Our submission to the National Food Strategy Call for Evidence is on-line here.
It contains this statement: It’s important the National Food Strategy states the Government has ultimate responsibility for the food security for every citizen in the UK.
We made three specific recommendations:
- The Government sets up a UK Food Security Institute, or similar, ideally led by senior members of the MoD or the intelligence community with specific remits regarding food risk and resilience.
- The Government sets up a new statutory funding body, similar to the Arts Council or Sports England. Its purpose would be to enable engaging, informed debate about the food security challenges we’re facing and to generate a myriad of unexplored and as yet unimagined ideas for different actual and potential food systems.
- The Government sets up a Public Inquiry led by a senior Judge. Its concern would be to advise on the authority body we need to ensure food system players act ethically in the protection, promotion and maintenance of sufficient supplies of safe, nutritious food for the UK population.
How we drew up this submission
We called a special meeting about how we should respond to this Call for Evidence. This was a facilitated workshop for Board members and invited local participants (a senior supermarket executive, the Operations Director of one of the UK’s largest independent fresh produce wholesalers, a banker who is a relationship manager for the agri-food sector, and a long-standing senior professional in environmental health).
The workshop outputs, plus work we’d previously carried out informed a series of 20 blogposts on the matters under consideration to include in our Submission, which itself was reviewed by our Board and invitees to the workshop.