In our latest report Global Risks to UK Food Supplies, we spell out the major global risks that will have increasing impact on the UK’s dependency on the global larder. The collocation of these risks in one brief document makes a compelling argument for radical change.
UK policy makers at a national and regional level need to take these major risks into consideration when drawing up their resilience plans. We have, therefore, made these three sets of urgent recommendations:
Recommendation 1
To change the social, economic and environmental context to drive population behaviour change, as outlined in the Chief Medical Officer’s Report 2018. Specifically, we recommend:
- Fiscal measures to promote sustainable viable profit margins in agricultural production, wholesale and retail of fresh produce.
- Limits of the use of land, soil, water and energy for the production of products of low nutritional value; e.g. currently 6% of the UK potato crop is used to make crisps for PepsiCo alone, raising questions about the best use of the UK and the world’s increasingly limited agricultural resources
- Changes in land use as recommended in the Climate Change Committee report Land use: Reducing emissions and preparing for climate change
Recommendation 2
To restrain corporate vested interested from using the increasingly scarce UK and global resources of land, soils, water and energy to make and promote products with zero or close to zero nutritional value. In the UK many, but not all of these vested interests can be identified through the VAT system.
Recommendation 3
To set up a UK Food Security Institute as recommended in our horizon scanning report Back from the Future.
In making these recommendations, we draw attention to responsibilities under Article 25 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and of the definition of food security made in the Rome Declaration on World Food Security (1996), and that ethical considerations need to be an integral part of local and national resilience planning.
Very interesting. I am interested in the state of regenerative farming as, last time I checked , only about 2% of uk farms are seriously doing thus. The future is in the soil. Depleted nutrients . But I do believe allotment are hard work because people don’t pull together and have no time for them now but some sort of smaller scale community growing might work better. It is not about quantity production, urban food growing would be about quality and flexibility
Soil chemistry and, as important if not more so, soil biology, really matters. I’m unconvinced it’s ‘the future’ only!
re allotments and GYO: Take a look at this earlier blogpost: https://www.birminghamfoodcouncil.org/2019/02/19/why-talk-of-grow-your-own-gyo-is-irrelevant-and-unhelpful/
In summary, it doesn’t add up!