A way to turn the tables
As you munched your way through breakfast this morning, what ran through your mind? Your kids’ exams, planning the weekend, your next journey abroad? Whatever it was, I will bet you did not think about the journey your food took from farm to fork. It is so easy to buy any food at any time of year now there seems no reason to think about it.
But behind the colourful array of your supermarket’s fruit and veg lie dark secrets. Press your ear to the ground and you’ll hear whisperings of exploitation, pollution, community decline and unemployment. And these whisperings are gradually turning into shouts as more and more people wake up to the reality of the issues surrounding their food.
Watch Martin's interview Most farms produce monoculture crops, where the same crops are planted in the same fields year after year with no crop rotation. But monocultures can not last into the future.
“Rising energy prices, climate change and increasing population mean there is increasing need for sustainable agriculture and local food systems,” said Martin Wolfe of the Elm Farm Research Centre near Fress-ingham. “The costs of producing food will become very high because of the price rise in energy. We just can’t do it.”
Sustainable agriculture is the most viable way to ensure we have decent and plentiful food while simultaneously helping the countryside and communities. As Norwich City green councillor Adrian Ramsay said, “Sustainable agriculture is good for the environment and good for the local economy.” Mr Wolfe said, “There are very simple things we can do. For example, if you have a mixture of three or four varieties of wheat or barley in a field, the rate of disease spread compared to having a monoculture can be very much reduced.” 
Watch Adrian's interview
Cheap supermarket produce makes us think we Are getting a bargain deal on food. But while you scratch around the bottom of your purse for a few pennies to pay the checkout girl, hundreds of millions of pounds from your tax money is being used to clean up the mess left by giant retailers’ push for low prices.
Modern agriculture damages our environment and society, and repairing it is costing us dear. “Because we have high standards on water quality in this country, we have to pay between £300-£400 million a year cleaning up because farmers misuse water”, said UEA professor Tim O’Riordan. “The loss to biodiversity and other damage to the landscape costs another half billion.”
Until supermarkets start paying fair prices for what they buy, public money will continue to fund repair to the countryside. In an ideal world, those who are causing the damage would be able to sell their produce profitably even after these added costs
It’s not just the consumer and environment who are paying the price of cheap food. All over the region, small farmers and processors are forced to diversify just to survive, meaning they have less time and fewer resources to supply East Anglia with plentiful produce.
Clem Tompsett, managing director of Tompsett Burgess Growers at Isleham near Ely, said “It’s nearly impossible for small producers to compete. If I’d stayed as small as when I started in 1954 I wouldn’t be in farming today.” Felthorpe farmer Oliver Arnold agreed: “The problem we have is securing a sensible price and that is dictated by the supermarket. Their buying power needs to be reduced to give the smaller retailers a chance.” 
Watch Oliver's interview
A local merchant supplying veg to the big UK supermarkets, who asked not to be named, told the EDP, “There are so many things supermarkets do that make your hair curl. One of the giant supermarkets has only three suppliers for carrots and parsnips across the whole of the UK. That means the numbers of growers of fruit and vegetables is declining year on year, and the acreage of those that remain is getting bigger because of the volumes that the su-permarkets want.”
It’s not just the small producers who’ve lost out. The large suppliers with supermarket contracts have it tough too. The ‘Big Four’ retailers (Tesco, Asda, Safeway and Sainsburys) are abusing their freedom to decide buying and selling prices by setting them unrealistically low. Mr Tompsett’s experience is typical of large suppliers: "The multiples are all competing and are trying to cut the price to gain a little more business, and it’s all passed back to the grower. We had some very good years in the 1970s and 1990s when we made real money, but it's not like that today. I'm showing a 3pc return on my capital this year, which isn't good when I've got to invest for the year ahead. I'd get more at the bank. Why then do I continue growing vegetables? Well it's in my blood and I do still enjoy the challenge but it's now a very tough industry."
Watch Tim's interview The obvious choice for farmers in this scenario is to find another buyer who offers a fairer price. If only it were that simple. In reality, supermarkets are so powerful they have created dependency by telling farmers to grow two or three varieties in large enough quantities to supply all their stores. “If you can’t meet the supermarket’s re-quirements you can’t go anywhere else because no one can buy such huge volumes”, according to the merchant. “Nine out of 10 producers supplying a supermarket aren’t allowed to supply other supermarkets, so you’re basically locked in to one person.”
Once supermarkets have suppliers clinched in a deal they buy the produce at increasingly lower prices, which sup-pliers have no alternative but to accept.
As if that weren’t bad enough, suppliers are losing out even more because of supermarkets’ strict standards of what they call quality, where decent produce is discarded because it doesn’t match the required size, shape or colour. “Supermarkets have in the past concentrated on high quality looking food, and they’ve often been fairly punishing on their supply chains to ensure producers are meeting those standards,” explained Professor O’Riordan. Mr Tompsett knows this: "The consumer has been brain washed into buying a perfect looking product so if there's a slight little blemish or bend in the carrot it gets thrown away, even though it would have tasted just as good as the rest of them. Just 2p a kilo is the difference between a breakeven position and a profit margin.”
As this vicious cycle of exploitation and dependency continues, we have fewer and fewer farmers left in the re-gion. “The average age of farmers is mid-50s now”, says the merchant. “There are very few young growers in East Anglia.”
Supermarkets are not the only baddies in town. Government regulations have increasingly rewarded mass-scale production, leaving the locals out in the cold. “The regulators are punishing the small producers who are doing excellent work but simply can’t get their acts together in terms of costs. It’s very expensive to do things small scale,” reported Professor O’Riordan.
And rural funds are being cut rather than boosted. Baroness Sue Miller, Liberal Democrat Spokesperson for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs in the Lords, stated, “Our rural development budget is being cut by up to a third. This will really undermine all the efforts the government’s making to make agriculture more sustainable. It’s a disaster.” 
Watch the Baroness's full
interview video
Lack of funding means people all over East Anglia are losing their fundamental right to a dignified and solvent livelihood from food production. It makes a farce of the claim that government works to nurture local prosperity.
What does all this mean for your local community? Centralisation and the subsequent loss of small-holder produc-tion mean a loss to community autonomy. The supermarkets argue back, saying their stores create local employ-ment and wider consumer choice.
Yet communities are actually losing money as profits are taken to distant places. As local retailers go out of busi-ness and farmers are forced to grow limited crops, consumer choice actually decreases. It’s getting to the point where supermarkets are dictating what East Anglia will be eating for dinner.
If we want more choice in the nutritional quality and range of the food on offer to us, and if we want the local countryside and communities to be enhanced, we need to make agriculture more sustainable. This will mean changing production methods and the balance of power in the supply chain so all involved are treated fairly.
For this to happen, Tim O’Riordan emphasises that “both the suppliers and the retailers need to think about the whole idea of making food local and seasonal.” Some supermarkets have already started making noises to the tune of this, but as Baroness Sue Miller points out, “they need to walk the walk as opposed to talking the talk, which is all they do at the moment.” They and the government urgently need to make local and seasonal production and sourcing the most profitable option for farmers, processors and retailers. And they need to make it the cheapest and most convenient choice for consumers.
Watch Nick's videoNick Saltmarsh, a project manager at East Anlgia Food Link, said “There’s increasing recognition that we shouldn’t buy food from the cheapest source but the most sustainable source, where the total cost to the environ-ment and society is the lowest.” But buying sustainably doesn’t mean you can’t continue to enjoy cheap food. “If we eat the things that are in season and when they’re at their best, they’re also at their cheapest because they’re being produced in the most sustainable way with the fewest inputs,” he added.
Every person in East Anglia can make a difference. The more we all do simultaneously, the bigger impact it will have on powerful decision makers.