Food expert delivers verdict (From Tewkesbury Admag)

Food expert delivers verdict

5:00pm Sunday 8th November 2009 in Evesham Vale

RURAL areas were coming into a new time of importance as the combined pressures of the shortage of resources and climate change made questions of land use and food production pressing in a way that they had not been for many years.

Those were the sentiments of Sir Don Curry, former chairman of the Sustainable farming and Food Delivery Group and author of the influential 2002 Curry Report, when he opened a major rural policy conference in Cheltenham.

The Rural Policy and Local Assets conference was organised by the Countryside and Community Research Institute. A number of prominent speakers facilitated stimulating topical debates on many current hot rural issues, such as food security, currently under threat from climate change and population growth.

Organiser Dr Paul Courtney, assistant director and reader in rural economy in the CCRI, said: “The policy conference provided an ideal opportunity to present contemporary rural topics based on evidence from CCRI’s latest research and to open them up for discussion and debate by national and local policy makers, researchers and academics.”