One of the many striking comments in the documentary film Derek vs Derek (see page 8) is farmer, conservationist and author Derek Gow’s remark about food waste. ‘We waste a third of the food we produce in this country’, he says to neighbouring farmers concerned that using land to increase biodiversity will lead to food shortages. The comment speaks to one of the central misunderstandings about rewilding—that much of the land proposed to increase healthy biodiversity is not well suited to food production, and that creating corridors and pockets of biodiversity will help fertile land that would otherwise continue to be damaged by chemicals. In the film, a farmer at a cattle market turns to traditional dairy farmer Derek Banbury and says of rewilding, ‘It’s a joke, isn’t it? When the country’s starving, they’ll understand what they’ve done. It’ll be too bloody late by then.’ Derek Gow sees this argument as ‘patently absurd.’ He says he’ll accept there’s a ‘poverty and food crisis’ issue when ‘we’re prepared to eat all the horses, dig up all the golf courses and grow radishes on the lawns of Buckingham Palace’. Derek vs Derek doesn’t address all the arguments about biodiversity, but it certainly shows the polarisation of the discussion and the difficult economics of traditional farming. Explaining how his life is like a treadmill, Derek Banbury says: ‘People don’t know a thing about it. They think all food’s grown in Tesco’s.’ But as food gets cheaper, he has to milk more and more cows to maintain his income. According to government figures, the UK wastes over 9.52 million tonnes of food every year, enough to feed upwards of 30 million people. Taking a long-term view of biodiversity, alongside better education about food waste and more sensible packaging, would go a long way towards sustaining the nation’s food supply.
