Northern Ireland vs. Northern Italy

Whilst locked in emergency talks at the Stormont Assembly, I was surprised to see Gordon Brown, in a natural-resource rich region like Northern Ireland help himself to an Italian water brand in a cabinet office.

Pig Business!

Marchioness ‘Tracy’ of Worcester invited MP’s at Westminster to see her hard-hitting film Pig Business, which challenges the pork industry and campaigns for pig welfare, with the support of Zac Goldsmith, Tom Parker Bowles and actress Miranda Richardson.

Worcester told the Evening Standard ‘Until there is a mandatory country of origin and welfare label on pork, I believe we must ban the import of animals that are produced to a lower standard’.

Foodservice Footprint awaits eagerly to hear whether Pig Business has a similar impact to The End of The Line and makes a true measurable difference.

Unilever embracing the principles of sustainability?

Foodservice Footprint recently suggested that business leaders should be aware of the bigger picture and not succumb to ‘path dependency’. We were thus delighted to hear Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, argue along similar lines, by making an impassioned plea at a session in Davos to ignore demands of short-term shareholders and lead from the front on sustainability and climate change.

Mr Polman joined Unilever a year ago and has had an eye on the long-term success of the business and not merely on shareholder value. According to The Times ‘this required him to take costly actions to ensure it had a sustainable business, for example in terms of palm oil supplies’. Mr. Polman commented ‘We want to be in business for the next 500 years’. Has Unilever grasped the principles of sustainability?

Oh to be a forecaster…

When I was young our summer seaside holiday was spent on the east Northumbrian coast. The weather was generally iffy to say the least and our method of forecasting was to hang seaweed outside the door which was remarkably accurate.

Today our weather forecasts are the result of rather more sophisticated, highly intricate and extremely expensive computer models, so we should perhaps expect even higher levels of accuracy.

Not so. ‘Barbeque summer’, the Met Office said, winter ‘milder and wetter than average’. Poor chaps – they just can’t get it right can they. Where do they get their data from? Surprise surprise … the same computer models as are used to predict climate change … the one’s recently discredited as being manipulated to suit certain vested interest. Funny that…

Another ‘Dodgy Dossier’?

With the Sunday papers full of the news that the IPCC has begrudgingly withdrawn another of its wilder claims – that of the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 -the rumble of climate change ‘deniers’ grows louder by the minute.

The story here is that the 2035 claim was made originally in a paper by a Dr.Syed Hasnain who works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) of which IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri happens to be Director General. It now turns out, according to Dr Murari Lal, the co-ordinating lead author on the asian section of the IPCC 2007 report, that the authors were aware the statement was unsound, but kept it in because ‘We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action’.

Does anyone see a parallel with the 45 minutes scenario currently under discussion in the Iraq enquiry?

That aside, this is yet another own goal by the IPCC following the manipulated data scenario in the autumn. What is worrying is that the more these stories emerge, the more they will enflame public cynicism towards the whole environmental issue and that, in many minds, includes the very real issues of sustainability facing the world at large and the food industry in particular.

Initial thoughts on Food 2030

A couple of points that need to be addressed regarding DEFRA’s campaign Food 2030 announced today:

One of the aims is to reduce greenhouse gas in the food chain and another is to cut food waste and use technologies that allow us to create energy from the waste we can’t avoid.

As far as I am aware most of the bigger businesses in foodservice have taken gigantic leaps in this direction already, with very little or no help from the current government. To that extent the smaller foodservice businesses cannot afford to do so. So I wonder what the government is proposing to assist smaller businesses?

Furthermore, Hilary Benn is still banging the 5 A Day drum, although it is common knowledge that if the entire population were to actually follow this directive, the environmental impact would be disastrous.