Peter Kendall, the NFU president, told me that the cheap food sold in supermarkets was "morally questionable". Meanwhile, Sir Stuart Hampson, the then-John Lewis boss and author of a report on farming, said that A SUSTAINABLE UK RURAL ECONOMY WAS "CLOSE TO BEING LOST FOREVER". It was bleak stuff. So two years on, how have things changed? Food prices in shops saw a sustained period of inflation over the last year - surely a good thing for farmers? - and we are hearing less about farmers' plights than we were back then. Are they finally happy?

Sadly, no. In fact, THINGS ARE WORSE THAN THEY WERE TWO YEARS AGO. Prices to farmers are actually falling and input costs - fertilizer, fuel, feed - are rising. On top of this farms are HAVING TO DEAL WITH EVER-GREATER REAMS OF RED TAPE. They are still closing at an alarming rate. In his newsletter to members this month, Mr Kendall of the NFU said the following: "With prices of agricultural produce around the world continuing to fall for most sectors, coupled with the high costs of many inputs, we will all use whatever time we have available to look at what production is viable for the coming year." Hardly encouraging words.

Dairy farmers are on their knees. "It's a dead industry," the chairman of the Royal Association of British Dairy Farmers told The Grocer magazine this week. The collapse earlier this year of Dairy Farmers of Britain - one of the UK's three co-operatives - and a slump in the milk price have killed off many farms. The result is that production in the UK is at its lowest for decades.

Farmers talk of a "dire" situation today. A recurring (if not new) issue is that farmers' customers - the all-powerful retailers - constantly squeeze them on price. "Our margins are so so skinny. THE SUPERMARKETS' MARGINS ARE 30-40PC, BUT OURS ARE PENCE," one farmer tells me. Something is wrong in the food chain, they argue. Producers - be they wheat farmers, strawberry growers, or dairy farmers - take all the risk, pay for the production, the packaging, (in most cases) the distribution, and often the marketing but get very little in return.

We all need to get real. For a sustainable, safe, secure food chain in the UK three things need to happen. Firstly we - consumers and retailers - need to pay more for what is on our plates. Secondly farmers need to act collectively and with more business nous. And thirdly, red tape must be cut.

What makes the issue particularly difficult is that MANY OF THE EVENTS CATASTROPHIC ENOUGH TO CAUSE A MAJOR CRISIS - known as "fat tail risks" or as "Black Swans" by trader and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb - COME FROM OUTSIDE THE REALM OF FINANCE. To be able to forecast what the next global shock will be, we need to be able to make predictions about geopolitics, war, terrorism, extreme weather events, earthquakes and pandemics.

In their book this year on fat tail risks, Ian Bremmer and Preston Keat of political risk consultancy Eurasia Group noted that they pose fundamental problems for accurate prediction. Fat tails, they wrote, "represent the risk that a particular event will occur that appears so catastrophically damaging, unlikely to happen, and difficult to predict, that many of us choose simply to ignore it. Until it happens."

A growing body of theory and evidence suggests that making accurate forecasts about rare catastrophic events is inherently impossible. But it also suggests a practical solution to mitigate the dangers - detailed scenario-planning by imaginative analysts who do not cling too tightly to mathematical models of reality.

"In fact, when considering the military-modernization programs of countries like China, we should be concerned less with their potential ability to challenge the US symmetrically - fighter to fighter or ship to ship - and more with their ability TO DISRUPT OUR FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT AND NARROW OUR STRATEGIC OPTIONS," Gates said in a speech to the Air Force Association.

"Investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific - in particular our forward air bases and carrier strike groups," Gates said in National Harbor, Maryland.

Defense analysts have warned that the US military will soon lose its dominance on the high seas, in space and in cyberspace as China and other emerging powers obtain sophisticated weaponry and missiles. The intelligence guidelines for the next four years also elevated the importance of the cyber domain, singling out China as "very aggressive in the cyberworld."

The governor sent a letter Wednesday to Brown, referring to "news stories regarding the ACORN organization that have concerned me greatly." ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. The group has come under fire after employees were caught on tape giving tax advice to conservative operatives posing as prostitutes and pimps.

The most recent video surfaced this week in San Bernardino and has been used extensively by Fox News and conservative websites. "You can hear on the tape, the ACORN worker offering advice as to how to lie, how to claim that the house is a business, not a brothel," KTKZ talk show host Eric Hogue said Wednesday on his radio broadcast in Sacramento. Callers weighed in, one saying, "It just makes me sick."

At ACORN's Sacramento offices on Florin Road, a worker who answered the door said she couldn't answer questions. Ronald Coleman, ACORN's legislative director in Sacramento, later confirmed that tax and mortgage services were being suspended for now.

"Positive identification of the attacker was made, and US forces fired in self-defence wounding the attacker," the army said in a statement. "Local Iraqi police secured the scene and transported the wounded attacker to a local hospital for medical care," it added. Dr Ali Hatam of Fallujah hospital confirmed that Mr Latif later died from gunshot wounds.

The incident came a day after the Iraqi television journalist, Muntazer al-Zaidi, was freed after spending nine months in jail for throwing his shoes at the former US president George W Bush during a visit to Baghdad last December.

He argues that: "If we can't do away with factory farming, we should at least take steps to minimise the amount of suffering that is caused. I'm offering a solution where you could still eat meat but avoid animal suffering." Researchers have already performed similar tests on mice noting that if they are lacking a certain gene they are less sensitive to heat and pressure.

Future advances could allow scientists to switch off the pain receptors of animals set for slaughter but it raises certain moral issues. Should we be playing God with animals' DNA? Even if animals couldn't feel physical pain, that wouldn't alleviate the emotional and psychological pain they endure of being cooped up in dark, overcrowded conditions for days, weeks, months, years leading up to their innevitable deaths. And if anything, relieving animals of physical pain will encourage slaughterhouses to treat them even worse.

Changing animals' DNA is a clever solution to the problem of slaughterhouse cruelty but it's still a lazy one in my book. The problem needs to be tackled head on. If we can do something so amazing as to readjust a living organism's DNA to alter their pain barriers, WHY CAN'T GOVERNMENT'S HERE AND ABROAD DO THE COMPARABLY SIMPLE TASK OF PUSHING THROUGH LEGISLATION ENSURING THE ANIMALS ARE TREATED BETTER?

As a result our hunger is not satisfied, and we eat more and more. The effect is so powerful that a cheeseburger eaten on a Friday could be responsible for feelings of hunger three days later, the US researchers believe. Dr Deborah Clegg, who carried out the study, said: 'Normally, our body is primed to say when we've had enough, but that doesn't always happen when we're eating something good. What we've shown in this study is that someone's entire brain chemistry can change in a very short period of time.'

In a series of experiments, Dr Clegg showed that saturated fats trick the body into switching off the system that tells us how hungry we are and whether we've eaten enough. The fat makes the brain send out messages telling the body to ignore the information it is getting from the appetite-regulating hormones leptin and insulin. Dr Clegg, of the University of Texas, said: 'Our findings suggest that when you eat something high in fat, your brain gets "hit" with the fatty acids, and you become resistant to insulin and leptin. Since you're not being told by the brain to stop eating, you overeat.'

Writing in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, the researchers said that a type of fat called palmitic acid is particularly good at fooling the brain. Palmitic acid is a common saturated fat found in butter, cheese, milk and beef. However, the fats found in olive oil were given a clean bill of health. The scientists now plan to look at how long it takes the body's appetite to return to normal.

That is an increase from £49billion in 1998-99 - a year after Labour came to power promising a 'bonfire of the quangos'. The spiralling budgets of the 'quangos' - public agencies and advisory and monitoring bodies often staffed by box-ticking bureaucrats - and NHS trust will make uncomfortable reading for the Government. Ministers are facing a wave of public anger as ordinary families are told to prepare for sweeping spending cuts to get a grip on Britain's record national debt.

THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE EMPLOYED BY THE QUANGOS - often run by Labour cronies - has also rocketed from around 1million to 1.5MILLION over the same period. Mr Elliott said: 'Over the past decade, billions of pounds have disappeared into the quango state, which is so disjointed and poorly managed by ministers and civil servants that they end up doing the same jobs and wasting even more taxpayers' money on form-filling and bureaucracy.

'Gordon Brown likes quangos because it gives him the chance to shift the blame for poor public services onto non-departmental bodies, and to shift overpaid civil servants into supposedly non-civil service jobs, so he can claim he's made efficiency savings. Spending cuts are desperately overdue so we can avoid job-destroying tax rises, and the quango state is where the axe should fall first.' There has been an explosion in the number of quangos since Labour came to power in 1997. The Treasury has admitted that 160 of the biggest quangos, which are independent of the Government, cost the taxpayer £34billion last year.

The Guardian understands that key differences have emerged between the US and Europe over the structure of a new worldwide treaty on global warming. Sources on the European side say the US approach could undermine the new treaty and weaken the world's ability to cut carbon emissions. The treaty will be negotiated in December at a UN meeting in Copenhagen and is widely billed as THE LAST CHANCE TO SAVE THE PLANET FROM A TEMPERATURE RISE OF 2PER CENT OR HIGHER, which the EU considers dangerous.

"If we end up with a weaker framework with less stringent compliance, then that is not so good for the chances of hitting 2PC," a source close to the EU negotiating team said. News of the split comes amid mounting concern that the Copenhagen talks will not make the necessary progress. Ban Ki-moon, the UN general secretary, told the Guardian last night that negotiations had stalled and need to "get moving". Ahead of an unprecedented UN climate change summit of almost 100 heads of government in New York next week, Moon said the leaders held in their hands "the future of this entire humanity".

The US distanced itself from Kyoto under President Bush because it made no demands on China, and the treaty remains political poison in Washington. European negotiators knew the US would be reluctant to embrace Kyoto, but they hoped they would be able to use it as a foundation for a new agreement.

The sunken vessel has been found 30km (18 miles) off the south-west of Italy. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels. Labels on them say the contents are toxic. THE INFORMANT SAID THE MAFIA HAD MUSCLED IN ON THE LUCRATIVE BUSINESS OF NUCLEAR WASTE DISPOSAL.

But he said that instead of getting rid of the material safely, he blew up the vessel out at sea, off the Calabrian coast. He also says he was responsible for sinking two other ships containing toxic waste. Experts are now examining samples taken from the wreck. For years there have been rumours that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board, as part of a money-making racket.

The environmental campaign group Greenpeace and others have compiled lists over the past few decades of ships that have disappeared off the coast of Italy and Greece. Processing waste is highly specialised and is supposed to be an industry where security is the top priority. If tests show that there is nuclear material on the seabed it will prove that the mafia has moved into its dirtiest business yet.

THE OFFERING WAS MADE TO AKASH BHAIRAB, THE HINDU GOD OF SKY PROTECTION, whose symbol is seen on the company's planes. The airline said that after Sunday's ceremony the plane successfully completed a flight to Hong Kong. "The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights," senior airline official Raju KC was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Nepal Airlines has two Boeing aircraft in its fleet. The persistent faults with one of the planes had led to the postponement of a number of flights in recent weeks.

The construction is part of the port's plans to invest more in its infrastructure to handle iron ore and oil. China's 4tn yuan ($580bn, £352.7bn) economic stimulus package is driving demand for raw materials. The iron ore that passes through Dalian Port is from Australia, Brazil and Canada. Recently, it has started to receive shipments from Mauritania and other parts of Africa. The port is also building a huge oil tank with China National Petroleum Corporation, the state-owned firm that controls oil major PetroChina. Total capital investment in 2009 will be between $120m and $150m.

During a tour of facilities still under construction, senior manager Xu Shengke admitted that, overall, business had slowed due to the economic crisis. Last month, the port's Hong Kong-listed unit reported a 49% drop in profits in the first half of 2009, largely as a result of a slump in global trade. "The financial crisis has definitely impacted us. But as you can see, our investment plans have not been affected at all," Mr Xu said. "Our expansion is part of a broader national strategy."

Some believe the stimulus package will help China overtake the United States as the worlds biggest economy by 2030. "CAN CHINA SAVE THE WORLD? NO, BUT IT CAN HELP," said John Zhao, chief executive of Hony Capital, one of China's best-known private equity firms. He said countries with minerals, energy and other commodities stand to benefit the most from China's appetite for raw materials.

Such a strike may well be in Israel's best interests, though that depends entirely on whether the strike succeeds. It is certainly in America's supreme interest that Iran not acquire a genuine nuclear capability, whether of the actual or break-out variety. That goes also for the Middle East generally, which doesn't need the nuclear arms race an Iranian capability would inevitably provoke.

THEN AGAIN, IT IS NOT IN THE US INTEREST THAT ISRAEL BE THE INSTRUMENT OF IRAN'S DISARMAMENT. For starters, its ability to do so is iffy: Israeli strategists are quietly putting it about that even a successful attack may have to be repeated a few years down the road as Iran reconstitutes its capacity. For another thing, Iran could respond to such a strike not only against Israel itself, but also US targets in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, IT IS AN ABDICATION OF A SUPERPOWER'S RESPONSIBILITY TO OUTSOURCE MATTERS OF WAR AND PEACE TO ANOTHER STATE, however closely allied. President Obama has now ceded the driver's seat on Iran policy to Prime Minister Netanyahu. He would do better to take the wheel again, keeping in mind that Iran is beyond the reach of his eloquence, and keeping in mind, too, that very useful Roman adage, Si vis pacem, para bellum ("IF YOU WISH FOR PEACE, PREPARE FOR WAR").

Speaking at the Sibos conference in Hong Kong on Monday, William White, the highly-respected former chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements, also warned that government actions to help the economy in the short run MAY BE SOWING THE SEEDS FOR FUTURE CRISES.

"Are we going into a W[-shaped recession]? Almost certainly. Are we going into an L? I would not be in the slightest bit surprised," he said, referring to THE RISKS OF A SO-CALLED DOUBLE-DIP RECESSION OR A PROTRACTED STAGNATION LIKE JAPAN SUFFERED IN THE 1990S.

"The only thing that would really surprise me is a rapid and sustainable recovery from the position we're in." The comments from Mr White, who ran the economic department at the central banks' bank from 1995 to 2008, carry weight because HE WAS ONE OF THE FEW SENIOR FIGURES TO PREDICT THE FINANCIAL CRISIS IN THE YEARS BEFORE IT STRUCK. Mr White repeatedly warned of dangerous imbalances in the global financial system as far back as 2003 and – breaking a great taboo in central banking circles at the time – he dared to challenge Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, over his policy of persistent cheap money.

Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said US bank loans have fallen at an annual pace of almost 14pc in the three months to August (from $7,147bn to $6,886bn). "THERE HAS BEEN NOTHING LIKE THIS IN THE USA SINCE THE 1930S," he said. "THE RAPID DESTRUCTION OF MONEY BALANCES IS MADNESS."

The M3 "broad" money supply, watched as an early warning signal for the economy a year or so later, has been falling at a 5pc annual rate. Similar concerns have been raised by David Rosenberg, chief strategist at Gluskin Sheff, who said that over the four weeks up to August 24, bank credit shrank at an "epic" 9pc annual pace, the M2 money supply shrank at 12.2pc and M1 shrank at 6.5pc.

"For the first time in the post-WW2 [Second World War] era, we have deflation in credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a toxic brew," he said. IT IS UNCLEAR WHY THE US FEDERAL RESERVE HAS ALLOWED THIS TO OCCUR.