One new thread in a document generally viewed as big on aspiration but light on action is the role of the consumer in driving change.
By 2030, according to the document, consumers will be “aware of the origins of their food and understand the environmental and social impact of their choices.” They will “choose and afford healthy and sustainable food”. They will play a major part in achieving a low carbon food system. They will “express environmental concerns in the market place” and by demanding environmentally friendly products they will prod producers and processors into climate friendly innovation and invention.
They will be sufficiently educated to stop their current practice of wasting a third of the food they buy.
Net net, consumers will use their influence and spending power to support those who produce environmentally sound, sustainable, animal welfare friendly, healthy food.
It’s a lovely idea. How super to think that in just 20 years time Britain will be a nation of slim, fit, concerned individuals dedicated to spending their money only on the right type of food, bought in the right quantities, produced in the right way, and with a fair reward for those who produce it.
This is a massive attitude change, and raises the question of just how do you change consumer behaviour so radically.
It helps to have a following wind, and it is true to say that consumers are becoming more interested in eating healthily, want to know where their food comes from and how it is produced, and like to buy local foods. But it’s still a minority, and its an even smaller minority who are interested in things like the carbon footprint of their food. The document acknowledges that the topic of a sustainable diet is a “niche interest”.
The strategy document talks about encouraging change by putting information on the “eat well” website and make labelling more explicit. This is nowhere near enough. Getting the wholesale change described will require enormous advertising and promotional budgets, commitment from major retailers to disproportionately stock and display so called healthy and sustainable foods, and a situation where the price of the “right” food” is the same as, or only a few pence more than the “wrong” equivalent.
How big might the marketing and advertising budget need to be? In the year to March 2009, the government spent £540 million pounds on communicating anti smoking, climate change, anti obesity and road safety messages. This is a 59% increase since 2005, yet 25% of the population still smoke, and obesity levels do not seem to be falling. Big budgets do not guarantee success, particularly when it is government talking, and its interesting to note that one of the major shifts in consumer buying, the shift to higher welfare chicken, came about not through government action but through the efforts of celebrity chefs Oliver and Fearnley-Whittingstall.
Major retailers with their 80%+ share of grocery shopping will be crucial to consumer change. They are past masters at running with even a hint of consumer demand, but they are unlikely to support anything they see as overpriced or giving them a lower margin.
And on the subject of price, the search for the "right" food is unlikely to be accompanied by a major loosening of consumer purse strings. We know that consumers will pay a bit extra for something they value, but baulk at overpaying, as the recent collapse in organic sales has shown. One of the reasons Fair Trade has been so successful is that many of its products are sold at the same price as equivalents, such as bananas, Cadbury’s Fair Trade Dairy Milk chocolate, and Tate and Lyle’s Fair Trade sugar.
It will take alot to reach the Nirvana described in Food 2030, and at the end of the day one is left wondering what difference the attitude change, were it achieved, would make to producers. It would probably impact the actual foods that were produced, and how they were produced. It would not help the issue of how to produce more, and it would not address the issue of profitability. Which leads us back to the failure of the strategy document in that it is a social and environmental treatise, not a production plan.
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