FEEDING Britain, the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry chaired by Labour MP Frank Field, issued its report two days after the opening of the Saltaire Canteen, formerly Vicars, at the junction of Victoria Road and Caroline Street , Shipley.

As outlined in a T&A story earlier this week, the Canteen cooks and serves food that would otherwise be thrown away. Customers don't have to pay for it; but those who want to can put a contribution in an envelope thereby supporting the venture anonymously.

The parliamentary report draws attention to a social phenomenon we already know about in Bradford - the mushrooming use of food banks by people driven to extremis either by a low disposable income or the suspension of welfare benefits for those who fall foul of stringent Department of Work and Pensions regulations.

The Saltaire Canteen - part of the Shipley Food Project highlighted by the T&A in October - is a response to another part of the problem Britain has in feeding itself - the waste of food, in fact the waste of 15 million tonnes of food annually. This in part is attributed to proscriptive food labelling.

The labelling of food products and ingredients - sell-by-dates - is not carried out by the UK Government. A number of international bodies make the rules which are then adopted by the European Union and its 27 member states.

These global bodies include the United Nations Economic Commission Europe, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the World Health Organisation and the Codex Alimentarius - set up in 1963 by the WHO to homogenise international food standards.

A new EU regulation comes into force this Saturday. All food retail outlets will be obliged to tell customers if their products contain any of 14 allergens such as gluten, eggs, soybeans milk, nuts, lupin and molluscs.

Former food hygiene inspector Richard North, who lives in Wibsey, said labelling was only part of a much bigger problem. "Sixty per cent of world food production is lost before any of it comes to market, through spoilage, poor storage, pest damage or contamination.

"If we could resolve this problem there would be a significant increase in food supply. This is the sort of arena where foreign aid could be targeted. Small amounts of money for specific things can have a huge impact - cold storage for apricots, storage silos for wheat, rat-proofing grain silos, for instance."

UK overseas development aid has proved a contentious point. Only last week backbench MPs, including Shipley Conservative MP Philip Davies, failed to stop Michael Moore's International Development Bill being approved by the House of Commons. The Bill seeks to enshrine the in law a commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of the UK's national income on foreign aid.

The 0.7 figure was agreed after much wrangling in 1970 by the United Nations' General Assembly, since when the UK has paid out in the region of £118 billion. According to online figures from the House of Commons' Library, overseas aid rose from £186m in 1970 to £1.58 billion in 1989 which became £7.2 billion in 2009 and currently stands at just over £11.4 billion. Next year it is estimated to go up again to £12.5 billion.

Philip Davies said: "Lots of people feel overseas aid is taking money from poor people in rich countries and giving it to rich people in poor countries. We pour billions of pound into countries in Africa which are no further on than when we started pouring billions of pounds into them."

The biggest portions of Britain's annual overseas aid budget go on health, government and civil society, education, economic infrastructure, humanitarian projects and, well down the list, water and sanitation.

Overseas aid is only a fragment of taxpayers' money which Her Majesty's Treasury pays out every year. Since 1979, the year when Britain first sent elected members to the Parliament of the European Economic Community (now the European Union), more than £228 billion has been sent to Brussels with approximately £143 billion coming back in the form of various grants.

Food wastage is not a recent global problem. The non-farming part of the British public was shocked when the consequences of the European Economic Community's Common Agricultural Policy were first revealed in the form of surplus mountains of butter, lakes of wine and warehouses of grain.

Barry Seal, Labour MEP for Yorkshire West from 1979 to 1999, said he was aware there was a problem 35 years ago. "Subsidies were being paid for agricultural products we could have got cheaper elsewhere. It's still going on. It's only come to light because people can't afford to buy food, not just in the UK but throughout the whole of the EU." he added.

Bob Geldof wants us to feed the world, but as Bob Dylan observed in his Blood on the Tracks song Idiot Wind: "It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."

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