Have you caught yourself doing a double take at the price of something in the supermarket recently?  If so, you have ‘sticker shock’, an American phenomenon apparently, the incidence of which is rising along with the price of our food.

Sky News reports on this on their website, noting that even before the current dry spell, wheat prices had risen by 70% since last year, putting around 7% on everyone’s daily loaf.

But it’s not just the lack of rain that pushes up food prices.  Too much rain has ruined Spanish tomatoes, German gun-jumping over E-coli has put sales of European vegetables under pressure, and the earthquake/tsunami combination in Japan is predicted to have a complicated effect on the price of rice in future months.  Although Japan does not export much rice, it is a top 10 consumer and if it needs to bolster its consumption with more imports, this is likely to push up prices.

But weather, politics and earthquakes don’t do as much damage combined as the bankers, investors and money men who play the commodities market like a casino, according to a new report by Oxfam, Growing a Better Future.

They highlight how the current global food system works only for a few, producing massive profits and obesity epidemics, mountains of food waste and appalling environmental damage, while millions around the world teeter on the brink of food insecurity and starvation.

In this country, where our biggest food dilemma might be whether to eat a ready meal or a takeaway, it is easy to dismiss this as Somebody Else’s Problem.  But anyone who is trying to grow their own right now is only too well aware of how fragile our agriculture can be when faced with unco-operative weather.   We are currently spending up to an hour, twice a week, pouring water on our fruit and veg.  The plants are surviving, but that’s because we have access to the water and the ability to irrigate.  If water were scarce (as is swiftly becoming the case) and supermarkets not on every corner, the situation would be bleak.

Oxfam has it right.  It is our problem and we have to do something about it NOW.  Sustainable agriculture has to be the way forward, something Slow Food has always advocated.  Mixed farming, of the type seen pre-World War Two, must make a comeback and the megafarms, megadairies and battery farms of today consigned to the compost heap of industrial history.  Dr John Strak, special professor of food economics at Nottingham University, advised this approach in his research blog last month.

Just over eighteen months ago, when I visited Denmark, I was given a presentation on how pig farms might look in the future. In the future pig unit there will be no such thing as waste. No wasted heat, no wasted CO2 or methane, and no wasted nutrients or energy use in any form because the future farm will take all the outputs of pig production and use them to produce horticultural crops simultaneously alongside the production of live pigs. This is a new farm building typology that looks more like a ‘mixed farm’ and is potentially very positive for the environment.

Perhaps there’d be room for an investment banker or two?