Rosie Boycott (London's food Czar) and I had a meeting with farmers from the Home Counties to look at ways that London can eat more locally produced food. Boris joined us for part of the meeting but had to rush off to another appointment, although the farmers did present him with a rather nice basket of goodies.We discussed opening up more street markets, making it easier for farmers to supply pubic sector organisations and encouraging London kids to visit farms to see where food comes from. One of our biggest challenges is to shorten and simplify the supply chains which will help farmers, reduce costs to the consumer, support independent retailers and help save our street markets. But it won't be an easy task.
If you think that living in a city next to the Garden of England would mean that we get the bulk of Kent's produce, think again. I have now heard about peas from Kent going via freezing facilities on the continent and then back to supermarkets in London. Or how about the nearest big abattoir being in the West Country, meaning Sussex lamb goes on a nice 350 mile round trip just to get to south London. Or Kent raspberries being sold in Dundee while Scottish Raspberries are on sale in Greenwich. Bonkers.
Posts
6 comments:
great idea .. sometime in the super market culture of supply chain management and optimisation the common sense is priced out ..
Excellent stuff, James. Our farmers need as much assistance as they can get after years of abuse from this Labour government and the corruption of the EU hasdecimated their livlihood.
Local abattoirs were shut down because of the EU. (don't have time to give refs, sorry).
STB.
Nothing wrong with shipping raspberries to the other end of the country. Nothing wrong with sending goods to Holland and back - in principle...
Let the free market decide what makes economic sense.
Remember: The abatoirs were closed by laws created by politicians who thought they knew better than the free market.
Just check out what Tim Worstall had to say about Rosie Boycott:
http://timworstall.com/2008/10/01/rosie-boycott-3/
She said:
"As the financial hub of the city crumbles, we have to find a way to build a food system that will make us all the more resilient to future shocks;"
Tim responds:
"Oh, agreed, we do.
Now, what would be the most resilient system possible? That would be one where we get our food from a wide variety of places. One where we are not dependent upon the weather in a particular growing season, a particular location.
That is, we would move as far as we could to a global trading system to suppply our food. Not a system which relied upon what we can grow within 10, 50 or 100 miles of where we happen to be.
What is it that Rosie suggests? That we should move away from the global market and produce more of our food locally.
Twit"
Once again the ridiculous laws of the EU make a mockery of things don't you think!!
Brown could easily save the Pound but he does not want to he wants us in the European Project.
Had he not sold off our Gold to his Bilderberg Puppetmasters he could have backed the Pound with gold.
With most of the Worlds currency being nothing more than worthless IOU's ( backed by our and our childrens labour of course ) how popular would the Pound be now.
Give me control of a nations money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.
It's all deliberate, Brown could stop this TODAY, all he has to do is Print, rather than Borrow.
This is about global enslavement.
If westminster had Printed EXACTLY the same amount of money as we have Borrowed over the past decades, would our children be enslaved by £1Trillion worth of Debt.
http://adrianpeirson.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!CB609AA4E892F479!121.entry
Post a Comment