Future of Food

With food riots on three continents recently, and unprededented competition for food due to population growth and changing diets, there is a looming problem. George joins a Masai chief among the skeletons of cattle he has lost to climate change, and the English farmer who tells him why food production in the UK is also hit. He investigates what is wrong with people's diets and talks to top nutritionist Susan Jebb, DEFRA minister Hilary Benn and Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri to uncover what the future holds for our food.

In this episode, George heads out to India to discover how a changing diet in the developing world is putting pressure on the world's limited food resources. He finds out how using crops to produce fuel is impacting on food supplies across the continents. George then meets a farmer in Kent, who is struggling to sell his fruit at a profit, and a British farmer in Kenya who is shipping out tonnes of vegetables for the UK's supermarket shelves. He also examines why so many people are still dying of hunger after decades of food aid. Back in the UK, George challenges the decision-makers with the facts he has uncovered - from Oxfam head of research Duncan Green to Sainsbury's boss Justin King. He finds out why British beef may offer a model for future meat production and how our appetite for fish is stripping the world's seas bare.

From the two women working to make their Yorkshire market town self-sufficient to the academic who claims it could be better for the environment to ship in lamb from New Zealand, George meets the people who believe they know how we should feed the world as demand doubles by the middle of the century. He also heads out to Havana to find out how they are growing half of their fruit and vegetables right in the heart of the city, investigates the 'land-grabs' trend - where rich countries lease or buy up the land used by poor farmers in Africa - and meets the Indian agriculturalists who have almost trebled their yields over the course of a decade.