Sustainable ways to feed the world must be found, delegates at a hard-hitting conference in Snape heard on Friday.

The Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival conference took place at Snape Maltings on the eve of the festival itself.

Meanwhile, outside the hall, a host of food and drink producers were setting up for a weekend of cultural celebration centred around food. The conference, the brainchild of local food campaigner Lady Caroline Cranbrook, heard from a series of speakers who looked at food chains, scientific breakthroughs, and heard inspirational stories of how cash-strapped farmers in parts of Africa were applying science at a more basic level in order to help on crops beset by problems of disease, heat and lack of water. “We don’t want to sit in an ivory tower,” Dr Gordon Jamieson of the John Innes Centre in Norwich told around 200 delegates as he described its research. “We are very keen to engage with others in dialogue.”