PLATFORMSustainability and responsible food production will be key to our thinking in future, writes Fergal Quinn

AN BORD Bia was established in 1994 on the basis that the food business was where Ireland's future lay - in export-driven, value-added food.

The potential for jobs and economic growth lay not just in agriculture, but in Ireland becoming both the farmyard for the world's consumers and the kitchen - gaining a reputation for high quality prepared foods.

With this in mind, I attended the CIES World Food Business Summit in Munich recently.

That annual meeting of food business executives from around the world does not limit itself to what is happening in the supermarket. It looks to the future. This year's meeting was no exception, and considered interesting issues from unusual points of view.

The theme of the summit was Growth and Sustainability - building profit with responsibility. This topic whetted the appetites of retailers but even more so the Irish food producers that Bord Bia represents so effectively with its promotion of "Ireland - the food island".

The speaker who caught our attention on the first day was Patricia Glyn from South Africa. She had written a book about retracing her great-great grand uncle's 2,200-kilometre journey from Durban, South Africa to the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. She was following the path of her ancestor Sir Richard Glyn, who had travelled that route in 1863 and kept a diary.

She told an interesting story not just about the long journey, but about how it changed her life. She used the trek as a way of explaining to a gathering of business executives from around the world the impact that modern living can have on the natural environment.

Travelling on foot (she called it "footing" rather than walking) through Botswana, a country where cattle outnumber people, brought home to her the damage that overgrazing can cause to a nation's ecology.

The figure that caught the attention of the audience was that it takes 10,000 litres of water to create one kilo of beef. She suggested that if such usage was to continue, it would not be sustainable. "We are robbing our children of their future more through what we eat than through what we drive." Water shortage will become more of a crisis than the oil shortage.

In a world of six billion people - forecast to rise to eight billion by 2025 - the use of scarce resources will exercise the minds of governments around the globe in the years to come.

Water is one of those scarce resources and, while recent weather in Ireland may not convince us of that, it is likely that it will become unacceptable for us to waste water and still be regarded as responsible citizens of the world.

Another figure that jumped out at us was that 20 per cent of the world's population (ie the developed world) consume 80 per cent of the world's food. At the same time, Gorta tells us that 6,000 children die each day from hunger.

In the past number of years we have had pollution of our water on a large scale. We have seen lakes and rivers become death traps for the life they should support and we have had our drinking water contaminated to the point that it now needs regular checking before we trust it.

If we are to be a food producing nation in the future, our impact on the international market will come from adhering to the highest standards. One of the major planks in that will be the recognition we earn as a nation that acts with a global social responsibility for the citizens of the developing world. Can the world continue to use a scarce resource like water in less than an efficient manner?

Sustainability and responsible food production are going to play an important role in our thinking in the years ahead.

"No man is an island," wrote John Donne in the 16th century. "No country is an island" could be the slogan of the 21st century, and the phrase "Ireland - the food island", which is the perfect brand for the Irish food business in this decade, may yet prove not to be an acceptable trademark for the coming century.

Feargal Quinn is an independent member of Seanad Éireann and chairman of EuroCommerce