Highlighting the needy, with Anthony Bernard.

Exmouth Journal: Exmouth Community Food Larder manager Anthony Bernard.Exmouth Community Food Larder manager Anthony Bernard. (Image: Archant)

The Zambezi is a slow moving river, over a mile wide, separating Zimbabwe from Zambia, until reaching the 'smoke that roars', renamed Victoria Falls by Livingstone after the locals took him to see it.

After the falls, the river flows through a deep gorge. The locals erected a statue to a tribal chief who 'discovered' Paris near the statue of Livingstone.

The local people knew the falls long before Livingstone saw it, just as its residents already knew about Paris.

There are rivers with more serious rapids to represent the two years of Covid-19 turbulence, but the Zambezi above the falls does emulate the quiet and expansive calm of life before 2020.

Calm enough for elephants to swim the mile across to escape noisy baboons, and for people to fly wherever they want, seeking greener grass or warmer sunshine.

April 2020 was the start of the pandemic in the UK and the beginning of totally changed lifestyles.

Going out and about was forbidden, except for key workers with necessary tasks. Inviting neighbours round was forbidden, as was cake in the cabinet room.

None of these should have happened, and we are totally confident, aren't we, that nobody around here bent any of these rules. Vaccines and the vaccination programmes moved us from Covid-19 into a more settled world.

Then on February 22, 2022, the Russian Duma (parliament) annexed the Donbas in Ukraine, invading Ukraine with a 'special military operation' two days later.

Our free and democratic world suddenly realised that the Russian bear was not as cuddly as some people had thought.

Global warming had been getting worse all along, but not so bad as to be obvious.

Plastic pollution was inundating parts of the world, but the council kept our beach clean so we didn't notice. Agriculture continued providing food, using modern machinery and imported fertilisers.

Rainforests were giving way to palm oil plantations to support many food and cosmetics needs. But the problems were piling up, like a river gathering more water ready for its rush through rock strewn rapids and over the falls.

Fertiliser prices and shortages, Global Warming and Plastic Pollution have now become so serious that the BBC reports them in prime time.

The most immediate effect is that our farmers will be paying much more for fertiliser, or returning to more sustainable but expensive organic methods.

Either way, the cost of food is going to rise severely; the era of cheap food is ended.

Sustainable food production without fertilisers is becoming a major issue for people to survive on the planet.

I remember from schooldays learning about the rotation of crops in medieval times and the nitrogen cycle in agriculture.

Recently, I was shown a field of wheat in which there is no insect life after repeated doses of insecticides and biological weed killers.

New varieties of crops were developed in the 1960s, highly dependent on the inorganic fertilisers now in short supply.

Modern technology has the capability to create crop varieties which can capture nitrogen, as some plants already do for themselves.

These new technologies take time to develop and longer to gain acceptance by the eating public, nervous about gene edited food.

Food seems to have lost its taste anyway, whether due to my age or changing perceptions, but we will soon need to eat whatever is available, in season and affordable, a big change from having anything and everything from around the world on our shelves.