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'The consumer doesn't seem to be part of the picture,' sighed a company director recently. We were in a meeting about initiatives to revamp the food sector and an innovative idea had just been presented. I shared the director's frustration. I often see how companies work on innovations with the best of intentions without investigating whether their product will appeal to consumers.

The LEI report 'Voedselprijzen en speculatie op agrarische termijnmarkten' (Food prices and speculation on agricultural futures markets) aims to bring clarity into the sometimes heated debate on the role of speculation in the high food prices.

In its recently published advice to the Dutch government, the Council for Public Health and Health Care (Raad voor de Volksgezondheid en Zorg, RVZ) requests that the government consider the implementation of a fat tax. In short, the message states that if food is made more expensive, we will lose weight. But the effect of increasing prices must not be exaggerated. The demand for food products is relatively insensitive to changing prices. Food needs to be significantly more expensive to have an effect on demand. Increasing VAT by 13% will not work wonders.

The current economic situation calls for innovation - in the agro-food and horticulture sectors as well. The Dutch government has understood that in good time. But there are plenty of pitfalls in the current approach. Innovation is not the same as developing new technologies and spreading knowledge.

This year’s World Food Day was held on 16 October. It is an event that first took place in 1979 and which aims to remind us that there is still hunger in the world. In the Netherlands, we use this day to discuss how we can help victims of famine. There is no obvious answer to this question, as can be seen from the debate on development aid which was triggered by the famine in the Horn of Africa. Although almost 25 million euros has been collected by Giro 555, five in six Dutch people have not given anything because they were worried that the money would not reach the people who need it.

In just a couple of weeks the world’s population will hit 7 billion. This figure gives little cause for satisfaction – and becomes all the more alarming on learning that by mid-century the population is expected to reach no less than 9 billion. However, I have young children, so I can’t afford to be pessimistic.

The topic of risk management comes up every so often, most recently in the case of the EHEC (enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli) crisis. The purpose of this article is not to examine the horrific situation of the people infected with EHEC, but rather to discuss the economic consequences of the crisis for the Dutch horticultural sector. Within a few weeks, the economic losses had risen to more than 200 million euros, at a time when the sector was just making its way out of a slump. Sales of several types of vegetables dropped for various reasons, including the stagnation of sales in shops and the closing of the borders in a number of countries. As a result, the prices plummeted to an all-time low. Many vegetables were removed from the sales channels altogether. Banks soon had to step in. All in all, it’s not something to instil pride in a top sector, especially when you consider that everything was the result (as we now know) of false accusations. This is a typical case of a catastrophe risk – in other words, a risk with extreme financial consequences which has only a very small chance of taking place.

Today, the wagging index finger has made way for the raised middle finger. In the current political and social system, the allergic reaction to any recommended behaviour or intervention reigns.