Opinion: There are too many people and food is too cheap
© Adobe Stock I can’t be alone in looking at the outcome of the COP30 summit and wondering whether there is any point to these negotiations at all.
Delegates flew from across the globe to attend a meeting which the US boycotted, any mention of fossil fuels was excised from the agenda and the proceedings ended with the venue catching fire, which seemed strangely appropriate.
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For an elected leader trying to solve climate change or any of the other associated ills, it must be like trying to square the proverbial circle… with an elephant sitting in the middle of it.
Anyone with half a brain can see that digging oil, coal and gas out of the ground and burning them, thereby releasing millions of years of captured carbon, might have something to do with our present predicament.
But a prime minister who wanted to stay in office – especially if he was already fairly unpopular – would have to legislate to make it much more expensive to fly on foreign holidays, import shoddy consumer goods from halfway round the world and ride around all day in oversized cars.
He or she would be dragged by their heels from Parliament with a baying mob in attendance. It must be so much less challenging to divert the blame onto the ruminants which have coexisted with humanity for millennia.
Almost all of the pressures we find ourselves under as farmers stem from one simple fact – most food is too cheap.
More than a quarter of the British population are clinically obese, food producers operate as beggars at the bottom of the producer chain and the government finds itself paying for farm support schemes at one end and, at the other, £126bn to deal with the consequences for public health and productivity.
Pollutants fill the River Wye and all the time it’s so much safer and more politically convenient to blame the farmers and not the idiots who expect to gorge themselves on bargain chicken nuggets with no thought for the consequences.
But an elected politician deliberately trying to make food less affordable would be kicked down the street by the Daily Mail, roasted by Nigel Farage and probably ensure their party lost power for a generation.
There really are no easy answers, and the steps needed to start fixing the system would require some inspired leadership and an education system that would encourage people to respect themselves and their environment.
People need to feel valued and recognise their inextricable connection to their community and their landscape.
As farmers, many of us probably take these things for granted. Few people get to stand for long in a farmyard without being given something useful to do, and our entire living depends on our relationship with the countryside that is our workplace.
True leadership can be hard to spot in an age where any sense of balance or nuance often gets flattened under an avalanche of vote-chasing populists offering bullhorn solutions to complex problems.
If you can’t be bothered to think too deeply about the issues then it’s probably quite seductive to vote for the sort of people who’d rather you didn’t.
But maybe the ultimate elephant in the room is the growing consensus that there are just too many of us trying to live on one planet. And I have no idea how you start to solve that one.