CAP should focus on healthy not cheap food

A group of academics have called for a shift in the aims of the CAP, to place greater focus on feeding people well, rather than cheaply, in a bid to tackle Europe’s obesity crisis.

The Food Research Collaboration (FRC) has published a report, Does the CAP still fit, which calls for the CAP to move away from focusing on farming to become a Common Food Policy.

The report’s authors – Alison Bailey from Lincoln University in New Zealand, Tim Lang from the Centre for Food Policy at City University and Victoria Schoen an FRC research fellow – said there is overwhelming evidence at local, national and global levels that food systems need to change.

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“Reports and analyses have consistently suggested that for a number of reasons – environmental, public health, economic and social – the model of food based on producing ever more food, ever more ‘cheaply’, has had serious negative impacts,” it said.

“We should not continue to eat diets which add to climate change, pile on costly burdens of disease, and maintain a fantasy that food systems can continue to be fossil-fuel based in an era of rapid climate change.”

The report points to the environmental costs of intensive farming, with biodiversity loss an issue and food production a major cause of climate change.

Waste was now endemic and obesity was more extensive than hunger, leading to rising costs of healthcare from consumers eating a poor diet and consuming too many sweet, fatty, salty “ultra-processed” foods.

The UK, like all EU member states needed to review its entire food system, regardless of the outcome of the referendum on EU membership, said the report.

“A country such as the UK, which is heavily reliant on food imports from the EU, and where indigenous food production is slowly declining – particularly worrying in horticulture – needs to take its food policy more seriously than it currently does.”

Professor Lang, a senior advisor to the FRC, said their critique was the CAP was still too focused on farming when it needed to reconnect with public health, ecosystems and feeding people well.

“CAP should become a Common Sustainable Food Policy. This is what the scientific evidence suggests. The problem is that policymakers are either too hesitant or dazzled by a belief that technology will resolve future food problems. They cannot. Food culture also needs to change.”