. The difficulty we face is providing a healthy diet in a way that allows people throughout the food chain to make a reasonable living while being environmentally sustainable.

One important aspect of solving this conundrum is to focus more than we have done on the issue of productivity. We need to shift away from the idea that we don’t have to worry about how, or even whether, we produce food in this country. We can’t just assume that we can simply import from elsewhere. We need to have an overall food policy that includes clear goals on how much of our food we’re going to produce in 10, 20 and 30 years time, and how we’re going to ensure that food is produced sustainably. That must include recreating and sustaining the base of skills required to produce that food.

The solutions

As far as the problems of obesity and poor nutrition go, the answer is to support people through providing information and education, providing them with adequate skills and a sense of agency so that they can put into practice the information that they’re given. I think this means bringing back food skills into the general curriculum: shopping, cooking and budgeting. For many people, the only place they will learn these things is at school. Many parents haven’t acquired food skills themselves, so they can’t pass them on to their children. These are basic survival skills, but it is shocking how many people don’t have them.

I think this kind of education can be done for all age groups, and there is some really great work being done by community food projects up and down the country, often at an adult level. We know that when people are given the opportunity to learn these skills, developing their interest in food and feeding themselves, they begin to ask questions about how food is produced and become more discriminating consumers. In turn, that helps everybody in the food chain, from primary producers to retailers because it helps create demand for a diet that is not only healthy from a human point of view, but also healthy for the planet.

Sustainable food skills, from a consumer point of view, include not wasting food. That’s really important, because we throw away a third of the food we buy. While we’re becoming accustomed to talking about reducing our carbon footprint by turning down the lights or the heating, not making unnecessary journeys, and so on, we don’t make the connection sufficiently between food waste and climate change.

Finally, loss of skills isn’t just something that hasn’t happened with consumers, it’s clearly happened in production too. For example, pruning fruit trees is a very particular skill that we are in danger of allowing to disappear. It’s that sort of thing that is the food production equivalent of not knowing how to cook from fresh. These are basic skills in the food chain which have to preserve and recover.

Hope for the future

There is genuine government interest in the issue of food security, including issues of social justice and the need for a viable farming sector in this country. There is a Cabinet subcommittee on these issues, which reflects that concern at the highest level. I think the work that’s been done already to reduce waste by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) is fantastic, as are the efforts of the food industry to reduce waste in the food chain.

It’s almost ironic, but the consumer response to recession has actually been quite positive. The figures show that there are more people cooking from fresh, more people are producing food at home and people are wasting less food. People are also showing more interest in growing their own food. In the past year or so, sales of vegetable seeds have started to exceed the sales of flower seeds in the retail market. We know that most people are going to get only a small amount of their diet from the food they grow themselves, but engaging with how you grow food and how it’s produced is very healthy and leads to a wider questioning of food production.

School food has improved a lot and it’s good that many schools are doing all they can to encourage children to have enquiring minds about the food they eat. I think the wider interest in local and seasonal food is very positive, too.

Another effect of the recession is the way that people are focusing more on the issue of fairness within the food sector and whether, for instance, the mass of producers are truly being treated fairly. I hope very much that concerns about animal welfare will translate into more conscientious buying in shops, with consumers buying more food that’s been produced with animal welfare in mind. Very often, that means buying food that’s been produced within the UK to rigorous welfare standards.

In conclusion, we have a lot of problems that we need to juggle in relation to food. But there are a wide range of encouraging signs, too, about how we can have better quality food, produced sustainably and in a way that benefits everyone in the food chain.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Dame Suzi Leather is chair of the Charities Commission and chair of the government’s Council of Food Policy Advisors

Food has always been about pleasure - the idea behind Leon is that you can have something that is both lovely and good for you. But since we opened Leon, I have become more aware of the politics of food and the systematic problems in the way in which we produce what we eat.

The biggest single global issue facing us – bigger than the energy crisis and much bigger than terrorism - is food security. The global population is forecast to increase from six billion to nine billion by 2050. At the same time, India and China are continuing to eat more meat and global warming is putting enormous pressure on production.

We got a taste of what might happen last year when the harvest failed in Australia and there were real problems of food supply in Indonesia as a result. We in the West won’t really notice because we will just pay more for our food, but developed world may eat the Third World into starvation. There are parallels with the Irish potato famine, when no one in England really noticed that Ireland was starving because it was far enough away, stirring Jonathan Swift to write his satire: ‘Let them eat their babies!’.

So what is to be done? One suggested solution is that we continue down the ideological path of the Green Revolution. In the Fifties, the Western world realised that unless we changed the way in which we produced food, we wouldn’t be able to feed ourselves. The great achievement was that for the first time ever in history, we increased the capacity to produce food without encroaching on virgin land. In the past, in order to grow more you had to take over more land (typically forest). During the Green Revolution - through the use of nitrate fertilisers and oil – we were able to increase productivity without using more land.

At the same time, the ideas of the Industrial Revolution were increasingly being used in the food world, resulting in a massive industrialisation of food production and cooking, which created incredibly cheap food and meant we could all be fed. However, the nutritional quality of the food that was being produced was declining. Illnesses like heart disease became prevalent in the Western world for the first time.

For nitrates, proponents of this approach argue, read genetically modified (GM) food. Unfortunately – as of yet - there is no evidence that GM increases yields.

I believe that consumer behaviour in the West is going to have to change quite radically if we are to address this problem. Quite simply, the problem is not that we do not farm efficiently enough, but that we do not eat efficiently enough. We eat too much meat, which uses 10 calories of fuel to create one calorie of food.

In this respect, I like the fact that being vegetarian, or simply eating less meat, is beginning to be seen as less ‘worthy’ than it was. I really think that this is the most important thing that needs to happen and I’m glad that ideas like ‘meat-free Monday’ are gaining an audience. I remember when I worked with the chef Bruno Loubet and someone would order something vegetarian, he would ask ‘Vegetarian!?’ in this charming, mock-horrified way. That attitude was really prevalent until quite recently in the food world, but I think it is beginning to change.

Vegetarian food doesn’t mean you need to use meat substitutes, you can make wonderful food simply with vegetables. It sounds so removed from the deep issue of food insecurity, but actually that’s how these things start to change.

Companies like Leon can make a contribution in communication. Hopefully, we can influence decision makers, and the people who eat with us by keeping our house in order and talking about what is important in the food world. In this way, I think we can make a real difference.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Henry Dimbleby is co-founder and CEO of the restaurant chain, Leon.

I spent most of my childhood on that farm, basically mucking around in barns and generally getting the feel of living in and on a farm.

I suspect that back then, in the 1980s, things weren’t quite so bad for the industry, but it still gave me a strong sense of the hours a farmer must work. The amount of work is just absolutely phenomenal and I got a sense of the level of effort and commitment involved 365 days a year.  But I also saw what a rewarding lifestyle it can be if things are managed properly, so I got a real affection for farming and life in the countryside.

I also developed a sense of indignation at the way farmers are treated. That treatment does have an impact on other issues like where we get our food. I’m very committed to the idea of fair trade internationally, but we need to think a little bit more in terms of fair trade within the UK as well. If you look at the price obtained for produce at the ‘farm gate’ and at the auction market, and then see what goods are sold for on supermarket shelves, there is something very wrong there. This differential could have a damaging effect on an industry that is important economically, socially and culturally.

Part of the problem is that we don’t have any balance in the market. To say we have a free market is not true; it’s a very imbalanced market. It was well known that four or five huge supermarkets dominate the retail sector. But there are other near-monopolies, too. I think two companies own 80 per cent of Britain’s abattoirs, for instance, but they don’t get much in the way of headline attention. On the other side of the equation are thousands and thousands of small producers who are easily picked off by the giant companies they deal with.

One example of how this works out was when we had foot-and-mouth two years ago. The disease was restricted to Surrey, but because of the situation where farmers couldn’t use their livestock very easily because of movement restrictions, they could often only sell to one buyer. Those incredibly powerful buyers took advantage and prices dropped by anything up to 80 per cent.

In the end, it’s all about the fairness in the marketplace and what you do about that. I think the most powerful thing we can do about it is to bring in a food market regulator to ensure that people pay fair prices. Some other European countries have similar mechanisms that basically ensure that producers are not exploited and that they can get paid at least cost price for their produce. That also means, for example, keeping a check on how farm-gate prices and supermarket prices compare.

Such a regulator would need to have the power to really do something about it were problems to arise, in the way that Ofcom has the power to regulate broadcasters. The mechanisms at present are pretty toothless mostly and we need more than that, we need something that will be able to be quite muscular and who’ll be good, something that would be big enough to protect the farming industry.

The point is to try to equalise power within the food market from the consumer to the producer and all points in between. That means looking hard at what’s a fair price. If the shelf price for a litre of milk were only 30 pence, then paying farmers only 17-18 pence would be difficult, but it would be tolerable because that would reflect the consumer price. But farm-gate prices don’t really reflect consumer prices right now.

A radical break up of supermarkets is unlikely and that wouldn’t be the right thing, either. In many ways the supermarkets do good work, but they clearly abuse their power. The result is that we’re losing vast numbers of farmers. For example, we’ve lost about a billion litres of milk production in the past four years. That’s not because people are drinking less milk, they’re actually drinking more, it just means they’re consuming more from imports. This applies to a lot of aspects of agriculture, particularly livestock farming, where we’re losing capacity but we’re not reducing consumption. The only answer to this is to import - which is very bad for the environment and very bad for our farming economy.

A regulator wouldn’t solve all our problems and we don’t want to create a new era of expensive food when consumers are already hard pressed. But if we are to achieve a real free market then that means you have to have someone to be a referee.

It is ludicrous to think that we’re losing farming capacity in this country when we face the prospect that world population will go up by 50 per cent in the next 40 years and demand for food will double by 2050. As it happens, a rising population ought to be good news for a farmer anywhere. We can also see an enormous amount of innovation in farming, not just in terms of diversification. For example, we’re developing a whole culture of farmers’ markets and buying direct from the producer. We can ensure quality of produce and fairness within the market if we buy direct from the producer.

I think innovation in farming is definitely rocketing up and I think within farmers’ clubs in the country there’s a real sense that the next generation is going to be made up of really good business people. They are innovative and creative, but also prepared to look after the countryside and take pride in what they’re selling.

We need to enable people to be in the countryside by allowing people to make a living out of producing food. If we allow our capacity to produce food to continue to decline we’re going to be in a situation where we find ourselves spending far more money internally buying far more food or import from countries where standards aren’t as high as in the UK. The starting point for that is fair trade at home.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Tim Farron is Liberal Democrat spokesman on environment, food and rural affairs.

When I used to go sailing, I always dealt with everything to do with food and snacks. I ended up paying for myself to go through university by working in a restaurant, first washing up and then in a kitchen. I never thought that I was going to have a career there, but then I got into the wine business and from there into a restaurant.

My first restaurant was Boisdale, which I opened in 1988. We’re a Scottish restaurant and source many of our ingredients from Scotland, where possible, and particularly from the West Highlands and Islands. Boisdale itself is a port on the southern tip of the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, and we get a lot of our langoustine, crab, scallops, lobster, mushrooms and salmon from the island.

Sourcing food in this way is something we’ve been doing for 20-odd years. We used to buy our beef from Highland farms before we started getting through too much for them, so we now buy our beef from Aberdeenshire, all properly dry-aged. Everybody’s making quite a big thing about beef at the moment, but we’ve always done it the right way. We’re pretty eclectic, but most of what we do is cooking good ingredients fairly simply. We don’t do anything extraordinary, but I don’t think anything’s sacred – it’s fun to do different things. As it happens, this focus on sourcing, provenance and seasonality is currently very fashionable.

Personally, I think the greatest enemies of food are also the greatest purveyors of food and the people who brought food to a much wider market: the supermarkets. The supermarkets provide this magnificent opportunity for people to try a different product, but at the same time, they end up controlling what we eat. More importantly, they also control the price at which farmers are able to make a living or not make a living.

I think the problem of the supermarket is a fascinating element in how we buy and consume food today. For example, 15 per cent of the money spent on the high street is spent at Tesco. The supermarkets buy ruthlessly and they squeeze profit margins all the time.

On the other hand, there is an increasing opportunity for the public to bypass the supermarkets by buying direct from producers. While some of them are more real than others, the farmers’ markets and farmers’ shops are giving a great opportunity to buy more direct and cut out the middleman or the supermarket.

If you’re online, you can have everything delivered in the post. There’s no harm in it, either. Despite what some people would have you believe, human beings did exist before refrigeration, and there’s no danger to health from sending food out in this way. Hopefully it won’t be attacked by anyone, be it the big supermarkets or some government department, trying to make it illegal.

(That kind of interference wouldn’t surprise me, though. I do think there are too many rules and regulations about everything. For me, the public sector thinks very differently from the private sector. These rules and regulations help to keep them people in the public sector employed.)

I think maybe the greatest opportunity is connecting the actual producers direct with the public, which could open up to fascinating possibilities in terms of variety and price. For example, if we could relax some of our onerous abattoir laws that would enable farmers to go really ‘boutique’.

Another area where there is room for innovation is in frozen produce. Consumers haven’t fully understood that if products are frozen very well and then defrosted correctly, like fish in water in the fridge, you have a very good product. I doubt many farm shops in England have the ability to blast-freeze, but it is a process that hardly alters the food. It could open up another range of products that farm shops could sell directly to the public.

I think inevitably as people get more education, they will cook more at home and consume less processed food. People say that they don’t have time, but there’s only so much you can do in your leisure time. Instead of worrying about convenience, we should see that cooking is a pleasure, it tastes better and it’s cheaper. Cooking a meal from scratch really doesn’t take a lot of time. When I walk into my kitchen, the first thing I do is put on a pan of water and in the time it takes to boil, I take out and prepare the ingredients. I can easily cook for 4-6 people in no time – and very cheaply. I think people will, in time, learn how much fun cooking is. A good meal shouldn’t cost more than £2 a head and it’s very easy to create good food for less than £2.

In general, I think we’re paying far too much for our food. I can see how much I pay for ingredients and what the public is paying and the mark-ups charged by the supermarkets are huge. That’s not a problem that can be solved easily, but maybe consumers going direct to producers is part of the answer.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Ranald Macdonald is founder of Boisdale restaurants and jazz clubs.

The big food issue for the next decade will be putting in place the measures that will ensure that this growing demand for food can be met, and met sustainably - that is, without compromising the world’s environmental resources. To some extent, this challenge must be met by increasing the capacity of developing countries to respond. Yet many of these countries face some of the biggest climatic challenges as well as severe infrastructure issues. Therefore, in large part, the response will have to come from food producers and food exporters in temperate regions and the developed world.

The UK may be a small dot on the globe, yet our own population is expected to increase from over 60million today to more than 72million over the same period. Rightly, this has led to substantial debate in government and academic circles alike about our own food security, with self-sufficiency rates having fallen to around 60 per cent currently. Is our food security dangerously undermined by falling production in several sectors? Is our security best guaranteed through trade? Should we be concerned about a reliance on imports?

A policy based on becoming self-sufficient could harm the UK’s food security by making the country reliant on a single source. Equally, the belief that the UK can buy its way out of any shortages by importing more smacks of naivety as well as creating a new moral dilemma if it sucks food from deprived regions of the world.

In many respects, the global and national challenges are indivisible. We may be food secure; our key national challenges may be about improving diet rather than ensuring people are fed. Nevertheless, policies implemented at home can have an impact abroad and vice versa. The UK has a role to play in promoting agricultural production overseas and not just for selfish reasons. Equally, its domestic industry will have an increasing role to play in global food security. As the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee recently argued, the UK has a ‘moral duty’ to increase food production.

This may seem mildly absurd to some readers – British agriculture represents a very small part of our economy and our food exports have been historically low compared to other countries, like the Republic of Ireland. Nevertheless, the UK sits in a region of the world that already has the infrastructure and capacity to produce and to trade. It is also a region that may stand to benefit from climate change. Our vision is a British agricultural sector that stands ready to respond to the challenge of growing demand, a sector that is able to boost production while mitigating its environmental impacts.

So what is needed to bring this vision about? Simply put, we need to create the conditions in which British agriculture can respond through building capacity. There are a number of key ingredients in the recipe.

The first is science. Farmers need the technology and tools that allow them to be more productive, to yield more per acre for less unit of input, be this vegetables, crops, meat or dairy products. Investment in publicly-funded agricultural research and development has declined progressively and this decline must be reversed.

The second is competiveness. The food and farming industries must be able to compete, especially with their European partners. This calls for an approach to regulation that is sensitive to the needs of good business. It also calls for a fiscal environment that encourages farmers and manufacturers to invest for the future.

The third is functioning markets. At an international level the World Trade Organisation needs to look not just at market access, but also the impediments that several major exporters have placed on trade in recent years on exports. And at a domestic level we need fair play in the supply chain to prevent abuse of dominant market power, especially by major supermarkets. This is why a grocery supply chain ombudsman is so essential.

Tom Hind is head of economics and international affairs at the National Farmers’ Union

When many people think of poker today, the main game that comes to mind is Texas Holdem. As the saying goes, ‘it takes minutes to learn, and a lifetime to master’. The seemingly simple game got its start back in the 60s and 70s when Texas road gamblers took their brand of high stakes, high action poker around the country, but it wasn’t until 2004 that Texas Holdem became the mainstay of poker. Indeed, 2004 was a crucial year in the poker boom.

ESPN and a Man Named Moneymaker

ESPN introduced a revolutionary new concept to their programming in 2004 with the ‘Hole Card Cam’.  This device allowed players at home to see what the players were holding and therefore allowed them to follow along in the hand. Up until this point, action was showed as it happened with commentators doing their best to put players on hands. With the new technology, everyone knew what players had and could see when they had confidence and when the player was pushing in with garbage.

2004 also introduced the ‘poker everyman’ in the form of Chris Moneymaker. Moneymaker earned his entry on PokerStars.com via a $40 satellite and made a seemingly miraculous run to the final table. He was able to get heads-up with Sam Farha and pulled the Cinderella run by defeating Farha for the WSOP Main Event Championship.

The Poker Boom

Moneymaker’s win sparked what is known as the ‘Poker Boom’. Players from around the world started to flock to their casinos and try their hand at ‘the game that Moneymaker plays’. One area of poker that saw exponential growth is online poker. Online poker rooms around the world started opening and people could not log on fast enough. PartyPoker, PokerStars, and Full Tilt all exploded in growth as people logged on to try and check, raise and move all-in.

Live poker tournaments also started popping up all over the internet. Where there might have been only a handful of tournaments a year, there were now tournaments every week, which, in turn, eventually became daily tournaments. Online card rooms went a step further and started offering poker tournaments around the clock. Since online rooms did not need dealers, it was easy to create new tournaments. Also, players had the advantage of multi-tabling tournaments and cash games, something not allowed in live play.

The poker boom introduced a new batch of players into poker, but while poker has grown in overall popularity, there still remains a lot of resistance to the game.

Poker is Considered Immoral and Destructive

Many people believe that poker is just another form of gambling and therefore inherently immoral. Depending on who you speak to, many will point to the fact that gamblers and poker players covet what is someone else’s, that is, money. Since this is a sin, gambling and playing poker is seen as causing people to sin.

Of course, many people fail to realise that a form of gambling was quite common in biblical days. The casting of lots was used to resolve many disputes, and even used once to determine an apostle. As far as covetousness is concerned, people that come into a game realise that losing is a possibility. They freely put their money at risk. Whether this is truly covetousness is debatable: while you want someone else’s money, they are themselves putting it at risk. Typically, covetousness involves wanting to take away something from someone against their will.

There are many instances where people have lost their possessions, their home, their family, and in some cases, their life over a poker game. This puts the idea that the game itself is inherently evil, ignoring the fact that people make the choice to play, to risk money, and to allow other circumstances befall them.

Arguments Against Poker and Gambling

The government has stated in the past that internet gambling is a potential avenue for money laundering. Since there are servers all over the world, the ability to track these activities can be difficult and allowing these games can promote illegal activities.

Also, many people try to skirt around paying taxes on their gambling winnings, and playing online poker can give players an opportunity to make money that is nearly untraceable by the federal government. While there are still electronic and paper trails the money and effort it would take to catch all the people that evade their taxes would likely triple the Internal Revenue Service workforce.

While these arguments are valid, with proper controls in place, these types of activity could be monitored by both the government and the online sites themselves. Online sites already regulate the flow of money between players and extraordinary circumstances receive investigations. Also, in regard to the tax evasion issue, the websites could work with the IRS to produce paperwork detailing the money won and lost at the tables over the course of a year. That way, the process of tracking illegal activities is simplified.

Poker in general has experienced tremendous growth since 2004 and continues to grow today. Poker has emerged from the back rooms of the 70’s and 80’s and grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. While many people still resist this ever growing game, a new generation of players that have grown up exposed to the game will emerge and over time, the game will gradually become acceptable. How far the game will grow is anyone’s guess, but it is safe to say that poker is here to stay.

There has been much debate about whether poker is a game of skill, or whether it is gambling and should therefore be considered akin to betting on sporting events or on casino games such as roulette.

Personally, I think poker can be considered both gambling and a game of skill. It is simply a question of context. In the short term I would consider it gambling as over a small sample of hands luck will be a significant factor on whether a person wins or loses.

However, in the long term, I would consider it a game of skill. Over time the instances of luck should even out and then the most significant factor will be whether a player was more or less skilful in his play than his opponents. Regular poker players will consider every session of poker as just one facet of one enormous, continuous game that encompasses their entire poker-playing careers. And so the short term fluctuations in luck that affect each session become increasingly insignificant in the bigger picture and the skill (or lack of it) that they have demonstrated becomes the prevalent factor in whether they win or lose money overall.

As for whether poker is akin to other forms of ‘gambling’, I feel it differs from betting on horses or putting money on a roulette wheel on three fundamental levels.

Firstly, in poker I have a significant degree of input on the event rather than having to rely on factors beyond my control. By comparison no control of the actual event is possible when betting on horse racing, football or roulette.

Secondly, the random element affects all of the players with equal probability. So over time, as the sample of hands played becomes so significant that the instances of ‘good luck’ and ‘bad luck’ start to balance, or at least become less significant in the scheme of such a vast quantity of hands played, the over-riding factor in whether I win or lose will be how well I played compared to my opponents. This is in stark contrast to roulette where having the odds against me every time I play will mean the more I play, the more confident I will be that I will make a loss overall.

Thirdly I can learn about how to play better poker and enable my control of the events to improve. This educational process can be multi-faceted. I can learn more about statistics and probabilities so that I can make better-educated decisions in a hand. I can learn to improve my temperament so that I play well consistently and become less prone to making bad plays based on emotional factors rather than a calm rationale. No such learning process is available in roulette (beyond learning not to play it at all).

For these reasons I am happy to play poker regularly and therefore consider it a game of skill. In contrast I have never bet money on a game like roulette and it is my intention never to do so.

Laurence Edwards is a lawyer working in Birmingham and keen amateur poker player.

There’s been a high level of awareness about factory farming in Britain for a long time, but much less in the United States. That has changed in recent years, particularly thanks to a wave of new writing on food, like Michael Pollan’s work and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. It was in this context that I decided to write Eating to address not just the animal issues that I talked about in Animal Liberation, but also wider food issues, and environmental issues in particular.

There is a growing acceptance that factory farming of animals is indefensible. It is too confining for the animals, it doesn’t allow them a decent life and it’s something we shouldn’t put up with. It’s been great to see not only philosophers and animal rights activists, but also leading chefs, like Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, taking that sort of stance about factory farming. There is now a growing movement against factory farming in the United States, though the US is some way behind Britain in this area.

The other big development is the increasing realisation that meat is a major contributor to climate change. People are starting to rethink their diets and that applies not only to factory farming, but also to free-range grazing of ruminant animals. For Western nations, that means beef, dairy and lamb. If we really want to reduce the impact we’re having on our climate, and we realise just how urgent action is, we have to cut the numbers of these animals fairly drastically.

Ultimately, we should be aiming to eat vegetarian diets. That might seem utopian to some people. Many people are suggesting that we should have a meat-free Monday to begin with and gradually phase out meat. It may be that that’s the best we can manage over the next few years, given how the public are about such things. But in the long term, I believe that if we aim to get to a sustainable place in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it’s going to be very hard to have large herds of cattle and sheep as we do at present. That problem, combined with opposition to factory farming, really does mean we have to move towards vegetarian and even vegan diets in the medium term.

On a positive note, there has been a significant trend away from the worst forms of factory farming: battery farming of hens, the individual stall for pigs for breeding, veal crates and so on. That’s been particularly marked in Europe. A similar reaction is now becoming apparent in the United States, specifically following a referendum in California in November 2008 where the large majority voted against these forms of factory farming. There is also an increasing awareness about the climate impacts of meat and more people in the environmental movement are becoming vegetarian or vegan. We’re starting to head in the right direction, if rather too slowly.

Some have argued that factory farming and industrial-scale meat production must continue to allow meat to be affordable by the less well-off. It may be true that some people can’t afford free-range chicken, but that doesn’t mean you must eat chicken. Nobody has to eat chicken - or at least, nobody in Britain or America. There are plenty of very inexpensive plant-based foods available, like lentils and beans, that are good sources of cheap protein that would work out significantly cheaper per gram of protein then buying even factory-farmed chicken.

For us to cause avoidable suffering to animals is wrong. Even religious people who take the view that humans are made in God’s image and appointed by God to be stewards of creation would generally agree that stewardship doesn’t mean taking 20,000 chickens and putting them in a single shed with a very small amount of space per bird and treating them like they’re merely things to convert grain to flesh. That’s not stewardship, that’s simple exploitation of sentient beings.

On any ethical principle it is not acceptable to use other sentient beings in a way that disregards their interest in having a decent kind of life. That’s exactly what factory farming does and it is time to put an end to it.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of numerous books including Animal Liberation (buy this book from Amazon(UK)) and, with Jim Mason, Eating (buy this book from Amazon(UK)). Picture of Peter Singer courtesy of Derek Goodwin.

The great new demand on agriculture is to keep boosting productivity. We’ve done it before. We’ve had a green revolution – in fact, we’ve really had more than one, and we need at least one more. That revolution could be genetic, it could be technological, it could be energy-related. Whatever it is, the status quo won’t suffice.

Even if we manage to achieve a green revolution at a global level, we also have regional issues. The population of Africa is expected to double from one billion to two billion by 2050, and Africa has had very little success in boosting productivity in its agricultural systems. The chances of there being additional stresses in places that are already turbulent and prone to shortages are high. So while I think it is feasible that these production problems can be solved on a worldwide scale, it’s hard not to see Africa as a persistent troublespot for agriculture.

There are some small-scale success stories. Malawi is now exporting food aid when just a few years ago it was having real trouble. The New York Times wrote about how that turnaround was a function of fertiliser availability and pricing, subsidies and so on (See Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts). But Malawi is still very much the outlier and I can still see some real crunch points coming for Africa.

Another area of concern has been the effect of dwindling water supplies on agriculture. I’m pretty optimistic about the power of innovation to deal with that problem, again with some regional variability. No one is building desalination plants in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. On the other hand, we wrote a series in the New York Times in 2007 called The Climate Divide that looked at how technology and wealth are enabling industrialised countries to shield themselves from climate-related risks.

Perth in Australia has already built a substantial desalination plant that runs on wind power and that has become the poster child of what’s possible. They’re basically turning wind into drinking water or agricultural water, and it’s been successful enough that they are now scaling up that operation.

Soil salinity is a considerable problem in many areas, so salt-tolerant crops will help a lot. In the really long run there’s mariculture, producing food from the sea, for example with seaweed cultivation. There are limitless possibilities open for exploitation. If there really were a crunch on water, humanity has shown itself to have a capacity really to get busy and come up with new ways to get around that problem.

This outlook could apply to all technologies, including genetic modification (GM). In my experience, black-and-white debates like the one we’ve seen around GM are more framed by ideologies than the reality of the science. I think there’s a huge potential for crops and food synthesis using a variety of technologies like GM.

One area that often gets forgotten is food preservation. We lose 25 to 50 per cent of the food grown in the fields due to avoidable deterioration. There’s lots of evidence that this could often be prevented by irradiating food. I wrote about radiation in the wake of 9/11 because it’s expanding into a lot of countries as the way to keep food fresh and there’s very little evidence that it creates any kind of a harmful by-product. Yet there’s still a lot of resistance because of that funny word ‘radiation’, particularly in the environmental community. Turkey is doing it and Brazil is moving a long way towards it. It can give fruit, vegetables, milk and a variety of other foods a much longer shelf-life.

There are some other technologies which are still a little way off that could be very interesting in the long term. One is the idea of meat grown in vitro. It all sounds totally goofy now, but if you don’t like killing living animals, you don’t want to utilise a lot of land to grow food, and you can develop a really efficient, low-carbon energy source - maybe photovoltaic panels - then you could have solar-powered meat factories culturing cells for food. Interestingly, given the controversy it arouses now, foie gras could be the perfect starting point (as I reported here). It’s very easy to grow a liver, so you could grow livers without the ducks and have a very high-volume product.

All that said, many of the problems the world faces in terms of feeding itself are not really questions of science and technology. The circumstances that turn a drought into a famine are often political, economic and infrastructural, so those are the key questions we need to deal with. But the possibilities that arise from the application of human ingenuity are very exciting and have the potential to solve a lot of our problems.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Andrew C Revkin has been environment reporter for the New York Times since 1995 and writes the newspaper’s Dot Earth blog.

This is because, despite the world population more than doubling since 1950, crop production has more than trebled over the same period. This means that we now produce over 40 per cent more food per capita than we did in the 1950s.

Such a magnificent and often-forgotten achievement in feeding the world is largely thanks to science-based advances in crop breeding and management, of which the most notable was the Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s that averted almost certain famine in large areas of Asia. Today, we produce more than enough food to enable each and every person on the planet to have an adequate and nutritious diet.

Even if, as reliably forecast, the world population increases to nine billion by 2050, we could still easily feed everybody by reducing meat consumption and ensuring equal distribution of food to all. The resultant diet might be rather monotonous – a little like the 1940s wartime diet – but at least nobody would need to starve.

Of course, this will never happen. We live in a deeply unequal world where access to food is very patchy and depends on where you happen to be born. Food has always been an economic good and a powerful political/military tool. During the twentieth century, large-scale manmade famines that killed millions became sadly commonplace.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet authorities deliberately engineered famines that killed over 10million people. Massive famines on a similar scale were allowed to occur by neglect and poor management by the British in Bengal in 1943 (three million deaths) and by the Chinese in 1959-61 (causing somewhere between 14million and 26million deaths). More recently, it is estimated that five million people in the war-torn eastern Congo died from famine and disease between 1998 and 2004.

In all of these cases, plentiful food supplies were available elsewhere in the world, and often within the same country as the famine itself. But sufficient food was not distributed for a variety of reasons. In this sense, each of the famines can be regarded as manmade.

A more positive use of food in politics is to supply it as a form of aid, friendship, or even coercion between nations. One of the most perceptive appraisals of the potential power of food as a tool of realpolitik originated in late-nineteenth century America. There, thanks to a great deal of public and private investment in agricultural research and development, new crop varieties, new equipment and improved farm inputs were developed. As a result, wheat yields increased sevenfold between 1850 and 1900, while maize yields increased more than fourfold between the 1920s and 1990s.

This produced millions of tonnes of surplus grain that was available for export. Better transportation links opened new markets in America’s growing cities and across the Atlantic to an industrialising Europe. By the early 1900s, America had come of age as a global agricultural power. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, the US government continued to use its status as the ‘bread basket of the world’ to favour allies (for example, feeding the British during both World Wars) and to punish foes (such as the 1980-81 grain embargo against the USSR), not to mention earning a very healthy profit from sales of the exported food.

In the 1980s, the US secretary of agriculture, Earl Butz, even referred explicitly to what he called the ‘food weapon’. Today, the US is still able to maintain a vast, highly efficient, but highly publicly subsidised food production system that produces huge surpluses either for sale or as carefully targeted ‘aid’ overseas.

One of the most serious sources of food inequality and most effective barriers to agricultural innovation in many poorer countries is the current system of subsidies and trade tariffs that favour more powerful regions such as Europe, North America and Japan. The latter regions subsidise relatively inefficient domestic production of dozens of crops including rice (Japan), sugar beet (Europe), maize for bioethanol (USA), and rapeseed for biodiesel (Germany) in a way that distorts global trade and discriminates against more efficient crops such as tropical rice, sugar cane, and oil palm.

The overall effect is to depress the agricultural sectors in many developing countries so that they fail to create strong institutions able to improve their own crops and feed their populations. Despite decades of postcolonial development, endemic corruption and civil strife combine with poor infrastructure (including roads, schools, credit systems, legal systems and so on) to retard the inherent capacity of people in such countries for indigenous improvements in food production using a combination of the best of modern science with the more reliable and effective elements of traditional knowledge.

Rather than ‘sticking plaster’ responses, such as emergency food aid, the West should facilitate the genuine social and economic advancement of developing countries. We could start by dismantling inappropriate trade barriers, curtailing certain NGO activities that smack of neo-colonialism, and enable the farmers and breeders in these countries to develop production systems for their own benefit. 

We also live in a uniquely grotesque period of human history and achievement where increasing levels of malnutrition and even starvation coexist with record rates of morbid obesity. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in 2006, the number of grossly overweight people in the world exceeded, for the first time, the number that is malnourished due to lack of food.

It is rather bizarre to reflect that in so-called ‘advanced’ Western countries, the obesity epidemic is concentrated in socio-economic groups of relatively low income and educational achievement. And, paradoxically, despite their excess food intake, obese people regularly manifest deficiency symptoms due to an unbalanced diet with inadequate intake of vitamins and other key nutrients.

Therefore, much of the ‘surplus’ food production of the world, the diversion of which keeps one billion people in developing countries on the edge of starvation, is not used by rich people at all. Rather it is mostly consumed by poorer, ill-informed folk in Western countries who consequently become both overweight and badly nourished, and are much less likely to be economically active. Such people also experience dramatically reduced life expectancies, and then tend to pass on their obesity (both biologically and culturally) to their unfortunate children.

Therefore, the much proclaimed end of the era of cheap food in the West may actually turn out to be a good thing for the world as a whole. We should question whether we really need the vast and wasteful supermarket/warehouses with their tens of thousands of items of rapidly spoiling food, of which between one third and one half is thrown out either by the retailer or by careless shoppers who buy too much for their needs. If we valued food more, we would be less likely to waste it and perhaps less likely to eat too much.

We would also be able to pay food producers more, both locally and in developing countries, although this may need a reduction in the stranglehold exerted on the supply chain by global supermarket networks. A willingness to pay more for food would also take the political pressure off governments to maintain the pernicious system of trade barriers and subsidies. Dismantling the latter would greatly stimulate food production in many developing countries and help them feed themselves in the future. 

Denis Murphy is biotechnology advisor to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. He is also professor of biotechnology at the University of Glamorgan in Wales where he lectures on agriculture, botany and human nutrition.

Two years ago, the world wheat price doubled in the space of four months. So ‘spiked’ is something we’re increasingly seeing apply to world food prices.

This volatility is in part due to short-term factors; in the case of sugar there’s been drought in India coupled with flooding in Brazil. But the reason why one poor harvest causes huge price swings is the low level of world food stocks – and that’s a sign of a deeper-rooted problem.

World food supply is always in a race to keep pace with growing demand. It’s been able to do that comfortably throughout most of my lifetime thanks to a ‘green revolution’ boosting farm productivity. But this revolution has been input-intensive and we’ve started to hit some resource limits, including the availability of productive farmland, at the same time that demand is surging.

It’s wrong to ascribe this entirely to China, but a few statistics from there do illustrate the point. Chinese meat consumption has doubled over the past 15 years and dairy consumption is growing by 25 per cent a year. To grow the crops to feed those extra animals required an area greater than England and Wales combined.

China is also growing thirstier, and one extra beer per man per week in China creates another three billion gallons of annual demand.

Coupled with fast-growing demand we also face depleting oil reserves, increasingly scarce water supplies, climate instability and an imperative to reduce carbon emissions.

According to one American study, it takes 10 calories of energy to produce one calorie of food. We have to improve that ratio substantially.

Human water consumption has risen six-fold over the past 100 years – more than double the growth in population. That obviously can’t continue. Almost 70 per cent of the world’s water withdrawals are for irrigating crops, so that’s the place to look first. 

So for food companies, sustainability is not just a fashionable buzzword. We have to develop a more durable system that will stand the test of time, one that is efficient, equitable, environmentally responsible and shockproof. There is no alternative that bears contemplation.

There’s still a lot to learn about exactly how we can achieve this, but the need is urgent. We at least know the right direction of travel, and the industry is getting on with it.

IGD advises companies to apply seven steps in building a sustainable food system: 

1. Get every member of staff onboard with the scale and importance of the challenge;
   
   
2. Build partnerships - we won’t succeed with a silo mentality;
   
   
3. Wage war on waste;
   
   
4. Make the supply chain more shockproof;
   
   
5. Use technology to raise productivity;
   
   
6. Share best practice - there will always be a first-mover advantage but we need to learn from each other
   
   
7. Bring consumers with us by explaining what needs to be done and empowering them to help through their food choices.

Each of these is a critical component, but step five is worth particular examination.

We’ve had one ‘green revolution’ and we need another – this time reducing our use of inputs, but continuing to raise output. Unfortunately, at the exact moment when we need to be at our most purposeful, Europe is locked in limbo over how to apply crop science and technology.

We’re stuck in particular over genetic modification (GM). ‘GM – good or bad?’ is the wrong question; one we’ll never resolve if GM (like most technologies) can be a mixture of good and bad. A better question is how to develop lower input, higher yielding, more resilient crops and farming methods. This would put GM in its proper context as one, and only one, of the methods at our disposal.

If society can’t agree on what is and isn’t ethically acceptable then how can we expect our scientists to help us solve the problems? This has to be resolved quickly otherwise we’re losing precious time. We need to be pragmatic and flexible. There’s little value in polarised debates about which of today’s farming systems is the best. We need to develop new methods, pool our knowledge, combine our wisdom and pull in the same direction.

The scale of the challenge we face, and the disastrous consequences of failure, demand decisive action. Fortunately, food companies are full of practical people, motivated by solutions rather than arguments. Sustainability is the new competitive frontier and companies are trying to outdo each other in preparing for the future, raising ethical standards and improving resource efficiency.

An era of great change is just starting to unfold, and food will be in the vanguard.

Joanne Denney-Finch is chief executive of IGD, an international food and grocery research organisation that provides information, insight and best practice worldwide.

I would hope that, as the recessionary dust settles, there’s no return to business as usual. Plenty of risks have indeed been taken in the recent past, and that is in some ways why we are where we are now in terms of credit, in terms of property speculation, stock-market speculation and so forth. That’s really why we, as taxpayers, have had to step into the breach. So, I do think the idea that the Brits have always been cowering in their burrows and not taking any risks is a little bit wide off the mark.

What future for business? What future for business risk-taking? What future for business supervision?

I’d start from the other side of the telescope and ask what is business? What do we mean by business? It seems self evident in a way. It’s the non-state, voluntary bit of the economy: Large corporations, small medium enterprises, partnerships, sole traders. Plus a few gray areas: law firms, schools, private- medical, dental and veterinary practices and so on. The latter do seem to straddle the boundary of the two sectors but, by and large, when we say business we know what we mean, don’t we?

I don’t think so. I’ve long rejected this conventional view, as has my co-author Larry Elliott. Before suggesting what sort of risk and innovation business ought to undertake in a post-recession environment, and what sort of scrutiny and regulations ought to be imposed, I’d like to distinguish what I see as two different types of business.

The vast majority of enterprises in this country have few or no employees. They either don’t enjoy limited liability or, if they do, it’s worthless because the banks and their trade creditors will insist on the dreaded PG, which has nothing to do with tea bags and everything to do with personal guarantee, that actually voids the protection of limited liability. Of this, a majority of businesses maybe half make either no real money or actually run at a small loss. Only about half are consistently profitable. That to my mind is the private sector. I’m happy with it, I rejoice in it, I support it, I think it has social and economic value but it is very, very different from what I call the public/private sector.

These are the business organisations that, as we’ve seen in the past 18 months to two years have been too big to fail. I don’t just mean banks. These organisations could never have reached a tenth of their present size without genuine gifts from the rest of us.

Limited liability for all big incorporated companies allows them to walk away from their debts. Fractional reserve banking, which applies mainly to the financial institutions, allows these companies to conjure money up out of thin air. It also allows them to turn to the taxpayer in bad times and insist that, as they are so vital to the financial system, and the economy, the risks they have taken must be underwritten by us.

These are absolutely enormous privileges. They’re not like copyright or contracts or laws against fraud; those all are a bit complicated but they have their roots in an everyday understanding of right and wrong. No, limited liability, and so on, are very specialised privileges which, although they may be necessary for large-scale undertakings, encourage such entities to take enormous risk and then allow them to come to us when it all goes wrong. I think this has been proved in the last two or three years to be quite wrong.

Imagine Bill Gates or any other tycoon in a world without limited liability. They might be hugely rich but their fortunes would always be at risk. I can’t see huge international entities like Starbucks or McDonalds in a world without limited liability. We might have rather more family-owned cafes as we used to have. It’s the difference between a merchant prince and a vast self-perpetuating economic organisation.

So I think, if we accept this distinction, it becomes clear that issues of risk and innovation ought not to be considered in relation to scrutiny and regulation. They are separate cases.

A real private sector ought to be able to do pretty much as it likes. No one unit is big enough to cause serious trouble. No one unit is too big to fail. I think regulation of the risks should only apply to their products. In other words, if someone is making jam yes food and hygiene regulations should apply to their jam. I don’t believe that they ought to be regulated as companies. They are small self sustaining businesses. But with the larger ones, I am in favour of quite strict regulation. I think we’ve all seen what went wrong when we didn’t regulate properly.

Dan Atkinson is economics editor of the Mail on Sunday. This is an edited transcript of a speech given at the spiked/CMP event, ‘What future for business’, held on 7 July.

Just to give a bit of background, the organisation I work for, the Future Foundation, have just recently completed some research for the RSA, formerly, the Royal Sun Alliance, on risk-aversion. RSA were interested in how the recession has affected both businesses’ and consumers’ views of risk. With that in mind, we spoke to senior business leaders, consumers at large, and industry experts.

Understanding the current mood amongst businesses and consumers is a useful starting point. Currently, who in their right mind would want to be an entrepreneur or risk-taking business leader? It’s just a non-stop roller coaster of sleepless nights, terror-inducing decisions around risk and all for uncertain reward.

This seems to be the current and somewhat worrying view held by many of the senior members of the business community. Less than half of board-level executives now say that they admire risk-takers, while a similar amount say that entrepreneurship should be rewarded. No doubt UK entrepreneur and recently appointed enterprise tsar, Sir Alan Sugar, will have something to say about that across the chamber of the House of Lords.

Maybe we should all be buying shares in cotton wool for the equally stark fact is that the majority of Brits actually prefer to be cautious and not to take risks. Indeed, 60 per cent of us believe we don’t do enough to protect ourselves.

Something that has emerged very clearly from the report is that there is a wholesale reassessment of risk currently taking place across UK business. In short, risk-taking seems to have been devalued. It now has very negative connotations rather than positive ones. And in terms of our personification of risk, we now in terms of Sir Fred ‘the Shred’ Goodwin rather than Sir Richard Branson or Sir Philip Green.

There’s no question that in light of recent events we do need to assess and take stock, but a key concern is that the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction. The danger, at least in the short term, is that businesses not feeling comfortable sticking their necks out are going to miss out on opportunities. Again, looking at our research 63 per cent of business leaders think that there is opportunity to grow their business during the recession, but only 45 per cent expect this to happen. That is a significant gap in terms of potential and lost opportunity.

What lies behind this sentiment is an interesting question to ask, and on the face of it, given what has happened with the economy, it’s not surprising that there is a very strong mood of caution. Furthermore, our national, cultural reserve is being highlighted on a regular basis. At Wimbledon, Andy Murray’s approach on court was deemed defensive, and founder of Lastminute.com Brent Hoberman has been quoted in the Financial Times citing British reserve on the dot.com scene as the reason why Britain has failed to provide a success story to rival Google.

It is something that certainly came through in our research as well. Only 26 per cent of UK business leaders actually say that they enjoy taking risks. And, when we look at the UK population at large, that figure drops to 17 per cent. And a third of the British public also say that they’re much more cautious in light of recent events.

There are other important factors that are worth highlighting as well. We strongly believe, in light of our research, that better guidance and support for businesses is essential, allowing business leaders to manage risk more confidently. It would therefore allow them to take advantage of opportunities when they see them. At the moment, 70 per cent of business leaders said they tend to react to perceived rather than actual risk.

We also identified a view that those who do have an appetite for risk during the current recession are in some ways being held back by lack of support from banks. Despite a general nervousness, 60 per cent of businesses recognise that to cut costs now will constrain further growth.

To conclude, we all recognise that risk is an essential part of business and despite the mood highlighted by our report we do expect business leaders’ natural inclination to take risks to return once the economy picks up.

But a shift is taking place, too, and more than ever we want and expect risk to be managed in an informed and measured way. This applies whether we’re investors looking for improved returns or customers of organisations providing very critical products and services, or even if we’re employees wanting to be part of a growing business that provides ever more generous remuneration. To do this, businesses need to be communicating their risk strategy as part of their wider corporate social responsibility programmes. Taking it back up the chain, business leaders need to be able to rely on the right skill sets, both internally and externally, to judge and manage risk in a more confident way, so that they’re able to take better advantage of opportunities when they do arise.

The alternative is a crippling situation in which the nervousness of businesses is compounded by the nervousness of advisors lacking the appropriate know-how.

Pippa Goodman is an account director at the Future Foundation. For the Future Foundation’s report on risk-taking in business see here.

The business which I operate in, Solace Pharmaceuticals, is a risk venture, and requires investment in that risk. The risk centres upon the potential effectiveness of medicines to help the treatment of pain.

Certainly in the past 12 months I have seen the effect of what is colloquially known as the credit crunch, which, from our perspective, is effectively the lack of freely available investment capital.

This is happening against an already cautious background. Investment in biopharmaceuticals and biotechnology was already limited, particularly as regards early-stage, early-clinical, pre-market companies. Yet there’s still been a noticeably big difference even in the last 12 months. Effectively, that means that there’s much less capital available and those that do have capital available are much more risk-averse.

The problem in the UK is that the way in which capital is available through venture houses in particular, or through private equity, doesn’t come with any real benefit to the investors. There is a small amount of tax relief available, up to a limit, through the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS). You get 20 per cent tax relief on any losses in side of that top limit, as an investor. But there’s little other incentive to invest. The companies themselves can claim research and development tax-relief, which is beneficial and gratefully received, but in terms of investors there really isn’t any government incentive, eg, tax relief, for capital to be invested.

The other aspect to this is that the general mentality of investors across the board in the UK is characterised by a lack of patience, of not being willing to wait a reasonable period of time for a return on investment. There’s always a feeling that anything that has to be invested in for a period of seven to 10 years is probably just too long in investment terms.

That short-termism owes its existence to the history of investment in UK biotechnology over the previous ten years. In short, there have been very few successes – this is the reality of the situation. There was a period when there were a lot of companies starting up. British Biotech being probably the most famous one, but there were many others, too. Yet there are very few companies in which investors in the UK can say that ‘over that period’, a), ‘I’ve got my money back’, and, b), ‘I’ve actually made a return on that investment’. So what happens is that the investors become even more averse to investing in new ventures given their previous lack of success.

Contrast the UK situation with that in the US where, over that same time period, the return on investment has been better than any other sector. The reason for this is that, firstly, there’s a lot more money available, and secondly, the mentality is far more patient, far more long-term – it’s not much longer, but it’s longer term than the UK. And of course, because of the investment that people are willing to make in public markets into biotech companies, should they float, then there’s a return made on investment. Gilead, for example, is the number one selling HIV-drug company in the world, and it is a biotech company that is only a few years old.

There are many US companies like this. And of course the history of success breeds further investment. What you end up with is a chicken and egg argument. What happened at the beginning of the investment period for US investors is that they were willing to, a), give more capital and, b), take more risk with that capital. This means that they would go in with early stage companies and off of the back of that, they would have success.

By contrast, the UK investors were far less risk-tolerant, and would give less capital. Since a less risk-tolerant, undercapitalised company is much less likely to succeed, you end up in this spiral of ‘well, I’ve invested in that already, it didn’t work, so therefore I’m not going to invest anymore’. This is opposed to the US attitude of ‘I invested, it’s worked, and therefore I’ll continue to invest’. And so you get this dichotomy of thinking between the US and the UK.

Looking back at how much money has been invested in the UK biotech market, and how much investors have received in return, it does appear to justify contemporary risk-aversion. I would argue, however, that the level of investment and the risks taken were never sufficient to generate success in the first place. My firm belief is that there needs to be a sea change in attitude. That will probably have to come through the taxation system for investors. This will enable the proper re-capitalisation of biopharmaceuticals, that is, hit-tech companies.

So, if I had to offer a solution, I would say that we have to offer meaningful tax incentives to encourage investors to invest in early stage investment levels (in the vernacular, that’s ‘series A’ or ‘series B). If capitalised at the right level, this would create some successful companies, on the basis of which, investors would realise that since it’s possible to make some return on investment, they’ll be less cautious in the future. This would create a positive upward spiral, rather than the negative downward spiral we currently have.

Dr Eliot R Forster is CEO of Solace Pharmaceuticals.

When I was asked to write a retrospective on the effect of the dot.com crash, I experienced a certain clash of mental gears. My first response was actually to dig through some historical financial data to check my memory.

So yes, there was localised massive over-expectation by investors, especially in retail business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses – the so-called ‘dot.coms’ – and their supply base. Technology companies generally were over-valued, yet had to service investor expectation. The bursting of the bubble led to a long period of Darwinist culling. Yet sometimes it validated the very business principles it called into public disrepute: grow market share; first mover advantage; hire the plan; get eyeballs and worry about revenue later.

For a few, it worked. In fact, it worked so well we’ve seen it used many times since. Today, online services build it into their evolution – the ‘freemium’ model used in online gaming and in the growth of social networks and worlds. For others, it was a true test of their business model and whether networked ICT technologies could transform business for long-term advantage.

An abiding memory for me as an industry sponsorship public official was a call from another department wanting to plan a press release to help prevent the ‘meltdown of the ICT sector’. My reply was that ICT wasn’t going anywhere, we would all be using a lot more in days to come and that a press release probably wouldn’t help an unavoidable market correction.

Anyone using IT less today than 2001? Me neither. 

So what trends do we see today that appear to have their roots in the dot.com boom and bust?

• The attitude to entrepreneurship, business angels, venture capital and IPO underwent a massive change that has lasted and spread across many sectors – from dot.coms to biotech, ‘green’ and beyond. As a country, from my perspective, we seemed to go easily from the ‘Tell Sid’ privatisations of state utilities in the 1980s and 1990s to an immense entrepreneurial culture that is clearly still very much with us today;
• A corollary of this: ignore new entrants into your market at your peril. Even where they may not have had such astounding growth or longevity. some have changed pricing and business models across the sectors they have entered;
• Attitudes to risk certainly did change as a result, but in some possibly different ways than would be expected: open innovation, partnering, reducing time to market, willingness to cannibalise existing revenue streams, hot housing product teams and skunkworks (small groups who work on a project in an unconventional way with the aim of very rapid development);
• The get started, go global models that used to be the preserve of massive leveraged finance are now widespread. Now its easy and cheap for online services – which in turn make it possible for all companies to remove overheads, create valuable local specialisations and evolve beyond the central-versus-local management conundrum. The traditional model - start local, go national, clone yourself overseas - now seems slow and inflexible compared to global, integrated organisations
• ICT itself has completed an evolution – from a standalone activity or sector to something that’s a board-level competitive issue for many.

The move to online commerce now seems a foregone conclusion, to the benefit of both previously established players and new entrants into the market. The pure online play versus clicks-and-bricks debate seems simplistic – both won. Our companies, and more and more of us as individuals, are a part of the dot.com revolution. What was hype in 2000 now seems commonplace – it just took a few years longer than expected to be realised.

We now move into public debates about the necessity of universal service and the ability to give everything an online presence – I’ve recently seen news coverage of twittering buses, ferries and fresh-baked pastries.

How will we look back to today’s work in today’s economic situation on adding intelligence and leveraging the instrumented, connected world? What will change now we can know how much electricity we are using, our carbon emissions, whether the bus is just around the corner and whether the pains au chocolat are fresh at the canteen? Will that last be linked to a twit reminding me of my current cholesterol, salt and calorie intake and how much of my daily carbon budget it represents?

Chris Francis is director of government and regulatory affairs, IBM UK.

In a new 37-page report, Paris-based research body, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is adamant that the economic crisis has led to a decline in innovation reflected in a fall in research and development (R&D) spending:

‘Corporate reports for the fourth quarter of 2008 in many cases already show a decline or slower growth in R&D spending. Forecasts for 2009 confirm the trend… R&D is declining because it is mainly financed from cash flow (retained earnings), which contracts in downturns. At the same time, banks, markets and investors have become more risk averse; firms face difficulties in tapping into external sources of funding to support their investments in R&D. Business R&D is also being re-oriented towards short-term, low-risk innovations, while longer term, high risk innovation projects are being cut first.’ (1)

So far, so predictable. But it seems the OECD misses the point that the decline of innovation is a cause, not just a result of the crisis. The report recognises that public R&D in energy has long been in decline, but fails to use figures which the OECD itself produces – figures that show, in the US and Europe and as a percentage of GDP, the stagnation of business R&D and the rapid decline of all aspects of public R&D (2).

As the OECD says (p7), venture capital investments are in steep decline (including in China, though it looks like Initial Public Offerings there will revive within a year). Barriers to entry for small, innovative firms are higher, and the decline in world trade makes global value chains in innovation tougher to operate (pp8-9). But the dangers of a purely economic account of barriers to innovation today come out in the OECD’s remarks on energy (p10). It argues that lower oil prices have already reduced incentives to switch to alternative energy sources – and that the declining prices of raw materials reduce pressures to use these resources more efficiently. Yet already oil prices have bounced back to $70 a barrel; and falling prices for steel and cement, for example, count in favour of wind turbines and solar panels. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why China hopes to generate 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 (3).

Rightly, the OECD touches on ‘focusing public support on promising research and innovation affected by the crisis, eg, long-term and risky research’, and on using public procurement to support R&D (pp11, 12). But it is much more interested in local or regional clusters of innovation – a weak doctrine first pioneered by Harvard’s Michael Porter nearly 20 years ago (see his book The Competitive Advantage of Nations, 1990). The OECD’s refusal to think big is continually reflected in it talking up small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) – mentioned no fewer than 52 times. In the same, unambitious and economics-obsessed mode, it believes that carbon capture and storage ‘will not be aggressively deployed in the coming decades without a clear carbon price’ (p15). Well, yes – if you think that there’s anything clear about carbon prices today and the EU’s byzantine Emissions Trading System, and if you believe that prices and markets are the alpha and omega of innovation.

In contributions to this debate on spiked, cScape CEO Rob Killick has rightly made the point that the roots of the West’s problems with innovation lie not in economics, but in its cultural antipathy toward moving ahead (4). In this sense, ethical investor Edward Mason is wrong to argue that ‘Developed societies want wealth creation, but it’s ever more important to them how it is created and who shares in it’ (5). Cultural elites in the West are not interested in wealth creation the way they once were: why else have they bothered with financial services so much these past years? On the contrary, wealth creation itself is stigmatised as damaging the planet, as useless in terms of creating happiness, and so on. In this sense, then, David Kern of the British Chambers of Commerce is right to say that the undesirable features of the banking crisis have prompted ‘a general intellectual attack on the whole wealth-creating aspects of capitalism’ (6) – even if the antecedents of today’s attack go way back.

The OECD, however, doesn’t even take its own economic determinism seriously. In the second, empirical half of its report, it usefully tabulates the anti-crisis measures of some of the world’s leading economies. What comes out of its research is that, with few exceptions, Western governments are spending bugger all (forgive the term, but it really applies) on helping societies innovate their way out of the recession. And, characteristically, the OECD refuses to criticise the lethargy that its findings reveal.

To their credit,

• Finland has announced that it will maintain its target of extending R&D spending to up to four per cent of GDP;
  
• Korea has set aside no less than 5.14 per cent of GDP on energy conservation, recycling and clean energy supply (even if supply is much more important than conservation);
  
• President Obama has allocated a reasonable – though by no means forthright – $11billion to fund a smart electricity grid, $7.2billion on broadband to unserved areas of the US, and $17.4billion on fuel-efficient cars (France: €6billion on such cars).

But what are today’s typical government initiatives on innovation? Expenditures, of course, don’t tell the whole story; but their shockingly small scale does tend to give the game away. France is to spend a piddling total of €70million on both nanotechnology and information and communication technology (ICT) for higher education. Britain is to devote a derisory £50million to support innovation in manufacturing, and aims to get universal broadband out by 2012… at two megabits per second (Australia does it at 100 megabits per second). The EU will spend a princely €1billion on universal broadband, with no targets for bit speeds. Mighty Germany is to spend just €1.5billion on both clean cars, and incentives to buy new cars.

A lot of these sums wouldn’t even reach the Sunday Times list of UK squillionnaires.

Table 4 of the OECD report also shows what’s going on. Apart from the massive amounts of cash they now spend on bailing out the malignant financial services sector, Western governments will devote funds to infrastructure, education and green initiatives more than to science, R&D and innovation. But across all four categories, the sums involved are a joke:

Financial weights of selected, long-term policies in OECD country stimulus packages, May 2009
(percentages based on GDP in 2008) (7)

Even with these figures, there is a fair amount of double-counting across the four categories.

Across the OECD, the average size of fiscal packages to beat the recession amounts to more than three per cent of GDP – and in the US, to more than five per cent (p19). So one does not need to be an old-fashioned state interventionist to see that, in terms of priorities, Western governments are not serious about using innovation to exit today’s crisis. Nor, however, should one be a Marxisant economic determinist in trying to understand these shocking figures. Economics alone, as Marx would be the first to say, do not explain the sheer scale of risk aversion today. Thus, the OECD writes blithely of the need to adapt policy instruments to ‘the central importance of non-technological innovation’ (sic, p16).

For the most part, members of the Western elite have given up on thinking big, given up on R&D, given up on the future.

They are mice, not men.

James Woudhuysen is co-author, with Joe Kaplinsky, of Energise! A future for energy innovation, published by Beautiful Books, 2009. ((Buy this book from Amazon(UK).)

(1) Policy Responses to the Economic Crisis : Investing in Innovation for Long Term Growth, OECD, 10 June 2009, p6

(2) An R&D recession, by James Woudhuysen, 27 May 2009

(3) China plans increase in renewables targets, BusinessGreen, 10 June 2009

(4) This is really a political crisis, by Rob Killick

(5) A new era of regulation? by Edward Mason
(6) The demonisation of entrepreneurship, by David Kern

(7) OECD, op cit, p25

There are a numbers of ways of thinking about risk-taking in business. The most obvious way is the extent to which individuals feel burdened by recent history. Events will hang over people and as a consequence they may over a period of time be deterred from taking risks.

Now, that is only over a period. The length of the period of risk-aversion will depend upon how deep the impact of the recession is. In this regard, where are we in the recession is still a question people should be asking themselves. To my mind, the recession has a way to run yet. Of course, we can think about a post-recession period, but let’s not assume we know the answers because we could be looking a long way ahead, and we don’t know what people’s mindsets, people’s budgets, people’s pockets will be like when there’s a general sense that the recession is behind us. And I certainly don’t think that we can make any prognosis, optimistic or otherwise, on the basis of a rise in stock market for a few months, or greater fluidity in capital markets. In fact, the real pain, for ordinary people, is still, I suspect, to come. The pain has been taken by the banking community, by the investment community, by those closest to the financial hub. But the big hit yet to come will hit those with far less, far harder.

It stands to reason that those who have suffered worst will be risk-averse for longer than those that have suffered less, ie, those who have had more resources and therefore are able to take risks earlier. And those that can take risks earlier will have a greater opportunity to take advantage of the opportunities open to them.

Now, we assume that risk-taking is a natural behaviour, and also potentially a desirable one, because those that take risks will further the discovery process. They will challenge rigidities and therefore advance the health of the capitalist system. Underpinning the Anglo-American capitalist model, then, there is this belief, this conviction that risk-taking, entrepreneurial behaviour is efficacious, that it will clear out the cobwebs of inefficiency and bureaucracy. That is, we empower the individual enterprise so that it acts as the avant-garde of the capitalist process.

Yet the interesting question is whether the recession has strengthened the hand of those who would look to the state, to government, to implement a centralising, rule-book type of mentality. This would mean that instead of saying to the individual, go forth and procreate, push the boundaries, what we’re seeing in response to the recession is a structuralising dynamic emanating from the centre which says ‘here are the boundaries in which you may operate; push beyond them at your peril!’

I would think that the recession, as it were, has not swept away risk-taking but it has empowered those that would set up parameters to risk. Hence, within the financial community, we’ve had the responses of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which is going to intervene more, is going to become more aggressive – all those things that say ‘where before you might have been able to close your eyes and ears to the FSA, now we’re going to remind you that we’re here’. If behaviour is adjudged to have breached standards or regulation then expect to be severely punished. And, of course, beyond the FSA are the lawmakers themselves who will also be expected to set up more structures that will further curtail risk-taking activity.

I think one can see this response in how people anticipate the banking system developing. There’s one quite well-established view now that involves a partition in banking, between one set of banks that don’t take risks and another that do. The former merely push out and return the same money. Some view this as a utility, a banking sector that is useful to society, useful to individuals, useful for the running of businesses, but is still merely a service, a service to the customer. Those people that would see that element of banking segmented, would also envisage another area of banking, or to use the fun phrase, ‘casino banking’. And that would be where individual money is risked, say, the individual’s own money or the money of investors. Basically it does nothing else but invest. And obviously the corollary of risk is reward. And regardless of whether that reward adds or subtracts from the quantum of the money that’s at stake, the assumption of everyone there is that all the money allocated to the casino is at stake. It is a stake in the investment markets where risk reigns.

Therefore we will have a polarised banking system with risk reigning on one side, and security and stability reigning on the other side and ne’er the twain shall meet. That is a sort of extreme structural response to how you handle risk, in a nervous post-recessionary business environment.

Despite the prevalence of risk-taking in the pre-recession financial sector, there has not been much risk-taking when it comes to productive investment for a long time. To my mind, the story of the last thirty years has been one of failed industrial strategy, started with Thatcher continued by Blair, and continued by Brown. The fiscal stimulus of the service sector, particularly the financial services sector has, in a way led us to our current economic impasse. In other words, although it’s a relatively small number of people who actually work in the financial sector it amounts to very large amount to the national profit. And what has happened over the last 30 years is that government has become very reliant on the financial sector for these invisible exports, for profit, so more and more perks, more and more handouts, more and more deregulation – in short, special treatment – has been given to the financial community because they have been put on this pedestal as our great profit maker. This has led to a severe imbalancing of our national investment policy.

The real employers, the creaters of foreign exchange, the builders of businesses that compete in international markets – they’re the key. The City can be replicated in a thousand countries, the maker with an exclusive patent, be it for a particular type of software, machinery, or shipibuilding can only be in one place, (unless it’s patented out, creating an internal flow of capital). And it’s precisely that risk-taking, innovative spirit that we haven’t stimulated.

What needs to happen in the wake of the recession, is that we need to rebalance our industrial policy, focusing on products that can compete on world markets and can produce the foreign exchange that will ultimately strengthen sterling.

Nicholas Kochan is author of The Washing Machine, and co-author with Hugh Pym of What Happened? And Other Questions Everyone is Asking About the Credit Crunch and Gordon Brown: the First Year in Power. Visit his website here

Until about three years ago, I had spent 15 years being a serial entrepreneur in the biotech industry. I started three different companies from scratch, built them up and then sold or floated them. For the past three years, I have been both an ‘angel’ investor to other companies and a director of portfolio investment funds.

As such, I am involved in two funds plus eight or nine companies with an increasing amount of my energies directed to business outside the UK. I’ve found that many of the things I’ve wanted to do, which might be regarded as risky in business terms, have been easier to finance in the Middle East and implement in India and the US than they are in the UK.

My business interests have been ‘risky’ in the sense that they involved long-term research and development with no guarantee of a successful outcome. My first businesses were in genetically modified (GM) crops, then I moved on to cloning and stem cells (including setting up a company around ‘Dolly the sheep’ at Roslin, near Edinburgh). More recently, I’ve been involved in a more conventional pharmaceutical company. All of these businesses were set up knowing that commercial applications would only emerge years down the line. Even now, for example, therapeutic applications for stem cells may be five to 10 years away.

This kind of business will involve a lot of misses in order to secure a ‘hit’. For example, it would be normal for only one in 10 drugs to make it to market even from the point where they are first tested in people. Even at this stage, a product is still roughly seven years from being released. Of 10 drugs that are tested on people, two or three will go through to the next stage of testing; maybe one will go through to the third stage, and even then not every drug that gets that far will become a commercial product.

The payoff is that the products that do make it, make it big. If you end up with a billion-dollar product at the end of it, you can pay for all those dead ends. The trouble is that in the UK, that model hasn’t delivered enough winners. Even in the US, it probably hasn’t worked well enough, which is why there are problems in the biotech industry on both sides of the Atlantic.

In terms of this kind of funding, in my experience it has always been more difficult to raise money in the UK as compared to the US. Where in America it might be possible to raise $10million for a start-up company, in the UK it might only be possible to raise 30 to 50 per cent of that. If you went back for further venture capital money, you would get less than half the amount in the UK as compared to the US.

What that means for innovation is that there is far less room for failure. With the smaller level of backing that a UK-funded company could expect, it would simply get fewer shots at getting one of those elusive ‘hits’. As a result, lots of companies never make it. In the US, the greater levels of funding mean that companies have more room for error in an industry in where error is intrinsic.

We’ve never got that right in the UK, which means no one has made enough money and we’ve had relatively few successful companies. That is despite having the second-strongest medical research machine in the world, one which – to be fair to them – this government has invested in very heavily. There is lots of good science going on in the UK, which could lead to lots of good products, but we’ve failed to find a good model by which to achieve that.

Emerging markets are not necessarily a major source of funding for high-risk ventures, but these countries now have the infrastructure and expertise to do research to the same standard as in the UK for a lot less money. In India or China, you can get three times as many attempts at finding a commercial product as you would with the same amount of money in the UK. Where Indian companies have invested in R&D themselves, it has mainly been profitable producers of generic drugs (those whose patent has lapsed) like Ranbaxy, Dr Reddy’s or Nicholas Piramal that have accumulated enough capital to start taking more risks with the aim of increasing their rate of return.

The recent economic downturn has made a bad problem horrendous. There were some companies still able to get funding 12-18 months ago if they had exceptional management, had made money for investors before and ticked all the boxes in terms of raw materials, advisers and so on. In the past year, even that has become almost impossible.

Biotech has particular problems due to the long-term nature of the investments and the risks involved. In lower-risk areas, like IT, software, medical devices, environmental technology, web-based applications and telecoms, for example, there is a lot of stuff going on. Given that putting money in the bank or property is not delivering good returns, there is money out there for lower-risk, high-profitability concerns.

There have been efforts at government level to tackle these problems. Along with the big medical research charities like the Wellcome Trust and the various Sainsbury charities, the government has been investing in research.

First, it used the university research assessment exercise (RAE) to concentrate funding on centres of excellence while weaker departments were closed or amalgamated.

In turn, the infrastructure in these top establishments has been brought up to world class. The labs in these UK academic centres of excellence and top hospitals are absolutely on a par with their equivalents in California, Maryland or Boston. Meanwhile, the financial support available through the research councils was broadened in both universities and the National Health Service (NHS) to allow the best researchers and medical clinicians to devote more time to research programmes.

The question is: how does that convert into an industry here? We need to take a number of steps to allow the industry to survive over the next two to three years and then rebuild. I don’t think we can go back to business as usual.

One way to rebuild would be to enable the creation of companies with sufficient capital to be able to absorb the failures while waiting for the successes, with management who have done it on that scale before – possibly by encouraging Brits who have done it in the US to come back here. For example, Scotland has had a ‘Global Scot’ campaign to identify Scots working overseas and try to encourage them to come back, with some success.

Essentially, we need companies that can go to investors with the aim of doing things on a much bigger scale, and with the management and development experience in place to reassure those investors that they’ll be able to get it right.

What government officials can do is to invest further along the development path than they do at present; the point at which they would expect other sources of funding to step in has to be shifted a bit further down the line. They need to pay for more ‘translational medicine’ to take ideas into the first (and relatively cheap) stage of clinical trials, the early, pre-commercial stages of manufacturing, toxicology testing and some animal testing. These steps would remove some of the commercial risks in terms of safety testing. The other aspect will be to sort out issues relating to intellectual property, so that companies can invest in products covered by patents.

This kind of thing is starting to happen, through the Medical Research Council (MRC) and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), via a body set up in 2007, the Office for Strategic Co-ordination of Health Research (OSCHR).

How much will this cost? Roughly speaking in the UK, outside the commercial sector we spend about £1.5- to £2billion on medical research, mostly through the MRC, NHS and the Wellcome Trust. Along with a reprioritisation of funding, we will need to spend another few hundred million pounds on top of that to enable these changes so that British companies can exploit the outcomes of UK research rather than have that knowledge licensed on the cheap to global firms to take forward.

Professor Simon G Best, OBE, FRSE is currently entrepreneur-in-residence at TVM Capital, chairman of the Advisory Board of PAR Equity, NXD of Entelos Inc, Polytherics and the International Potato Centre (CIP) and vice-chairman of the UK India Business Council (UKIBC). He was previously chairman of the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA) 2006-7 and vice-chairman of BIO 1994-6.

We are certainly in for more regulation. It’s virtually impossible to read the economic pages of the press without learning of some new controls of the financial sector. The financial crisis has shown incontrovertibly that there is a need to increase regulation of the financial sector to reduce systemic risk.

The financial crisis will not, however, be the biggest driver of future regulation; the main driver will be the need to combat climate change. The business world of the future will be one of carbon caps, licensing of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon taxes and heavy state direction of the ways in which energy is produced (less fossil fuels) and consumed (less wastage).

But none of this means, in my view, that we are entering a new era of regulation. Business has long operated in a framework of regulation. The European Single Market is one of the most heavily regulated environments for the private sector anywhere in the world.  We are not staring at the end of the free market as we know it. We are merely seeing a continuation of the process of constraining the free market within socially beneficial limits – a process that started in Britain in 1802 with the first Factory Act. There will still be plenty of space for entrepreneurs and competition.

I was at a conference the other day on venture capital and private equity investment opportunities in clean technology; one of the speakers noted that while government is ‘all over the sector’, this is an area of economic activity where ‘animal spirits are alive and well’.

Not that it will be business as usual in the post-recession world. There is an ongoing shift in societal values underway, pre-dating the credit crunch but boosted by it – a shift that amounts to a change to the social licence to operate. Developed societies want wealth creation, but it’s ever-more important to them how it is created and who shares in it. Making money at the expense of the environment or by means of exploitation of suppliers or communities is becoming less and less socially acceptable. The amount of money that executives pay themselves is also under greater shareholder and public scrutiny than ever.

Governments do not make good regulators, as the financial crisis has shown. Politicians are too easily seduced by the economically powerful and rarely have the competence or experience to understand and oversee the modern economy. Their officials will work hard to avoid a repeat of crises past, but will never be as savvy as those they seek to regulate.

But, if governments do not make good regulators, the culture of the age does, as our Members of Parliament have discovered in light of revelations about their expenses and allowances claims. Successful businesses will need to be more sensitive to the shift in public mood than our elected representatives. Many already are. It is not regulation that has led Rio Tinto to commit to ensuring that its activities have a net positive impact on biodiversity, Coca-Cola to cut back on its water use, or Cadbury’s to buy only Fairtrade cocoa. This is no time to ditch corporate responsibility. In a growth-constrained economy, it could be alignment with societal values that gives successful businesses their edge.

Edward Mason is a former British diplomat now working on ethical investment.

I have been surprised by the depth of the current recession, with falls in output that are clearly much bigger than anticipated. However, the related increase in unemployment is not much worse than I predicted back in September, at around the time of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

There are many reasons for the unexpected depth of the recession. One reason is that the losses in the banking system have been greater than many thought they would be. More surprising still has been the impact that the financial crisis has had on the real economy, most notably in the area of international trade. It amounts to nothing less than a global collapse in world trade. And one of the unexpected consequences is that export-dependent countries – such as Germany and Japan – have suffered more in terms of loss of output than countries like the US or the UK, where the financial sector is bigger and the housing bubble was bigger.

However, whether comparisons are justified with the 1930s is a moot point. Yes, they both began with a major financial crisis and huge banking losses. But I don’t think in critical areas the impact now is as severe as then. The 1930s crisis and the present recession were both triggered by asset bubbles. In both crises, there were elements of deflation. But the deflation, and the related falls in the money supply, was much sharper in the 1930s than now.

Nevertheless, both the 1930s crisis and the present one differ from other post-War recessions. The downturns of the 1980s and the 1990s were triggered by inflationary booms, which Governments were forced to crush by hiking interest rates. In the present crisis there was no inflationary boom in the goods and services market. There was an asset price bubble in the housing market. But inflation in the goods and services market was pretty tame in 2007 and 2008, which meant that the present recession was not accentuated by interest rate hikes. On the contrary, interest rates now are down to almost zero, even lower than in the 1930s.

Another significant difference between 2008-09 and the 1930s is that the social consequences are far less severe now than they were in the 1930s. In most Western countries, there is a welfare system in place to alleviate the human misery. There is none of the terrible poverty of the 1930s. But the most important difference of all between 2008-09 and the 1930s is that today’s governments are able and willing to use a much better array of instruments to counter the recession, and have a much greater awareness of what needs to be done to deal with the recession than governments had in the 1930s. Most economists and politicians are familiar with Keynes, even if they do not always agree with his teachings. The huge fiscal stimulus, and massive quantitative easing, that we are now seeing applied everywhere, even in the Eurozone, is in complete contrast to the misguided and perverse nature of the response in the 1930s.

It is very early to say how the recession is affecting businesses. In the UK we’ve seen sharp falls in investment and sharp rundowns of stocks, which is what you would expect. In terms of whether businesses are more survival-oriented than ever before, well right now they should be survival-oriented. In a recession, survival is the name of the game, the ne plus ultra. What many businesses are doing at the moment is only to be expected.

Right now, business management is crucial. A recession obviously tests the quality of management more than a boom does. In a boom it is not difficult to survive and make some money – but in a recession the quality of management becomes critical. A survival-oriented perspective is only to be expected.

The wider issue is whether there are things that governments can do to help those businesses that are viable and productive in the long term, but that may nevertheless struggle to recover without intervention. That is particularly important in those businesses, manufacturing being the main example, where it’s important to maintain and preserve a critical skills base. Because once these skills have gone, they may have gone forever. I am not talking about subsidising inefficient firms, but about short-term support that will have longer-term benefits for the national economy. Not losing key parts of our manufacturing base, which is already too small, is a national priority

There is an issue with the current prevalence of the notion of ‘greed’. What is happening in the public debate does bear an unfortunate parallel with the 1930s insofar as, once again, the bankers are being blamed. Beyond speculative banking, which must be better regulated, the wider condemnation and demonisation of entrepreneurship will undoubtedly damage the economy. People that innovate, develop ideas and take risks should be rewarded. If you always condemn the reward, you will end up with a big army of civil servants. And this could reduce our growth rate over many decades.

We are now incurring huge budget deficits. This is vital to end the recession. But we are inevitably accumulating a very large national debt. Our unsustainable budgetary position will have to be dealt with as soon as the recession is over, and this means drastic cuts in public spending and/or tax increases. It also means a very shallow recovery and low growth rates. In such a situation, it is very important to have a culture that encourages entrepreneurship. But the extent to which venture capital, for instance, is being associated in the public mind with banking greed, indicates that we may be moving into a society and economy in which risk-taking and entrepreneurship are being treated as part of the greed culture. Unless we resist this we will endanger the long-term health of the UK economy. We will end up with a booming public sector, which is very good at providing services, but does not create wealth. We all want good public services, but we must first create the wealth that pays for these services; and wealth is mostly being created by private sector businesses.

The extent to which we are able to distinguish between the undesirable and speculative features of the banking industry on the one hand, and risk-taking, innovation and entrepreneurship on the other hand, is a critical issue. There has been a lot of reckless speculation and short-termism in the investment banking industry; but this is not genuine capitalism, because the rewards were given for illusory short-term gains. For me, real capitalism involves risk-taking and innovation. And this also means commensurate rewards for genuine wealth creation. I think the danger now is that the undesirable features of the banking crisis, which have been very objectionable largely due to poor regulation, have now been made into a general intellectual attack on the whole wealth-creating aspects of capitalism. I don’t think there’s anybody in the political arena, who now has the courage to stand up for what I would call ‘good enterprising capitalism’, which will remain critical to wealth creation in any society.

David Kern is economic adviser to the British Chambers of Commerce. He also runs his own independent macro-economic consultancy, Kern Consulting. Prior to that he was NatWest Group’s chief economist and head of its Market Intelligence Department.

We have to frame this discussion within a cultural and political context. Our society has become tremendously risk-averse at every level. Common sense tells us it is unlikely that we can create a more dynamic and innovative economy when we are afraid to send our children to the park on their own. Also, how likely is it that these overprotected children will become confident risk-takers when they grow up?

This may seem too much of a generalisation. But if you look at the specifics of what is happening in our economy, you can see the links between today’s cultural attitudes and the reaction to the recession.

Firstly, consider some of the better commodity-producing parts of our economy, the bits of the economy that actually make new things. Foremost in these are aerospace, pharmaceuticals, bioscience and energy. Each of these industries has been subjected to intense criticism recently for their supposed threats to us, consumers, or to the environment.

The aerospace industry is held responsible for global warming, as is the energy industry. The pharmaceutical industry is held in deep suspicion of selling us drugs that might cause more harm than good. The biosciences have been held back by fears of Frankenstein food, amongst other things. And many of these negative sentiments have been allowed to go unchallenged by our political leaders, sunk as they are in the mire of market research-led policies.

How likely is that these industries will attract the best and brightest young people to work in them, or win the support they need from universities and investors, when they are held in such low esteem?

Almost every time a crisis of public confidence has arisen in recent years, the instinct of our political leaders has been to cut and run: Tony Blair over the MMR scare; more or less the whole political class over nuclear power and GM food. Such cowardice on the part of our political leaders has helped to create a lack of trust in science and an irrational approach to what are the most exciting areas of development in medicine and other sectors.

The lack of political leadership has encouraged a mood of anti-science and anti-progress, so much so that when swine flu broke out in a school down the road from where I live, local opinion was divided between those who didn’t believe the scientists who were saying there was a real threat, and those who did but did not believe that Tamiflu was a safe form of treatment.

Secondly, another thing that also stems from our over-inflated sense of risk is a widely held belief that economic growth in itself, whatever its source, is problematic. Some people today even argue that recessions are good for us and for the planet. These anti-growth sentiments fly in the face of reality, as all human progress is built on material prosperity. Yet they are very influential.

Thirdly, many of these anti-growth feelings are wrapped up in the idea of the ‘Green New Deal’, which wants progress and development to be restricted to areas that can be proven to do no harm to the planet. This narrow criterion threatens to divert investment down narrow channels and hold up progress elsewhere.

Any threat to the environment – indeed any challenge we face – is best dealt with by encouraging scientific and economic development on a broad front. Often scientists and technologists come up with solutions to problems they were not originally looking for. If we narrow down scientific endeavour, we risk missing out on these serendipitous discoveries.

Even in terms of developing alternative energy, encouraging economic growth offers the best way forward. China creates 16 per cent of its electricity through renewable sources, compared with four per cent in the UK. This is because China’s demand for energy to fuel its rapidly growing economy is such that it is prepared, and able, to experiment and innovate on a grander scale then we are in Britain.

Finally, in the UK we have levels of both venture capital investment and research and development (R&D) that are below the OECD average, but this is not because there is an absolute shortage of investment money available. Rather, risk aversion means that investors are not willing to put money into unpredictable, Big Idea projects. Indeed, the roots of the financial crisis lie in the fact that vast sums of money were recycled through financial instruments with a view to spreading and avoiding risk, incredible as that now seems.

There may be a case, as some now argue, for diverting more of our state resources into encouraging innovation – but more fundamentally, science and innovation need to be unwrapped from the risk aversion which surrounds and infuses them at the moment. Perhaps some of the money that is going into authoritarian measures, such as identity cards or the extension of criminal records checking for anyone who works with children, could be diverted into encouraging productive investment instead.

In other words, what we are really facing today is a political and cultural problem, rather than a strictly economic one, and it needs to be tackled on that level.

It is clearer than ever before that there is a close connection between the failures of political leadership and the problems of our economic set-up. You can’t tackle one without tackling the other. To create a bright post-recession future, we need to stop denigrating risky endeavour and take a political lead in defining what our priorities should be and how we should meet them.

Rob Killick is CEO of the digital agency cScape. Visit Rob’s blog UK After the Recession.

For the best of medication, I would like to nominate the anti-psychotic drugs that were introduced in the 1950s and are used with great effect in the treatment of a variety of conditions such as schizophrenia, mood disorder and delusional disorder.

As a former social worker, I dealt with many individuals who suffered from severe and enduring mental health problems. Although many would argue that mental illness is socially constructed, I believe that this is, at best, a one-sided understanding. I do not dismiss the fact that societal factors impact negatively on people and I do believe that more can be done in terms of enabling those with mental health problems to integrate better into society. But my social work experience has lead me to accept the imperative for a multi-faceted approach to the treatment of mental health problems. I guarantee my students who wish to work in mental health services that, at some point in their career, they will be sat opposite a service user imploring them to take their medication.

Why is this? In short: medication does work. Not for everybody and not all of the time, but anti-psychotic medication has done much to enable people to remain stable, avoid hospital admissions and to function in the community.

The large-scale closure of psychiatric provision in hospitals and the introduction of care in the community saw the need for a variety of means to assist people’s continued stay in the community and one of these means was the increased use of medication.  The arguments postulated against anti-psychotics can be seen as political and financial arguments in terms of strategies for care rather than vilification of the drugs themselves.

Consider the plight of Noel (pseudonym), who had a good flat in a desirable area, a supportive family and had positive experiences in terms of occupation and leisure. Socially, Noel was quite stable but he was besieged by unwanted thoughts and hallucinations. Noel was apprehended by the police on a busy suburban road because he was completely naked. The explanation he offered to this was that his clothes were impregnated with explosives and he had to jettison them for his own safety. Although this was not the case, Noel truly believed it and this caused him some considerable distress.

The argument here is that until it is socially acceptable for individuals to walk down busy suburban, or indeed any streets naked, Noel is going to have to be stopped from doing so.  If we want to enable Noel to continue to thrive in the community avoiding hospitalisation, as he is capable of doing, then he will need anti-psychotic medication, along with the support of other people, to help this cause.

Chris Yianni is senior lecturer in social work at Manchester Metropolitan University.

It is difficult to say with precision what was the main driver in the closure of the large psychiatric institutions in favour of care in the community. Various factors have been cited by some and dismissed by others, such as the discovery of anti-psychotic medication that appeared to alleviate many patients’ symptoms, the fiscal crises of the 1950s and 1970s, the critiques from the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement and the publication of reports documenting the neglect and mistreatment of patients.

It is likely that it was a combination of all of these and other complex dynamics that resulted in the change in social policy towards the inmates of the old asylums. Nevertheless, it is possible to detect in the debates of the time a positive vision of a future society in which medical and social advances would enable people to live more fulfilling lives.

The extent of the run down of the old institutions is illustrated by the reduction in the number of psychiatric beds, from 155,000 in the mid-1950s to 37,000 in the mid-1990s. The 1990s witnessed a reaction against care in the community and many commentators were now of the view that the policy had failed. Frank Dobson, then secretary of state for health, argued that it had led to too many vulnerable ex-patients being left to cope on their own, some of whom were a public nuisance and others who posed a danger to themselves or the public.

No doubt there are many failings with community care, but this does not undermine the fact that this was one of the most progressive developments of twentieth-century healthcare. It has helped improve the social functioning of vast numbers of people, led to many community resources being set up to offer support to ex-patients, and allowed the rise of a user movement whose critiques and experiences have improved our understanding of the nature of mental distress and of the social control aspects of much psychiatric and psychological practice.

The criticisms of community care are either flawed or reflective of a mood of social pessimism. For example, the dangers that ex-patients pose to the public has been greatly exaggerated and, despite its faults, the fact that the number of compulsory admissions has increased significantly in the last 20 years could signify that patients prefer the flawed community to the closed hospital.

Of course, there are problems with current mental health service provision. However, a more optimistic and confident society should be able to rise to the challenges thrown up by the contemporary age. The loss of such an outlook has more to do with the failure of politics than with community care.

Ken McLaughlin is senior lecturer in social work at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Africa’s healthcare system is in rough condition. Developed countries are making it worse by draining the continent of healthcare professionals. One in every 10 physicians in the United Kingdom comes from Africa.

That Africa has far fewer healthcare professionals per person should hardly need demonstration. Still, the scale of the problem continues to astonish. In Malawi, for example, the physician-to-population ratio is one per 50,000, more than 100 times the figure for the United Kingdom. For sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the rate is one doctor for every 8,000. Within Africa itself, there are also enormous disparities between city and countryside.

Recent studies have underscored the gravity of the situation. More than 13,000 physicians trained in sub-Saharan Africa now practise in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. It is estimated that one third of graduates from state medical schools in Nigeria migrate to Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States within 10 years of graduation. In the year 2000 alone, according to one study, some 500 nurses left Ghana, double the total of nursing graduates in the country that year.

Professionals can hardly be blamed for seeking a better quality of life for themselves and their families, particularly those who live in regions torn by political strife, high crime and violence. But the migration is being actively encouraged by recruiters, and accepted without responsibility by the healthcare systems of wealthy countries.

Many countries develop mechanisms to induce medical professionals to work in regions where needs are greatest. It takes little imagination to devise such schemes. Can we not envisage something comparable, but on a global scale, whereby a package of incentives and penalties can help to improve the situation?

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the benchmark for the protection of human dignity. The Declaration recognises both a right to health and a right to benefit from science. And it imposes a duty on everyone to help promote these and other rights.

Today, people readily accept their obligation to protect the environment. We talk of carbon credits and similar mechanisms aimed at discouraging anti-social behaviour in this respect. But we also impose penalties, in the form of higher prices or higher taxes for those who insist on buying automobiles that waste petrol.

So let us do the same with healthcare. Global health is a global responsibility. By draining Africa of its best and brightest, people in the North enhance the quality of their own healthcare, but by damaging that of those who live in the South.

William Schabas is professor of human rights law at the National University of Ireland, Galway and director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights.

The best of Medicine: defend genetic testing

The worst of medicine: The obsession with nutritional substances

Jerome Whitney, UK

More than any piece of legislation, control of fertility opened the doors to female liberation. The Pill is more than just a contraceptive and even women who never use it experience the benefits.

Although the size of families had already come down significantly by the 1960s, women were still prisoners of biology. With 30 or more years of unpredictable fertility, they were mostly marginalised into low-paying, low-status jobs. In professional or administrative jobs, women were usually forced to leave employment upon marriage; pregnancy was assumed and maternity leave was unheard of. There is a long way to go, but the availability of (close to) 100 per cent effective contraception has made equality an attainable goal.

Oral contraceptives (OCs) mimic the hormonal indicators of pregnancy so the brain does not signal the ovaries to release an egg each month. Modern OCs contain much smaller amounts of oestrogens and progestogens than those of 40 years ago and are among the safest medicines ever developed.

A misconception (pun intended) that is, only now, being overcome is that it is ‘natural’ to have a period every month for 30 years. When the OC Pill was launched, market research indicated that women would find it more acceptable if they continued to menstruate normally. As a result, the OC Pill has traditionally been prescribed as ‘21 days on’ with active pills and ‘seven days off’, with dummy (placebo) pills, during which a period takes place.

In fact, in ‘natural’ hunter-gatherer communities, women experience far, far fewer periods than those in the developed world. Almost as soon as puberty occurred, girls would have been married and pregnant (aged in the mid-teens). Pregnancy and birth followed by breastfeeding (which suppresses fertility) could eliminate ovulation for up to five years. When breastfeeding stopped, ovulation would resume and another pregnancy would start within a few months. With life expectancy only into the late 30s-early 40s, a woman might expect only a few dozen periods in her life – compared with as many as 450 today.

The continuous, monophasic, OC Pill eliminates not only periods (and potentially significant blood loss), but many of the adverse effects experienced during the ‘seven days off’ pill-free interval – breast tenderness, bloating, swelling, headaches. Women can take these pills for years with no periods and no adverse effects. They also eliminate that old male put-down of women: ‘That time of the month is it darling?’

Rob Johnston is a freelance writer on the environment, health and science.

The term ‘mountebank’ was in common usage in Elizabethan times. It describes a smooth-tongued purveyor of patent and quack medicines who usually stood on a bench (hence the name: monte banca). Ben Jonson’s play Volpone is about such a mountebank. Donizetti wrote an opera, L’Elisir d’Amore, which features a mountebank as a central character. When I saw the opera last autumn, it reminded me of a hawker I had seen in Indonesia, peddling his quack potions to the crowd. But it also led me to consider whether the self-appointed experts who pop up in the media promoting supplements and superfoods are just modern day mountebanks who hoodwink the public.

Despite a surfeit of food in this country, it is perhaps surprising that about 30 per cent of the UK population takes dietary supplements, with women more likely to take supplements than men, particularly those over the age of fifty. Consumers give a variety of reasons for taking supplements. Some say it is an insurance policy to guard against deficiencies; parents have been gulled into buying supplements by claims that they will improve their children’s behaviour and school performance; others take supplements because they hope they will protect them from cancer and heart disease.

The claim that vitamin and mineral supplements improve behaviour or school performance has never been proven in the UK, though not for lack of trying. The Advertising Standards Authority recently upheld a complaint against a supplement called EYE-Q that claimed to boost children’s intelligence. In a breath-taking example of brazen marketing, the company made headlines in the Daily Mail where it was claimed that a large trial was being conducted on children in Durham which would prove that its fish oil-derived omega-3 supplement improved children’s exam performance. The ‘study’ in question could in no way be described as a proper clinical trial, even lacking a control group for comparison.

Cocktails of vitamin A, beta-carotene and antioxidant vitamins such as vitamin C and vitamin E are touted as protecting adults against ageing, cancer and heart disease. A quick search of the internet shows that most of the sites offering dietary supplements are peppered with health claims for the benefits of these supplements for adults. However, a number of large-scale randomised controlled trials have failed to answer the question whether these supplements help to prevent cancer in affluent populations.

Regulatory authorities even stopped further trials using vitamin A because there was clear evidence of harm. The World Cancer Research Fund in its recent report on diet and cancer reviewed all the studies and advised people not to take vitamin A or antioxidant supplements to prevent cancer but to get their nourishment from food.

The irony is that the Department of Health does advise some sections of the population to take supplements of vitamin D and folic acid. But while few people in the target groups - that is, people who really do seem to need to take vitamins - actually take this advice, people who have perfectly adequate diets are being sold the idea that they require supplements. At best this is a distraction from more important health issues; at worst, it may even be dangerous.

Tom Sanders is professor of nutrition & dietetics at Kings College London. This contribution is based on his lecture Making sense of diet and health to the Institute of Food Research in March 2008.