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Apprenticeships touted as solutions to the grave crisis of youth unemployment are not remotely up to the job

Apprenticeship – the word warms the cockles of politicians' hearts. David Cameron and Nick Clegg boast frequently of increasing apprenticeships by a remarkable 60%.

It's National Apprenticeship Week – but the coalition should perhaps have quietly dropped it, along with so much support for the young. The new apprenticeships they claim are almost a lie, at least nowhere near the truth. As youth unemployment climbs – now at 22.3% – the number of apprenticeships for 16  to 18 year-olds fell in the last three months.

Cameron and Clegg certainly know the truth about their "60% increase". They may get lost in thickets of vocational initials – BTecs, HNDs, GNVQs – while knowing every detail about whether an A* will help Oxbridge select the very best. But they love the word "apprenticeship", with its sepia image of a young man at a lathe under the watchful eye of a master craftsman, the sealing wax on his seven-year articles ensuring lifelong, worthwhile work. 

However, most "modern apprenticeships", as in secondary modern, are a world away from medieval guilds. The last government devalued the word, but this government trashed it when it took Labour's Train to Gain scheme for older employees, cut the funds and rebadged it as "apprenticeships". That created an instant 257% increase in "apprenticeships" as short courses for over-25s, most already working at Asda, Morrisons or McDonald's. Worthwhile maybe, but not "apprenticeships", wasting scarce state funds on company training.

Here's an enjoyable statistic: in the last year "apprenticeships" for the over- 60s rose by 878%. Cuts in the training/apprenticeship budget are disguised by plentiful announcements of little pots of money for small new schemes: Cameron did it again this week with £6m for high-quality apprenticeships. The worst scandal is that so many "apprenticeships" are 12-week courses from private training companies, with no jobs at the end. That revelation forced the government to promise all future apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds must last a year – but not for 19 to 24 year-olds.

Britain is the only country that outsources apprenticeships: elsewhere they are a bond between employers and trainees. Take the retail apprenticeship, a weak, lowly esteemed course in generic basics. Professor Lorna Unwin of the Institute for Education says German retail apprentices learn the detail of, say, delicatessen, or electrical sales. "They learn all about the products they sell, along with maths and literacy. It's a regulated occupation, where you can only be apprenticed under a meister for at least two and often four years. No wonder Comet goes to the wall when staff have no idea what they're selling." That applies to low-grade social care courses: in Nordic countries nursery nursing is mostly graduate level. That goes to the heart of the matter, a reflection on a whole society's deep values.

It's been a week of bad news for the young. David Miliband's commission on youth unemployment, for the charities' organisation Acevo, laid out the frightening future. In temperate language – Acevo is non-political, and charities want grants – it shows how the damage done to the lost generation who never found work in the 80s will be dwarfed by what is happening now.

One in five has no job, with 600 hotspots where twice as many chase nonexistent work. Keeping them out of work costs £4.8bn a year, £28bn over the next decade, "a timebomb under the nation's finances". Quarter of a million have been out of work for a year. Training schemes and exploitative, unpaid work barely scratch the surface. The problem is deep and structural: there is too little demand for underqualified young employees, with too many out of work even in the good times.

The state intervenes too little too late: the vaunted Work Programme takes only one in 10 of the young, with under-19s left out. There are just 50,000 subsidised jobs, spending half the OECD average. The Association of Colleges reports alarmingly that the number of 16  to 19 year-olds with fewest qualifications enrolling for basic courses (level 1) has fallen, in some areas by up to 15%. Why? The abolition of the education maintenance allowance (EMA) and transport price rises. Barnardo's reports this week on harm done by the loss of EMAs, its chief executive abandoning politically cautious language: "It's an absolute disgrace that some students are forced to skip meals in order to afford the bus to college. Our most vulnerable young people may lose the opportunity to improve their life chances." Axing Connexions, which reached out to young people adrift, means no one guides them towards college. The replacement careers service will offer limited online or phone advice.

The Acevo-Miliband report shows how unemployment scars the young for life. Britain's education was always excellent at the top – the problem is the bottom 30%. Their low political status means further education colleges offering second chances get one-third less funding than schools teaching A-levels – and no free school meals.

Class cuts like a knife through everything as the government blames "low aspiration", chivvying the young into weak schemes with no jobs at the end. Chicken and egg: why should a society bother with expensive training for low-paid, undervalued workers in retail, social care or nurseries? A culture that pays so many people so little for essential work will never improve opportunities for those it undervalues from birth.

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The dilemma exposed in your article on the World Food Programme buying food for aid distribution from commodity trader Glencore, rather than from smallholder farmers (How £50m in UN food aid for starving was used to buy wheat from Glencore, 6 February), fails to address the heart of the problem, which is the huge underinvestment in small producers in recent years. Buying food directly from smallholder farmers is the ideal scenario, whether to help people in times of crisis, or as part of the everyday supply chain. When WFP buys food from local farmers, this strengthens the ability of communities to withstand crises by stimulating local economies, as well as getting food to people who need it.

However, the quantity of food needed to help hungry people in emergency situations is not always available from local farmers. Unless action is taken to develop the capacity of small-scale food producers to supply food to local markets during crises, organisations such as the WFP will continue to buy from large commodity traders to supply the quantities needed. Governments and donors must invest substantially more in small-scale food producers, especially women, who can play a crucial role in boosting food production and preventing hunger crises before they occur.
Hannah Stoddart
Head of economic justice, Oxfam

• Whether or not the owners of Glencore are billionaires or "able to operate with secrecy from its base in Baar" seems irrelevant. If it can supply grain more cheaply than other providers, more lives are saved. I at least have confidence in the WFP to buy grain at the best price it can.

Food politics is genuinely complicated and rarely as it seems. Russia's export ban was to dampen down internal prices to make food more affordable within the country (or to prevent the export of grain early in the year, only to be forced to buy it back later, perhaps at a higher price). Argentina has also constrained exports, with the unintended consequence of lowering production. The EU has controlled exports for years (export licences, tariffs on imports, subsidies etc). EU control has caused more volatility in the grain market than a whole raft of speculators by subsidising exports up until 2006. When the EU could no longer shovel grain from store, global prices rose uncontrollably as the market realised that there was a shortage – we have not recovered.

For the wealthy in the UK and EU, food is clearly not important. Current EU proposals for 2014 include the removal of 7% of arable land from production and the imposition of an uneconomic rotation, with a consequent fall in production, with little or no environmental benefit. We already have a policy that is doing its best to kill off development of GM crop production. But don't worry, we are unlikely to suffer; we'll export starvation, along with our carbon emissions.

There seems to be some surprise that Glencore "buys up supplies [of wheat] from farmers and sells at a profit". I have considered buying up wheat from bankers to sell at a loss, but don't seem to be able to get backing.
Simon Ward
Increment Ltd (and InsideTrack.org)