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STATES OF JERSEY
Corporate Services Scrutiny Panel Migration & Population Sub-Panel
MONDAY, 27th APRIL 2009
Panel:
Senator S.C. Ferguson (Chairman) Deputy G.P. Southern of St. Helier Deputy C.F. Labey of Grouville Deputy D.J.A. Wimberley of St. Mary Deputy T.A. Vallois of St. Saviour Dr. P. Boden (Panel Adviser)
Witness:
Mr. M. Forskitt
Present:
Mr. W. Millow (Scrutiny Officer)
Senator S.C. Ferguson (Chairman):
Welcome to this hearing of the Corporate Services Division, Migration and Population Sub-Panel. I wonder if you could just say your name and, effectively, affiliations for the purposes of the recording.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
My name is Mark Forskitt. Affiliations? Lots of them. Primarily Jersey Organic Association at the moment, Jersey Climate Action Network and a few other obscure international organisations.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
If you have not appeared ... I do not know whether you have appeared at a Scrutiny Panel before, we have some health warnings in the printed document next to you and it also tells you that we shall be recording the hearing and you will have a copy of the transcript so that you can make corrections to any errors in transcription and so on. We do not alter the sense of what you said but if they have made an error in picking up what you have said. For the purposes of the recording, if we could just run round the room?
Deputy D.J.A. Wimberley of St. Mary : Deputy Wimberley of St. Mary .
Deputy C.F. Labey of Grouville : Carolyn Labey , Deputy of Grouville .
Deputy G.P. Southern of St. Helier : Deputy Geoff Southern from St. Helier No. 2. Peter Boden, adviser to the Scrutiny Panel.
Senator S.C. Ferguson: Myself.
Deputy T.A. Vallois of St. Saviour : Deputy Tracey Vallois of St. Saviour .
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
Super. We might as well hit it between the eyes. What do you think of the population policy as proposed by the Council of Ministers? You have the floor.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
It is back to front. My personal view is that we already have an unsustainable population so the question is how do we get what we have got more sustainable rather than how do we make what we want to achieve sustainable. It may sound like semantic differences but it makes quite a difference to how you go about things.
Deputy G.P. Southern : Do explore. [Laughter]
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Partly it comes from understanding of whether you believe that the economy drives what humans do or the humans produce the economy, and I am very much of the latter. In other words even if you do not concern yourself with the physical limits of what we are worried about in the world, as in oil, water, food, all of which there are issues that we could debate globally, that would impinge on what you are going to do in a generation's time, whatever you do, as long as human beings have activity you have an economy. So it is rather back to front to say: "Let us sort out the economy and how do we get people to conform to that" because what people do is the economy and what people will end up doing will drive the economy. You might value that, you might measure that in different ways so, for example, if you are just going to go with gross domestic product, yes, it looks like it is shrinking but it is more people doing more things because at the moment we do not measure things like ... well, G.D.P. (Gross Domestic Product) does not measure things like grandparents looking after grandchildren for free because it is free, so therefore there is no money therefore it does not count. Honorary Police going out and doing what they do, which is a benefit but does not appear as a benefit because it is not paid therefore it is not money therefore it is not ... So there is a whole raft of other questions that go alongside of this what is our economy, what contributes to it and who is doing what and how many people do you consider are doing what?
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
What do you define as sustainable then? What is sustainability?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Essentially, again working backwards from, the fact that we live in a finite world. However we go about it there is only so much potable water in the world, there is only so much food that we can produce, there is only so much oil that we can burn and several of those at the moment there are organisations round the world desperately worried that we have limits that we are rapidly approaching. Certainly 2 years ago world wheat stocks reached a 50-year low, they went up last year, they may or may not go up again this year. We are struggling to feed the world. Now, we are talking about an issue here of migration and population, so in a generation's time predictions are that the world population is going to be 50 per cent more than it is now and we are already straining to feed the world so we have a serious issue there. Sustainability is about recognising the physical limits of what we are dealing with. We cannot overcome them. It does not matter
how we organise money flows, print pound notes or whatever, it does not produce more land particularly to produce people, it does not produce more money, it does not produce more food of itself. So that is where we start from. It is like what are the physical limits we are up against? The key ones, as far as I can see round the world, and some of them apply in Jersey, we know, water availability. We have already seen this year reports that 7 of the major rivers are losing capacity at a significant rate per year of 5 to 6 per cent, and that is irrigating vast amounts of land in parts of China, parts of North India. We are up against the issue of oil. We think we have used about half of the world's reserves of oil and declining reserves now at about 3 per cent per year. Now that is masked by the fact that we have what is a recession, which means consumption is reduced by about 3 per cent a year so it is not apparent. But if we do ever get to any sort of increased activity in economic terms will hit against the fact that we are not producing enough oil to keep things going. That feeds through to things like food production because that oil drives fertiliser production, food distribution, refrigeration, the whole works. You will end up with a situation like we see in Mexico at the moment, there is nobody in the streets, there is no transport going and there is no food in the shops after 3 days, because that is all the supermarkets store, 3 days' worth of food.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Playing devil's advocate for a moment; and I am sure you will be able to deal with it no doubt. Worldwide issues, resource issues, we have got a problem; how in particular do you see that applying to Jersey and what should Jersey do next?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
It affects us critically because we are an importer. You can ask yourself, if I am a grower and I have got just about enough for myself, no matter how much money you throw at me I am not going to give you my bread today, thank you. We are going to be competing for resources, they are in short supply, and what are we going to trade for it because people are not going to want money for bread if they need the bread themselves. They are not going to give us oil for money if they need it for keeping their machinery, their transport system, their hospitals, going. It affects us because we are an importer.
Deputy G.P. Southern : Of almost everything.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Of almost everything.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Apart from the financial services which we convert everything we import into financial services. For Jersey then, what do we do? Whether next or medium term? What do we do now? What does Jersey society do?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Do not stop from here, I think, is the ideal scenario. We have to face extraordinary tough decisions, and that is the problem. The decisions, the repercussions of decisions we make are extraordinarily tough. For example, Jersey could just about feed 100,000 people, sounds unlikely I know, but it is theoretically possible with some provisos. Those provisos are: we all turn vegan, we all turn organic. So we have got Jersey cattle out the window. It is not an easy option to face up to and ... there are some benefits. You could expect an improvement in health, improvement in exercise because to do that you would have to have about 25,000 people working the land, because you are having to do without tractors and fuel to do that sort of level of production on small scales. That is the sort of level of challenge which we are facing within the next decade, perhaps sooner.
You are almost taking us back 30 years.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I am suggesting that we need to have some plans in place to deal with huge changes because otherwise we will end up with no plan and it will be a free for all and that will be nightmare scenario.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
You were talking about 25,000 people working the land.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes. If you want to produce food for 100,000 people without using oil, without using huge numbers of tractors and locally, because you cannot import stuff, it would take about one person per vergée. I have dug a vergée in a year. It is hard work, it is almost not possible. It is a year to get fit.
The Deputy of Grouville :
Organic, why? Because surely you have more crops if it is not organic.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Not necessarily. There are people at the moment in Zambia giving up on their G.M. (genetically modified) crop that they have been growing their maize because 3 different types of maize that they got failed this year; did not pollinate at all.
The Deputy of Grouville : There is a reason behind that ...
Mr. M. Forskitt:
When it is a staple food ... in Zambia maize is the staple food, this means people are starving because it failed. The other reason it is organic is because fertiliser production. Fertiliser requires huge amounts of energy, uses oil and natural gas to produce, we have already mentioned that is in limited supply and declining so either you have to pay an awful lot of money for a fertiliser against everybody else who wants oil and gas for all those industrial processes or you find another way of producing your food. The information from the Soil Association and other international organisations is that organic production methods have improved significantly in the last 10 years. Yields are probably within 10 per cent of what the most advanced chemically based systems are. In fact you get more of a benefit in terms of human food production per unit area by changing diets than you would by going down the G.M. or non-organic route.
The Deputy of Grouville :
And vegan, why, when we live alongside the ocean?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I am talking about generally. Yes, you could import fish into that to supplement that. You have to consider carefully, of course, how your fish stocks are sustainable and I know certain people who think that even locally our fish stocks at the moment are not sustainable so it is not going to make a huge contribution. Yes, you can use some of it but you would not want to base your food production on denuding the sea any more than you want to base it on denuding the land.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
When you are saying "sustainable" you seem to be meaning sustainable as if Jersey is a bubble. Now what about, for the sake of argument, grow a few extra Jersey Royals or a lot of extra Jersey Royals, you sell them and you buy in something else that you need because you cannot live on just Jersey Royals.
The Deputy of Grouville : You need transport.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, but again you need markets to do that. You need other people to co-operate which means other people have got to produce surpluses. Yes, it is possible.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Is there a role for a certain amount of trade?
Mr. M. Forskitt: Yes, there has to be.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
We are not going to make all our nuts and nails, widgets?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
No, not practical. I mean it is hard enough to produce enough food to feed yourself and your family let alone get the iron to smelt to make your own scythe to cut your own grass. It is not feasible.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
So this is a direction rather than a ...?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, we are not going to go backwards. We still want people to produce medicines and that requires pharmaceutical factories, and we are not Blue Vine(?) Jersey, thank you. Yes, of course we have to, but we have to find things that people want.
Dr. P. Boden:
Do you have a view to what the sort of industry profile would be in the Island?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
No. It is too far ahead. All I can tell you is from my point of view my position was to go buy some land to make sure I produce some food because that is number one for me. If I have got shelter and I have got water and I have got food I am doing okay compared to a lot of people who will be in 30 years' time.
Dr. P. Boden:
You do not have a view on sustainable industries that could be most appropriate for an island the size of Jersey?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
The problem is how you define what makes an industry sustainable because industries consume resources and they produce outputs, some of which need to be dealt with as in CO2 or pollutants or waste products. It would be trite to say the easiest way of not doing that is to not have industry but that is not a real world answer.
Dr. P. Boden:
Unless it was a general terms, it covers all sorts of ...
Mr. M. Forskitt:
It covers all sorts of things. Now, what the balance is ... I suspect the balance is we have fewer material stuff because we are running out of resources to equally share out. Remember we are
not just talking about the resources that we can use today. Those of us who have children and grandchildren and future generations will also want to be able to use resources and we are plundering them at the moment in effect. So the only way you can take that long term view is to go: "We have to have less stuff", that means less industry, perhaps, depending on how you define industry. But if you farm as an industry you might be saying we do more.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
If you take renewable energy as a possible industry, what you are doing there is you are taking resources now, turning them into something physical and then getting a freebie for a long time apart from the servicing and the maintenance; comments?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, it looks good, does it not, on paper? The problem is what do people do with the energy? If you are not using the product in a sensible way you are simply generating a demand on something and it takes a lot of energy, a lot of infrastructure to produce those generally. You want to put in marine turbines, well, that is advance composites, advance materials, a lot of engineering, all doable; it is good science, it is good engineering, but there is a lot of commitment there. There is a lot of energy goes into producing the concrete, to laying the foundations, to building it and maintaining it and so on.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
But it is a guaranteed market and a guaranteed pay packet.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, depending on how your finances go and your economic measurements go. If you measure it in other terms you might find it does not look quite so desirable. I suspect it would still be better than a lot of other options and you would still want to go for it. But that is investment. If you want to build a barrage or anything today you are talking about a 10-year probably project life cycle, if not further. So you have always got a gap, if you have still got a 10-year gap to bridge.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
Yes, but on that you are producing an energy source which does not rely on fossil fuels, but surely that is what you are aiming for?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
You are probably going to use fossil fuels in making all the concrete stuff to produce it in the first place and there is some embedded energy, but yes it would be. It would be desirable but it is still not going to help you with your material consumption. It is still not going to help you produce food necessarily because you have got to find a way of storing that energy in a way that you can use it on machinery, for example. You have not got a way of producing fertilisers from electricity because oil is a chemical feedstock in that sense, as well. So it is not a straight one to one, you cannot just go one type of energy and oil or gas or coal goes or another type in electricity, for example, because they are not always convertible simply on their energy levels, which makes it a lot more complicated than it would appear. You cannot just swap one energy form for another.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
But looking at the alternative lifestyle which you are effectively recommending, looking on the fact that you reckon we need 25,000 people working on the land ...
Mr. M. Forskitt:
If we want to produce all our own food, yes.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
What are you looking at in terms of population?
That is a figure saying if you want to produce enough food for 100,000 people, which you could just about do on a vegan non-oil based labour intensive farming produce using 30,000 to 35,000 vergées, that is 100,000 people fed, just. That is a second world, if you like, is a term used to B- diet(?), no meat, maybe a bit of fish, no milk, no cheese. You have got 100,000 people who are on a diet that they could live on. If you were saying: "I do not want that, I want to be able to have my dairy, I want my cows and so on" that is going to take more land, and that means you are going to have feed fewer people. You are going to have to have a smaller population.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Or you do what we do now, which we buy land from somewhere else. Effectively that is what we do. We trade getting the products ...
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, we have been able to do that up until about ... on a global scale up until about 1987, 1988. Since then there has not really been enough sufficient spare land to do that for anything other than on a very small scale.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
So what are we doing now when we import food?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
We are robbing it from somebody else effectively. Somebody who needs the money more than we do is going: "I will sell you my last loaf of bread because I need the money to pay the bills or pay the local tax collector the local bandits" or whatever the relationship is in that part of the world. Because their diet is not as good as ours.
Deputy T.A. Vallois:
Do you therefore believe that the policy should meet the aspirations or the needs of the people?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
You have got to meet the needs first because we are up against constraints and if you can meet the needs and then you can go towards the aspirations, that would be great. But I believe you are going to really, really struggle to meet the needs in a generation's time, in half a generation's time in fact.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
That assumes we do not stay top of the pile.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
No, that assumes that we are better off than most people. That assumes that we have made plans, that we have decentralised, that we have reduced our dependence on externals much more than other people have. The worst case is we do not prepare and anybody who has got a gun gets their way and everybody else who has not got a gun does not.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
And Jersey does not have many guns. There is a new market. [Laughter]
Deputy G.P. Southern :
If there is a market we will go there.
Dr. P. Boden:
How do you strike a balance and make a first step? What is your recommendation? It is identifying your ideal scenario, this is where we are today, how do you get somewhere along that track?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
When I worked in research circles we always reckoned that the first 50 per cent of the answer was getting the right problem statement. So I reckon we face up to the fact of stating what the real problem is, and the real problem is the world is running out of resources or is using more than it can and we depend on importing so we are at the bottom of the pile when it comes to that long chain of getting whatever it is, diamonds, food, oil, whatever to us. There are lots of middle men on the way and until we formulate that as a problem that we need to address there is no point going much further because we are not addressing the right problems.
Dr. P. Boden:
You need a neglected world to do that.
Mr. M. Forskitt: No.
Senator S.C. Ferguson: It is a doomsday scenario.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
There is nothing wrong with the analysis providing the premise is right. Again, slightly different than Peter, in the population policy that sits embedded in the Strategic Plan for the next 3 to 5 years, what would you like to see in there that starts to address, as you see it, some of the issues so that we start working our way through to a better position than we are now, when we are bottom of the food chain?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I would start with an analysis of something that the World Wildlife Fund produce which is ecological footprints, which they have done for every nation. They have not gone down to the scale that Jersey has. This is printed methodology, it works through exactly what your dependence and your sustainable features are in terms of grassland, fisheries, natural resources, importers and so on. You can work out a net balance, a bit like an accounting system. Britain's works out at something like 5.5 hectares per person required to deal with the pollution to produce the food, to produce the timber to produce all those goods and so on, which is about 3.5 hectares per person more than it has got. I would not like to hazard a guess at which ours is, but it would be an interesting methodology to go through, and it is a published methodology. Somebody could sit down and go there, and we would have a baseline measurable calculable baseline to work from. There are issues with it but it would enable us to compare ourselves with other places and go: "Yes, we really are deficient." We kind of know it intuitively but it would quantify it in a certain respect for people to deal with it.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Once quantified it could be a target?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
You could start to mess in targets on that.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
We are saying how do we reduce this enormous figure to something which starts to look manageable.
Mr. M. Forskitt: Yes.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Until we have done that basic piece of research this is where we are starting, we do not know where we are going.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Not really. We know we are going the wrong way generally.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Is there another component that might be added to that? You were looking at the resources side, what do we have the right consume and so on, and what do we have to reduce our consumption to? The other side to that would be having a way of aiming for satisfactions or life quality, or whatever you want to call it, so that we do not all get the feeling that we are living in caves.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, you could run things like that in parallel. The E.U. (European Union) - I cannot remember which committee - did a very good study which was published, and they came up with about 20 of these different mechanisms for measuring alternatives to G.D.P. effectively, measuring your economy, measuring your societal activity, if you like, is probably a better way of putting it, which included happiness and it included fairness. There are different measures ... some of them are quite hard to quantify in any meaningful way. What I like about the ecological footprint is it is quite clearly relating to the physical realities of the world.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Yes, but without the other ones it is going to be hard to sell the first one.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I am not here to sell it, I am just here to tell you about it. [Laughter]
Deputy G.P. Southern :
I think it is section 13 of the Strategic Plan, protect and enhance our natural environment. So somewhere in there this analysis should be built in somewhere there or thereabouts. Interestingly to notice that you said measures like happiness of society, because it has been very interesting recently to see a number of pieces of work talking about the good quality of and certainly the health and happiness of society is reflected more in more equal societies, and it is more equal societies that produce the best outcomes in terms of health, in terms of almost any factor you look at, crime figures, whatever, and people staying in education. All relate to more equal societies seem to do better. Now, I would have thought, again, if it comes to placing population in terms of context of the Strategic Plan that also ought to be somewhere in there, moving towards a more equal society, because certainly at the extreme end of what you are talking about, I would have thought, should be an equal society - more equal society.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, it is one of the measures you could use. How you trade off the 2 I do not know at the moment. The other factor is how do you measure ... do you want to measure equality within the Island or are you going to go ... it is a global problem, we are talking about global resources, global issues like climate change and peak oil and so on, are we going to measure equality globally, in which case of course, we are down at the sixth standard deviation or whatever it is compared to a lot of the world.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
It is certainly one extreme to the other. But in terms of what do we do, what can we initiate some activity on in order to move in the right direction; that is certainly something that would be a local action in order to improve our situation.
At least to understand where we start from, yes.
Deputy G.P. Southern : Understanding would be a good start.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
What would you define as a more equal society?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
This is one of the more intractable issues that you face because you need to go back to the academic studies that have shown that these measures work or do not work because you get all sorts of biases in how you measure these things and what people tell you. But interestingly there is one country trying to do it at the moment, it is Bhutan. They have made a policy that they are going to include happiness and a statement of their national happiness in their national accounts.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
I was going on to the equality.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
It is relatively easy to measure equality; you just use something like economic G.D.P.(?) for a start.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
The problem is if you start getting into the same issues that you get with measuring an economy, which is you start using value judgments like: "What is the value of things?" them you turn to G.D.P. and you measure it globally, of course that is a subjective opinion depending on who is bartering in economies, what the value is. So you have kind of got a problem in there in that if you try to convert it into monetary terms and then back again you have got this variable in the middle that is a judgment rather than going: "We can objectively measure it."
The Deputy of St. Mary :
You are making it too difficult. You can use money as a prophecy.
Mr. M. Forskitt: No, you cannot.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
That is how equality is usually measured, when the Financial Times did this lead up and they mentioned just this issue and pointed out that ... I think it was the lead, it may have been a comment, of pointing out that a more equal society is more productive. In the old economics - we are talking about the old economics - people are still ...
Mr. M. Forskitt:
You cannot mix and match. If you are going to argue that gross domestic product, for example, is not a way of measuring the economy therefore you cannot use it to decide ... set your targets where you are going, you need something else like footprints, ecological footprints and so on, you cannot then go: "But we are going to use it to measure the other half of the equation" because you are now trying to measure one thing with apples and one thing with oranges, you are ending up with a fruit salad that nobody likes.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
I am surprised, because I would have thought if you measure, say, the difference between the best paid person in Jersey and the least paid person in Jersey is 100 to one or 250 to one or 600
to one, I would have thought that can be put into the happiness box as one of your factors that you would take into account as one of your measures.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
You are talking there about a ratio, so yes you could.
Deputy G.P. Southern : A 90 per cent ratio.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, that is what I say, you can do some of these things but you have to be very careful about getting some absolutes in there. It is monetarily we can trade off this with that much money and it does not hold.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
You cannot compare what your friend has got to somebody else's £100,000 a year. I agree with that. But you can compare ...
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Well, some people do surprisingly.
Dr. P. Boden:
The study that was driving all that analysis was based on the differences between the poorest and the wealthiest people within those particular countries which is why the U.K. (United Kingdom) came out so badly relative to Sweden and Denmark. That is the way they measured inequality.
The Deputy of St. Mary : In money terms.
Dr. P. Boden: Yes.
Senator S.C. Ferguson: Sweden being very highly taxed.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
But even in societies that are not that highly taxed there is still the link between more equal and happiest, most successful society was universal, whether high tax or low tax, rich or poor. The key is level at inequality within the society, and it works almost every time.
Dr. P. Boden:
Almost Always was the title I think.
The Deputy of Grouville :
If you could implement or put in 3 action points into this population policy, what would they be?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I would certainly do 2 things I can think of straight away, one of which is implement the ecological footprint methodology for knowing exactly where we stand in terms of the sustainability, if you like, element of that. The other thing that I would really want to put in there is a - I am trying to think of the right word for it - an appreciation of how much input and how much significance older people have outside of the workplace in society. Because I asked this question at the Emerging 2035 event, it was a specific question I asked. I said: "Okay, you want to get all the other people, what are the retired people already doing in society: Honorary Police, St. John's Ambulance, grandparents?" There is a whole raft of things there that we do not appear to have included in an
analysis somewhere and I think people would be very surprised at how active and how much influence and significance these older people have in our society already.
The Deputy of Grouville :
So you would like to see them appreciated or recognised?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I would like to go and say: "Actually things do not stop when people get to 65, 67 or 68" or whatever the pension or retirement age is going to be. Things go on and because it is back to how we measure what our economy is we go: "No money involved", it does not appear on the accounts, it does not follow ... and the fact is it is still having quite a significant impact on our society, I believe, and quite a positive one in many cases but we have not identified it, we have not rationalised, we have kind of parked it over there somewhere.
The Deputy of Grouville :
I was just going to wait for the third, if you have one.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
The third one? [Laughter] The third one I think would be to have a proper open public debate about the trade-offs that we face as a society in the future in terms of we can have fewer people living better, we can have more people living simpler lives and talk to people ...
The Deputy of Grouville :
I thought that is what Imagine Jersey did.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
No, it did not. Oh, no it did not. Because we did not put the people, these limiting issues, that are going to so shape where we are going to be in there. We did not talk about peak oil and the fact that we are not going to be able to manufacture the goods, we are not going to have the energy and we are not ... which event we got a rather partial view, got an idealistic view and it is not a ... and we need to go to people and say: "These are the constraints we are up against." There is a multitude of futures you can have. You can have 30,000 people living the high life or you can have 100,000 people working together in a simpler lifestyle but a bit happier, maybe. "What do you want people?" Here are some scenarios that we can give but we are not having that debate because we are facing the realities of just what those options are. We are still deluding ourselves that we can have it all.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
There is another argument which is you have 100,000 people living the high life, which is more or less what is happening now because we ignore the ecological footprint.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
That is why you need the ecological footprint. So you can show people that is not a future we can really realistically aspire to, at the moment.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Define "we can realistically aspire to".
Mr. M. Forskitt:
We have no ... as far as I can tell we have no realistic way of achieving 100,000 people in the high life in 20 years' time.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
Are you saying we should do more or less?
More of what or less of what is the question.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
Well, you just said there is no realistic way of achieving 100,000 people.
Mr. M. Forskitt: Living the high life.
The Deputy of Grouville : No, you cannot sustain it.
Senator S.C. Ferguson: Sorry.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, 100,000 people, they all lead separate lives, more community, less goods, this material stuff, more arts. There are lots of things you can do and I am only one person. I do not know that I have got ... I cannot see, unless somebody comes up with some interesting ways of growing food that nobody even thought of and some interesting energy options we are not facing that option.
Dr. P. Boden:
How many in Jersey do you think would echo your views?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Five hundred. That is on a good day. [Laughter]
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Approximately that many, give or take the turnout rate, it is only about 30 per cent. Interestingly when you talk about valuing the input from older people, those who are retired, et cetera, it is giving a figure of 30-60 million if we were to increase the pension age by 3 to 6 years in terms of monetary value, in terms of the population analysis, that does not take into account all those services, activities that they are already doing which we lose.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Which is why that analysis is full of holes because it leaves out half the economy.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
It has been recognised in the U.K., for example, that grandparents being the child minders, the child carers, is worth and they are being paid. You can get a benefit. It is the most convenient way to get kids looked after while the parents work. Ping, use the grandparents if at all possible and pay them to do it.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
There is a train of thought, I am not sure I fully subscribe to it at the moment, that says what you need to do is work out what you think people do that is useful and define that as work and then monetarise it that way, and go backwards. So if you are looking after ... if you are a grandparent looking after grandchildren that is valuable work for society here are your resources for doing it. If you are doing not such valuable work you do not have resources to go with it, but it is quite complicated to work out who decides what is valuable.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
I think that is probably our salaries massively reduced, doing useful work.
Anything else, Daniel?
The Deputy of St. Mary :
The problem is something about your ... the political problem is that you are taking into account the whole world and you are seeking ... if the ecological footprint argument sticks that means that we have our fair share. That is what you are trying to do, you are trying to define fair share. At the moment we simply buy food off other people's plates, because you said that.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Crudely, yes. You could improve your ecological footprint. If your fish stocks built up that builds up your ecological footprint. If you build your soil sustainability and fertility naturally so you can produce more, yes. Equally if you do not do it it goes the other way. What produces vegetables this year produces only ... only feeds sheep in 5 years' time, and 10 years after that it only supports goats and 20 years after that it is desert.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
So practical steps, maintain the soil fertility, increase it, improve our seawater quality instead of dipping heavy metals into it.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
But those all come out in the ecological footprint because you are then ... you are saying these are valuable inputs. These are valuable natural capital resources and you want to maintain them and look after them, improve them.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Back to where we started; have a proper measure of what the ecological footprint is and then we know where we are starting from.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
Also measure unpaid work in some way so your G.D.P. is not a silly figure but a real figure of what is going on.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
How are we going to support the infrastructure in all this? What infrastructure do you envisage?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
What do we need? First of all you better look after your seawall defences.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Are we just going to be an even sunnier climate, according to our current Planning Minister?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
You are training people in olive production, are you? The worst case ...
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
We need our training opportunities in order to pay for the infrastructure to support population apart from food.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, you need reservoirs, you need water to supply people. You need your sewerage system, you need all of that absolutely. But how much of it you can have is depending on what resources you have available. This is what I am saying; it is an extraordinarily hard decision. The alternatives and the scenarios are really quite tough to deal with. They are not palatable, people do not really want to know them. But I would say there is a moral imperative; if you believe these
limitations are there and we are hitting them, and there is plenty of evidence out there of lots of people who do think that, we have got to deal with it, we have got to face it.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
Now we are back to Carolyn's 3 points. Are there any others that you would wish to see in the population policy?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Certainly I think if we could start ... we are talking about a population policy that is 3 to 5 years, I think there is enough there to start us on the road of getting our thinking like we are facing these issues, because it is not one person who is going to come up with the idea that is needed. It is going to need a consensus of some sort and you will not build a consensus unless you have got facts out there and options for people to pursue. So that is what we have got to do, we have got to build plausible scenarios based on the limits that we know from the ecological footprint and those sort of things to present to the people to go ... we are in a tough place. Here are some options, if you can come up with different options even better, but realistically these are the options and the: "I do not want to know about that, stick my head in the sand, can we not just carry on the way we are?" is not one of them.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
It must be, as you say, informed consent.
Mr. M. Forskitt: Of course it must.
Deputy G.P. Southern :
All too often what happens in Jersey is we get ill informed or not informed consent or manipulated.
The Deputy of St. Mary : Manufactured.
Deputy G.P. Southern : Manufactured, yes.
Senator S.C. Ferguson: Anything else?
Deputy G.P. Southern : Not from me.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
Any burning point you would like to leave with us?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Not really because a lot of what I am struggling with here is understanding section and I come from it from a completely different history of understanding these things, as a lot of people do, so I know people struggle to kind of think that sounds insane, and you take it to the public it is going to sound insane. I know that.
The Deputy of St. Mary : Which is why we need steps.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Which is why we need steps, yes. It is going to be hard work. Whichever way you go it is going to be hard, hard work.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
You say that we will not be able to trade for the goods that we need for many of them because of the competition.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
Yes, there is not enough to go round.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
There is not enough to go round.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
So you better have something very valuable to offer if you want to trade.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
There is enough to go round now in the world but it so maldistributed that there are hundred and thousands, millions of people starving.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
And it is getting worse.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
So what you are saying is never let up, take awareness of that issue and that is where the ecological footprint comes in.
Mr. M. Forskitt: Yes.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
But what we have been doing now is we simply push it to one side and say: "This all does not exist."
Mr. M. Forskitt:
One day that pile of issues is going to topple over. You build a mountain up high enough it eventually falls over and you bury yourself in an avalanche of your own rubbish.
The Deputy of St. Mary :
That is assuming that justice can come from somewhere else.
Mr. M. Forskitt:
I do not know the answer to that one.
Deputy T.A. Vallois:
Have you presented any of these ideas of action points to the Council of Ministers themselves?
Mr. M. Forskitt: No.
Deputy T.A. Vallois:
Did you go to the Strategic Plan consultation?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
No. One of the limitations that we have is I only have so much time and energy. [Laughter]
Deputy G.P. Southern :
Having presented it in 1.5 minute tail bites times 12, it is a difficult task, is it not?
Mr. M. Forskitt:
We are still not fully formulated. I mean it is a path ... we can see the direction we want to go in but it is still very difficult to try and rationalise everything and cover everything.
Senator S.C. Ferguson:
It is getting a strategy together that is the difficult thing. Thank you very much indeed for your time. We are very grateful. As I say, you will be getting a copy of the transcript and if there is anything that has been transcribed incorrectly then please do correct it.