Should a city such as Birmingham have a food strategy of its own? Would it make a difference to the well being and economy of the city?
If the UK has a national strategy, how might cities, towns, regions and their local government deliver elements of it? And, if there are costs involved, who pays given the substantial cuts to local Council budgets?
We responded (in this report here) to Mayor Sadiq Khan’s call for responses to a draft London Food Strategy in the summer of 2018.
That work made us think long and hard about a Birmingham Food Strategy. Although for us, the jury is still out as to whether or not having such a strategy is worth more than the paper it might be printed out on, the process of thinking enabled us to identify some local challenges a strategy could address.
Hence the publication of the one-pager paper Towards a Birmingham Food Strategy in September 2018, the text of which is replicated below. Since we drew this up, we’ve given a lot of thought to local risk and resilience matters, including further work on and delivery of The Game. Thus, in addition to the suggestions below, we would also put in the development of robust local food security risk and resilience planning, to be delivered asap.
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Previous blogposts in this National Food Strategy series are:
#12: Local risk and resilience
#11: City level responses to food insecurity
#10: The space between farm gate and food outlet
#9: Three scenarios and their risks to the supply chain
#8: Supply chain permutations are endless
#7: A simplified fresh produce supply chain map
#6: UK resilience to global risks to food supplies
#5: Global risks to UK food supplies
#3: The global competition for safe, nutritious food
A link to our submission is here. A list of all the blogposts in this series is here.