Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk with Aviva Insurance.
Chapter 2: What is the food security crisis that Ireland is facing?
Many experts believe that Ireland is sleepwalking into a food security crisis and that the world's food system is as fragile as the banking system was in 2008. Environmental campaigner and columnist with The Guardian, George Monbiot joins me now. Hello, George. Thanks very much for being with us.
Coincidentally, Mick Kelly, who founded Grow It Yourself in Ireland, has written a big piece in the Irish Times, which I know you've had a look at this morning. And he makes the point that when it comes to food security, the Global Food Security Index. Ireland is really close to the top there. We're doing really well.
But when you look at it a little bit closer, a lot of the food we're producing is beef and dairy and we're making it to send away. So what we have here and what we're making here would actually make you think twice about how secure our food system really is, right?
Yeah, well, Mick makes some very good points in the article, and he's completely right. Our food system is not being designed to secure food for us. It's not being designed to ensure we get a good, balanced and affordable diet. It's designed for some people to make profits off it. And governments say, and it's the same with my government here in the UK,
All over the world, they say, well, we'll leave it to the market to work this out. And when they say the market, it's this convenient abstraction, this thing, the market. You might think of a little street market with stripy awnings, right?
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Chapter 3: Who is George Monbiot and what is his perspective on food systems?
But the market means a few big global corporations. And there's a very few of them now really control almost the whole food system. And they couldn't give a damn about whether you and I are properly fed. It's all about the bottom line. It's all about their profits and their share prices. And they are not the people.
who are going to ensure that we continue to get to eat and that we can get to eat the food we want.
Yeah, I think, you know, it becomes easier to understand if any of us think about going to the supermarket to buy our green vegetables, which we know we can grow very successfully in Ireland. And we see that they are being brought from all over the world onto the shop shelf.
And the reason for that is it's just not economically viable, we are told, to grow those things in our own country now in Ireland.
Yeah, I mean, it really is madness. And it's not that food localism is the answer to everything. Food nationalism and food security aren't the same thing because being able to buy from elsewhere does smooth things out if you have a bad harvest at home. But having no local production or almost no local production is total madness. And I think there is an answer.
which is to say fruit and vegetables, and you could say home-produced fruit and vegetables, should be subsidised at the point of sale. Now, we have a massive agricultural subsidy system. It costs us billions and billions of euros, but it doesn't deliver any good at all for us. Mostly it causes environmental destruction.
It fattens the profits of the rich guys while giving nothing to the poor ones. And you could repurpose this subsidy system to ensure both that farmers stay in business and that we're properly fed. And one of the very simple things you can do is to say, right, we will subsidise homegrown veg at the point of sale.
So when you go to the supermarket or to your local shop and you buy vegetables, you might pay, say, 50% of what you would otherwise have paid. But the full price is still paid to the grower. And that would massively encourage people to eat more fruit and veg because, let's face it, we desperately need to do that. We don't eat nearly enough of it. And as a result, our health suffers.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Ireland's reliance on beef and dairy exports?
But at the same time, it would ensure that you create a nurture system. a market for the fruit and veg growers who, as Mick points out in his article, are disappearing at the rate of knots.
And that's the other problem, isn't it? That once you lose that intergenerational knowledge around how to grow vegetables and fruit, you can't really replace that chain very easily. So once it's broken, it may be broken for a long time, even if you introduce the subsidies that you talk about.
Yeah, this is a skilled business. And, you know, I know this as an amateur veg and fruit grower that I have so many disasters that every year I think, thank goodness I don't have to make my living this way. It's really difficult because you're constantly faced by changing environmental conditions. Everything's a bit haywire now with climate breakdown.
You've got your caterpillars, you've got your slugs, you've got your aphids. You know, so many things can go wrong. And it's knowing how to navigate that is a really skilled job. Now, the hopeful thing is that there are loads and loads of young people who would desperately like to get into growing. I'm constantly coming across people who...
You know, they don't really have a way in, but they're so keen to become fruit and veg growers. And yet, you know, the market isn't there. It's a great way to lose all your investments because it's just very, very hard to compete at the moment. So we need government to step in and say, let's help these young people get a foothold. Let's help the existing players to stay in business.
That's really important. But also... bring in new players, bring in people who are prepared to acquire those very difficult skills. But we've got to nurture this. You leave it to this thing called a market. The market, it will eat you alive. The market is not a market in the way that we understand markets.
A market is a small group of extremely rich, predatory corporations and oligarchs who will have the shirt off our backs.
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Chapter 5: How does the current food system prioritize profits over people's needs?
So how has what's been happening in Iran and the wider Middle East affected all of this when it comes to our food security? Because we know here in Ireland, we import the grain that we use for bread. We import most of the fertilizer that we use in agriculture. So they're very apparent impacts. Where else does it take us?
Yeah, so it's very dangerous both in the short term and in the long term. So, you know, the fertiliser crisis is admittedly hitting other countries much harder than ours and Ireland or the UK. Africa is being absolutely hammered by it because many African countries are totally dependent on those imports of fertiliser from the Gulf and don't have other sources to draw on.
Also, farmers in a very parlous state in poorer countries can easily be driven over the brink by higher prices for fertiliser and for diesel and other supplies they need to farm. Even so, it's having an effect on farmers here as well, and it will have an effect on food prices. But much more dangerous, even than that, is what it could do to the global food system as a whole.
This system is on a knife edge. It is, as you said in your introduction, much like the financial system in the run-up to 2008, and for all the same reasons. Too few players have got too big to fail. They're all pursuing the same corporate strategies. They've cut their operations to the bone. It's just-in-time delivery. It's... all heavily financialized.
All of this is a recipe for catastrophic failure, for collapse. And when you look at the papers which have studied why the financial system went down or very nearly went down, it needed bailout amounting to trillions to stop it going down. All of those factors now apply to the global food system. It's really dangerous.
And there is a fundamental difference between the financial system and the food system is that when the financial system nearly went down, governments were able to bail it out by issuing future money in the form of quantitative easing. Well, you can't bail out the food system by issuing future food.
So what happens then? We run out of supplies?
Yes.
Well, so what could happen? And, you know, we don't when a system has lost its resilience, we don't know what the event which could tip it over the edge might be. You know, it could be something going on in the Gulf. It could be this fertilizer supply shock or indeed the oil supply shock.
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