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Agency Chief Scientist Dr Andrew Wadge talks about the City Food Lecture
in his blog posting on organics. Check it out, and join the debate, at
food.gov.uk/scienceblog.
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Complete coverage of this
meeting is now available.
To view the video-on-demand
now please select your
preferred bandwidth:
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The panellists are:
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Lord Peter Melchett
Policy Director, Soil Association
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Dame Deirdre Hutton
Chair of the Food Standards Agency
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Sir Stuart Hampson
Chairman, John Lewis Partnership
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Tim Smith
Chief Executive, Arla Foods UK plc
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Prue Leith
Chair, School Food Trust
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Professor Tim Lang
City University
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Peter Melchett is the Policy Director of the Soil Association, the UK's main organic food and farming organisation. He also runs an 890 acre organic farm in Norfolk.
Peter was a Labour Government Minister in the House of Lords from 1974 to 1979, at the Department for the Environment, the Department of Trade and Industry and at the Northern Ireland Office. He was a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund UK for seven years from 1977 and was President, Chair or Council Member of several of the UK's leading nature conservation and wildlife organisations before working full-time at Greenpeace UK from 1989.
Peter has had a long association with Greenpeace UK, as Chair between 1986 and 1988, and as Executive Director between 1989 and 2000. He was also a member of the International Board in 1988 and 2001 and Chair of the Board of Greenpeace Japan from 1995 to 2001. He was particularly active in campaigns against commercial whaling, the dumping of Shell’s Brent Spar oil platform, and genetically modified crops and food.
Peter was a Special Lecturer in the School of Biological Sciences, Nottingham University from 1984 to 2002. In 2005, he was a member of the Department for Education and Skills’ School Meals Review Panel. He is currently a member of the BBC’s Rural Affairs Committee, the Government’s Organic Action Plan Group, and is on the Board of the European Union’s ‘Quality Low Input Food’ Research Project at the University of Newcastle.
He also works as an environmental consultant for companies such as IKEA and Thames Water.
Deirdre Hutton became Chair of the Food Standards Agency in July 2005. She has served on a number of public bodies and has considerable experience of corporate governance, risk-based regulation and consumer policy. She is Vice-Chair of the European Food Safety Authority Management Board and Deputy Chair of the Financial Services Authority. For five years, she was Chair of the National Consumer Council, having formerly chaired the Scottish Consumer Council. Prior to her appointment at the Food Standards Agency, she was a member of the Better Regulation Task Force.
She has held a number of positions on bodies dealing with food issues, including Chair of the Foresight Panel on the Food Chain and Crops for Industry, Chair of the Food Chain Centre, and membership of the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food (the Curry Commission). She was a panellist at the 2003 City Food Lecture.
Sir Stuart Hampson joined the John Lewis Partnership in 1982 after a twelve year career in the Civil Service. He was Managing Director of Tyrrell & Green (now John Lewis Southampton) for nearly three years before being appointed to the Board with responsibility for department store development. Sir Stuart became Deputy Chairman in 1989 and the Partnership's fourth Chairman in 1993.
Sir Stuart was a founding Deputy Chairman of London First, a member of the RSA Inquiry into Tomorrow's Company, and Chairman of the Royal Society of Arts (1999-2001). He was President of the Royal Agricultural Society of England from 2005-06.
Sir Stuart was made a Knight Bachelor for services to retailing in 1998.
Tim Smith became Chief Executive of Arla Foods UK plc in June 2005. Arla Foods is the UK's leading dairy company processing own label milk to the major retailers and home to some of the UK's most popular dairy brands including Lurpak, Anchor and Cravendale.
Tim joined the business in November 1999 as Executive Director before becoming Head of Corporate Affairs on merger of Arla Foods Plc and Express Dairies plc in October 2003.
He began his career in the food industry with Unigate in 1978 and then held management positions in the dairy and convenience foods groups of Northern Foods for 15 years before becoming President of Sara Lee Bakeries UK in 1995.
Prue Leith started her restaurant, catering and cookery school group in the 1960s and sold it in the 1990s, by which time it employed 500 people. Since then she has opened a catering college in South Africa and a charitable training restaurant, the Hoxton Apprentice, in Hackney. She’s been a cookery columnist for four national daily newspapers and a TV presenter, and is currently a judge on the Great British Menu series.
Until December 2006, she chaired Focus on Food, the charity that teaches cooking in schools; the British Food Trust, which develops qualifications for professional cooks; 3es Enterprises, a company involved in turning around failing state schools; and the Board of Governors at Kings College, Guildford. She has also chaired the Restaurants Association, the RSA and Forum for the Future.
Prue has sat on the boards of British Rail, Safeway, Halifax, Whitbread and Woolworths. Today she is a director of Nations Healthcare, Omega plc and Orient-Express Hotels, and chairs Ashridge Management College. She has published three novels.
She took up post as Chair of the School Food Trust in January.
Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at City University, London. He specialises in how policy affects the shape of the food supply chain, what people eat and the societal, health, and environmental outcomes. He is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, and was Chair of Sustain, the UK NGO alliance (1999-2005).
Since 1999, he has been a Vice-President of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health. He is a frequent advisor and consultant to the World Health Organization and has been a special advisor to four Commons Select Committee inquiries, most recently in 2003-04, to the UK Parliamentary Health Committee Inquiry into Obesity. He is co-author, with Erik Millstone, of The Atlas of Food (Earthscan, 2003) and, with Michael Heasman of Food Wars (Earthscan, 2004).
In June 2006, he was appointed a Commissioner on the Sustainable Development Commission.
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