民以食为天，供给需保障

What is the first thing most people want as they get richer? The first thing they buy isn't a television or a mobile phone; it is a chicken. The first thing people spend their money on is getting some meat into their diet. And that presents huge challenges for agriculture. Raising animals requires much more effort than growing crops. For a start, you've got to find the food to feed them.

At the same time many farmers around the world are facing more extreme weather - droughts, storms and floods. Huge areas of the south of England have been submerged for weeks. Insurers are expecting a bill just shy of $1 billion. Our business correspondent Simon Jack is at the National Farmers Union Conference in Birmingham, where he joins us live. So Simon we tend to associate natural disasters like floods with the developing world. How badly hit has Britain been?

Well as you've say, Justin, that the bill is between 800 million and a billion and a half dollars, which is not a huge event in sort of global terms. But we've seen very distressing images of cows being moved out of their barns. But the National Farmers Union Conference which I'm here at today say that overall, actually, the food supply hasn't been badly hit, but it is reflective of more extreme weather conditions that we see around the world. And it does seem that the one-in-a-hundred-year event as insurers call it seems now to be happening every three to five years has got a lot of people thinking how do you secure food supply when weather is becoming more extreme.