Dr Oliver Moore

But now we're an exporting economy.

So we've just we've decided to basically have a very low cost approach to food, which destroys the farming base, because if it is that cheap, farmers can't survive.

And there's good models out there.

I mean, if you look at Dalhalla Food Services, for example, they provide meals on wheels and school meals to 4,000 people every day, and local farmers feed into that.

So there's markets that can be created and generated through public provisioning, which could be done well, and then farmers have multiple routes to market.

And we could start to do things like build a basic income for food producers and food organisers, build food hubs like Dull Hallow, like Drumshambo, like places where it works really well, and start to break away from the reliance on the supermarket system, a bit like when Anglo Irish was the best bank in Europe and then it was the worst thing that happened.

Like when you're so dependent on extreme levels of global trade,

you've left yourself completely vulnerable and exposed.

So we need to build in sort of food sovereignty, sort of proper resilience and people participation in the food system and start to grow our producer base because it is getting dangerously, dangerously low.

And we are an island off the northwest coast of Europe that extracts, that lets all of the nutrition leave the island, really.

We did, yeah.

We did up until very recently because they talked about access affordability and being part of global trade networks.

That's why ourselves in Singapore were considered the most food secure countries in the world up until about 2022.

But trade was part of that.

And trade is different now because of Donald Trump's tariffs and because of the straits of Hormuz and because the fertilizer squeezes and so on.

So, yeah, we did score really well in just like we were, like Anglo-Irish was the best bank in Europe.

It's the same thing.

We were locked.

We were food secure according to The Economist magazine.

But that's not the same thing as being able to produce food properly in the place that you live, being resilient and resourceful with what you have, with your soil, with your nutrition, with your farmers, and supplying to the domestic markets.