Suppose we all ate a healthy diet...could our food supplies cope? This paper, by Tim Lobstein, is a presentation given at the Agri-Food Network, organised by Sustain on June 16 2004.

A very detailed presentation on food and health policy is found in Food, the new ecological public health and governance (attached below). This paper looks at food policy and the choices that face us. In so doing it gives a wealth of statistics on nutrition related ill-health in the UK and internationally, it shows how farming would need to change to meet our nutritional needs, analyses the theory and practice of policy making and its relationship with the evidence base, and argues that we are at a policy making crossroads.

A study by the Agribusiness and Economic Research Unit at Lincoln University in NZ uses a life cycle approach to calculate energy use and CO2 emissions associated with production and transport to UK of four NZ products: dairy, apples, onions and lamb. With the exception of onion, the results are positive in the sense that even if transport impacts are considered, NZ products still use less energy and have less corresponding emissions (in case of lamb on a ration of 4 to 1).