I had the pleasure of speaking to Pete Smith, who is a climate change expert from the University of Aberdeen and who many members will know. I will tread carefully so that I do not misrepresent what he said when we interviewed him. His general view was that, when it comes to food production, the most efficient thing that we can do, by one measure, is grow everything as intensively as we can, but that is a very narrow way of looking at things. Extensive sheep and beef farming is very efficient, because the ratio of human edible input to human edible output is most advantageous in that system. Such systems also lock up a huge amount of carbon. Therefore, it would be wrong to say that, because—in global terms—they deliver a relatively small amount of food, those more extensive systems are not that important.
As the south—if you want to call it that—becomes hotter and more arid, there will be greater emphasis on the north. Pete Smith’s analysis is that we are eating too much meat here in the west but they are not eating enough in the developing world. In future, there will probably be a greater focus on us to produce the meat that the developing world wants to eat. I therefore do not think that the answer is one or the other—it is both, or all of these things, and we have to try to balance them.
It would be wrong to say that, because more extensive systems do not deliver much food, they are not that important and we should focus on other things. You would lose the carbon sequestration benefits and you would take away one of the more efficient ways of producing food, strange though it may seem. In addition, you would not really be putting us in a very good position—if we were to be selfish about it—to capitalise on the difficulties elsewhere in the world. That is what we will be doing: other nations will look to us to provide the food that they can no longer produce.