20 January 2005 - Eating local organic food and government pressure on destructive EU and WTO trade rules is needed to break supermarket dominance over farmers and rural communities – and tackle Britain’s spiralling obesity epidemic, Euro-MP Caroline Lucas will tell a panel of food experts this week.

Dr Lucas, Green Party MEP for South-East England, will join food and environment experts Vandana Shiva, Tim Lang, Jerry Mander and Satish Kumar in London this Saturday (January 22nd) for a debate on food policy organized by Resurgence Magazine.

She said: “With our farmers shackled in an armlock by ever more powerful supermarkets, our children suffering from record levels of obesity as a result of unhealthy diets, food scandals splashed on the front pages of our newspapers and our food travelling ever-greater distances to reach us, it’s clear that our food system is in urgent need of change.”

The panel will discuss the farmers’ markets, community gardens, box schemes and a wide range of other innovative local food projects which are springing up, in the South East and across the country, showing how it is possible to produce and distribute food that doesn’t cost the earth, or consumers’ health, and make a profit at the same time.

Dr Lucas, who has published widely on the impact of international trade and the dominance of supermarkets on the food we eat, added: “Local action is vital, but we also need to change national and international policies that currently discriminate against local food producers in favour of international trade and big business.”

Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence Magazine, added: “After water, food is the most important part of our life. Yet we have allowed our food growing and production to be hijacked by large anonymous global companies who have no interest in nutrition, the environment or our good health.

“We have organised Saturday’s debate to bring together some of the leading thinkers in the field of sustainable food. We will examine the production of food from the moment the seed goes into the earth, to it being picked up by your fork or spoon. The afternoon promises to be stimulating and challenging."

Other organisations involved in hosting the debate include The Ecologist magazine, The Gaia foundation and the international forum on Globalisation.

ENDS