Now I have a vision of Melchie and Maryjo skipping daintily through their allotments randomly spraying copper and fairy liquid all over the shop, singing Hare, Hare -eeeeeeuhhh!

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I’d have more sympathy with her objection if she had drawn any attention at the time to the fact that a House of Commons Select Committee had thrown serious doubts on the endlessly repeated claim that we need to double food production by 2050, or increase it by 50% by 2030, in order to feed the world’s growing population. A far as I know, she didn’t. Nor did she shout from the rooftops when the Government, in reply to the Select Committee, admitted that the figures looked a bit dodgy. They actually suggested that if you went back far enough and did the calculations from an earlier date, the science on which these claims are meant to be based could suggest a nearly doubling of food production might be needed. That sounds to me like a significantly bigger scandal than the leaked emails about climate change from East Anglia University. It is a scandal which is central to much of the agricultural press’ coverage of the future of farming.

Yet numerous senior figures from the Government, the NFU and GM companies have continued to use these figures, never once challenged by the agricultural press, or by Caroline herself. The fact is, it took the Soil Association’s “silly name-calling” to get Caroline, or indeed anyone else, to sit up and take notice.

I hope people will also notice that the authors of the original scientific paper which looked at projections (not desirable goals) for food production globally said quite clearly that increasing food production will not solve the problem of malnutrition and starvation. Indeed, increasing production is not a good predictor of whether starvation and hunger will be reduced. More important is to transform: access to food; the ability to buy food; and the ability of developing countries to produce more of their own food themselves, rather than, as now, increasingly relying on imports.

Caroline, if you see me dancing around my ‘organic allotment’, it will be because we’ve finally got all of our Spring crops drilled after the long, cold and wet winter. And by the way, even Defra have caught up with the fact that min-til systems are not necessarily better for climate change, and not many people are claiming nowadays that GM crops reduce inputs, given clear evidence from the USA of overall increases of pesticide use on GM crops.

Peter Melchett

Policy Director, Soil Association