On May 31 Caroline Lucas, the Green Party's Euro-MP for South-East England, addressed Leicester Green Party's Coalition Dinner, held at Woodgate Resource Centre, on the topic: 'Food & Farming after Foot & Mouth - Where Next?'. Ms Lucas is Vice-President The European Parliament's Committee of Inquiry into the Foot and Mouth Crisis. A key question to be answered, she said, must be why 11 million mostly healthy animals were slaughtered at an economic cost of £20 billion, to safeguard meat and dairy exports worth only an annual £600 million. Even this figure for meat exports is misleading, she added, as many of our meat and dairy exports are cancelled out by imports of similar products from the same countries as we export to. Such policies, she said, belong more to Alice in Wonderland than to a system of rational priorities.
Instead of the export-oriented intensive agricultural policies that produced this grotesque over-reaction, she said, we should be attempting to move towards greater self-sufficiency in food. Apart from other considerations such as public health and animal welfare, export-oriented food transport is one of the fastest-growing sources of global warming. A kilo of New Zealand apples is transported at the cost of a kilo of carbon dioxide emissions, but the true cost of this is not reflected in the price because air fuel escapes taxation.