Report back by Rob Squires on the Labour Party Conference fringe event at the Climate Clinic, Sun Sept 21st, 2008.

Two years ago, at the 2006 Climate Clinic I put the question to Alan Simpson MP (Nottingham), “What kind of government intervention can we expect, in order to support local food?” to which he replied that there was nothing in the pipeline what-so-ever. Two years later on, the situation does not seem to have changed significantly, although during this time the issues of the meet, dairy and fishing industries, on the environment, global food security, and health, have shot up the political agenda, from obscurity, to a point where their devastating effects are now acknowledged and beginning to be discussed in public.

Contained herein are links to a number of news articles, that appeared in national newspapers, concerning the  threat to global food security, caused by the interrelated problems of peaking oil supplies, biofuel production, climate change, the meat industy and human population growth. 

Guardian, December 02 2003, George Monbiot
Bottom of the barrel: The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to talk about it?
This is an old article but I have added a link to it here because it contains an excellent quote from Monbiot, which is very relevant to permaculture design:

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The Camel has the following primary design features:

• No nails! - the main 'rigging' is constructed from just pole wood and ropes;
• light weight canvas walls and roof, which easily hook on, and are pegged down with guy ropes;
• wheeley bins as receptacles for the humanure, which is then easily removed from site, where the 'product' can be composted safely

The first Camel was prototyped in 2007 in response to a request for compost toilets for the Northwest Neighbourhood at the Climate Camp. It quickly acquired the 'Camel' tag because of its characteristic central hump.