Food, Inc. highlights one of the most crucial choices of our time. Everyone now agrees that action is needed if we are to feed the world’s growing population. At the same time we need to address climate change and protect our environment for future generations. 

But which way forward? There are two very different options.

On the one hand, business as usual but up a gear – more high-tech, high-input farming, dependent on pesticides and fertilisers. A hope that technical fixes such as GM and a reliance on intensive livestock production will produce enough food based on the existing western diet. This approach ignores finite resource constraints, fails to address climate change and ignores diet-related ill health – in short it appears to us to be totally unsustainable.

The alternative requires a switch to farming systems which rely on renewable inputs to build soil fertility. It also requires a rebalancing of diets away from over consumption. At the same time we should be eating less meat and dairy products from grass-fed livestock.

This is the approach favoured by the Soil Association and forms the basis of their work.

To make a donation or for more information about their work and how you can get involved, please go to www.soilassociation.org