Consumers have never cared more nor known less about the food they eat, director of the Food Systems Institute at the University of Nottingham Dr Jack Bobo has said.

It’s good that they care, he said, but it’s a problem that they don’t understand the food system.

“Science tells us what we can do and it’s the public that tells us what we should do.

ADVERTISEMENT

“If the public doesn’t allow us to bring innovations to market it doesn’t matter that you’ve come up with great solutions. Solutions only matter if they can be applied,” he told the ASA conference in the Killashee Hotel in Kildare last Thursday.

Farmers, he said, probably feel like they’re under attack from the public, alluding to a quote by Bill Gates where he said, by 2030, everyone will be eating synthetic meat.

“I don’t think most people want to be eating synthetic meat. They want to eat more sustainable food and eat healthier food, but synthetic meat, that doesn’t sound very appetising.

“The point that I’m making is the language that people are using to communicate about our food and our future. The future is divided.

“It’s making it harder for us to come up with solutions that don’t work together,” Bobo said.

Europe, he said, needs to step up in terms of innovation and it needs to find ways of improving productivity, so that it doesn’t have to export its environmental footprint.

Things, in terms of innovations, are getting better, but not at a fast enough rate, he argued.

“We have produced dramatically more food in the world today than we did back in 1960 on almost exactly the same landscape or the amount of acres under cultivation.

“There are about 3.6bn hectares of forests left on the planet and what people forget is that without innovation, if we were farming today the way we did in 1960, we would need 1bn additional hectares of land to produce the food that we do,” he said.

This, he said, is what agriculture has delivered and this has only happened due to improvements in agriculture.

“Agriculture may be the biggest driver of deforestation, but it is also the biggest reason forests exist,” he said.