U.K. government issues a 20-year food-and-farming vision report
U.K. government recognizes the fragility of U.K. food production, and calls, for the first time since the Second World War, for an integrated food and farming policy; the government says that the U.K. food system, which depends heavily on imports, last-minute ordering, and long distribution chains, which are vulnerable to sudden shocks from global price spikes, disruption to fuel supplies, and the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure, leaves the United Kingdom too vulnerable
English farm // Source: nadis.org.uk
The U.K. government’s 20-year food and farming strategy fully integrates policy for the first time since the Second World War. “We can’t carry on just as we are,” the prime minister says of the U.K. food system in his introduction to the government’s new 20-year food and farming strategy published last week. The strategy has been coordinated by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), but it integrates policy on food across every government department for the first time since the Second World War.
Felicity Lawrence writes in the Guardian that the new food and farming strategy acknowledges formally for the first time since then that the U.K.’s food production and distribution affects not just the countryside and environment but our health, social equity, and whether the United Kingdom will even have enough to eat, as natural resources dwindle and climate change disrupts farming. It also recognizes the fragility of the current U.K. food system, which depends heavily on imports, last-minute ordering, and long distribution chains, which are vulnerable to sudden shocks from global price spikes, disruption to fuel supplies, and the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure, such as ports.
Although environment and food NGOs have already criticized the strategy for falling short on action, a joined-up approach to a national food policy represents a considerable shift from DEFRA’s position even recently. The strategy is the latest step in a long process that began when Gordon Brown lost patience with the farming industry in the wake of foot and mouth and set up the Curry Commission to rethink British agriculture. Then in 2007, when he became prime minister, he asked the Cabinet Office’s strategy unit — not DEFRA – to review U.K. food and report directly to him. The Cabinet Office’s report Food Matters published in 2008 highlighted the vital connection between food and health as well as environment, and flagged up food security as a pressing issue. Following that, DEFRA was required to produce a new vision to 2030, with the secretary of state Hilary Benn chairing a specially created subcommittee of the cabinet on food.
Lawrence writes that previous DEFRA policy documents have stressed the importance of the global market in providing food for the United Kingdom. Now the government is talking about the need for the United Kingdom to increase its own food production and make its food supply more resilient. The new strategy also talks
