FOOD - when did it all become so complicated? To misquote the Isley Brother's song Harvest for the World, some of us have plenty, the rest of us are in need.

Here in the developed world, having too much food has become as dangerous as not having enough. It was announced this week that 50 per cent of the UK's population could be obese within 25 years and that with the resulting health problems the current generation of children may not outlive their parents.

A 28-stone training dummy has even been created to help emergency services cope with the growing number of obese people they have to rescue. It is being used to train firefighters in Wales.

In response, the government is urging schools to increase the hours pupils spend doing sport each week so that they can burn off all those extra calories.

I fear this initiative will fall at the first hurdle. Remember when food hero Jamie Oliver tried to wean spotty teenagers off the Turkey Twizzler in favour of freshly prepared tasty food? He met his nemesis in the (roundish) shape of highly indignant mums and dads, who, outraged at the thought of their little ones being made to eat, ugggh, leafy, green vegetables, waddled off to the local takeaway to pass burger and chips over the school fence to their off-spring.

Imagine what will happen when they hear that young Waynetta will have to do double netball while little Kevin will be expected to run two laps of the playground twice a week.

Those sick notes will be winging their way in to teacher faster that you can say Bryan Habana.

I speak as someone who joined a gym a few years ago to shift some excess weight. Wouldn't it have been simpler and cheaper not to have consumed the extra calories in the first place? And of course some of the extra weight has gone back on because I am fortunate enough to live in a land of plenty where this is always something tempting to eat easily within reach.

And because we have too much food all around us we have become totally blasé about it, wasting criminal amounts, whilst around the globe scraping together one nutritional mouthful is a daily struggle for millions.

Another report that beggars belief is that on occasions over the years the wrong sort of emergency food aid has been sent to people hit by famine. Agencies have handed out maize and millet to people because that's what they would traditionally eat in times of plenty. But when a person has reached a state of malnutrition it now transpires what they should really have been fed is a mixture of nuts, milk powder, seeds and vegetable oil.

You couldn't make it up.

All those supermarkets, stuffed to the rafters with so much food, much of which must end up being trashed.

Couldn't we redeploy all those people planning the next war into somehow finding a way of sharing the butter, flour and bread mountains with the rest of the world?

Or are we just going to let the problem get bigger and bigger and bigger