st_ouennais

I have been asked why I haven't commented on the removal of GST on food.  The answer is that is has very little to do with food.  It has every hallmark of the pre-election give away beloved of politicians in power of every colour and hue and in every electoral system.  If our beloved leaders really cared about basic food prices they could have gone so much further.  In practice removing 3%  is going to make no material difference when prices are rising at 6% in a month (Office of National Statistics figures for July).

Before anyone fron the States claims no one saw the price rises coming before GST was introduced, I would point them to the November 2005 edition of the Jersey Organic Assocation newsletter, issue 65:

"A topical article from JOA member Mark Forskitt

Few can have missed the recent rise in the price of oil, but have you thought about what that means for farming and the price of food? You may think the main use of oil on a farm is driving tractors and machinery, and you would be right, but only just. On average 34% of the energy used in agriculture goes into ploughting, tilling and growing. That is only just ahead of the 28% used for producing artificial fertilizer. There is also some used in pesticides manufacture too. That sounds like good news for organic farmers, since every time the price of oil rises the costs to them rise more slowly than to conventional farmers.  If the price were high enough it would be cheaper to produce organically than conventionally.  Unfortunatley for the consumer this won't help much with the price of organic food since takes 4 to 5 times as much energy to process, package,transport and store food as it does to produce that food (based on US figures).

If oil prices continue to rise, farming practices will come under pressure. Growing crops to convert to diesel substitutes (bio-diesel) is perfectly possible, but it means land that could be used for food crops is them used for bio fuels.  This appears to be the main reason the Soil Association discourages growing bio fuels. I don't fully hold with that, after all for many centuries farmers have grown hay to feed horses to provide power on the land. This is just a different way to the same end. It does beg the question whether we have enough land to do this? It may be a marginal answer given the extra mouths we now have to feed.

According to the Ecology Action organisation in the US, conventional farming practices using fossils foods take typically 20,000 square feet to grow all the food for one person given the typical US diet. That is a vergee per person. They also reckon it is possible to grow all of one person's food needs in an organic and sustainable way without any fossil fuels on 4,000 square feet if you are prepared to have a vegan diet.  To put that in the Jersey context our 31,000 vergees under cultivation could feed around 1/3 of the population using conventional means and twice our population if we adopted the Ecology Action biodynamic approach . However their biodynamic method is labour intensive. A gallon of petrol contains the energy equivalent of 500 hours human labour - enough to propel a three tone vehicle about ten miles.  I estimate that to produce all the islands needs without fossil  fuels would mean having 25,000 people employed directly in agriculture.

UK government figures for 1995 show households with annual incomes over £30,000 spent 16% on food, while those households with incomes less than £6,250 spent 25% on food. Compare that with figures for those parts of  the world where food is still largely grown by hand and people can spend 60% of their income on food. This suggests hand grown food would cost 2 to 3 times the proportion of household expenditure as oil dependent growing practices.  If that sounds absurd, think in this. Looking back at that 25,000 people figure to grow all our own food, and assuming a minimum wage of  £5 per hour, it would cost around £250 million in labour to feed the island.  That's around £3,000 per person, or 30% of the income of someone on minimum wage, just for the labour to produce the food.  The real cost has to add land rent, seed, social security, tax, packaging, storage, marketing and distribution. All of which at least doubles the price to the consumer.

So if oil becomes scares and human labour leads to expensive food, what are the options?
Horses might make sense, but there are now so few working horses it would take generations of active breeding to produce enough to make a difference. Where would we find enough skilled staff to do the farrowing and handle horses in work? Bio-diesel might help- at least we can produce is fairly quickly.  You can produce around 40 gallons of bio-diesel from a vergee of oilseed rape.

According to a study written by Drs. Van Dyne and Raymer for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the average US farm consumes fuel at a rate of 8.75 gallons/acre of land., say 4 gallons per vergee., So setting aside one tenth of the agricultural land to grow bio-diesel crops would do. Typical costs of producing  bio-diesel on a small commercial scale are around 35 pence per litre., comparable to current red diesel prices. Paying 10 percent more for your food to cover the lost 10 percent  from production seems more reasonable than the other options. For the organic grower there is the benefit of being able to compost the bulk material of the crop once oil bearing seed heads are harvested. I think the Soil Association needs to review it's antipathy to bio-diesel for on-farm power."