Government ‘failing citizens’ by staying silent on future of food
Government silence about the future of UK food since the Brexit referendum is “an astonishing act of political irresponsibility” according to a report published yesterday.
Drawn up by a group of leading academics, the study warns that the UK is in danger of sleep-walking into a food crisis unless the full implications and the magnitude of the work required to maintain stability of supply and food security is realised and acted upon swiftly by the authorities.
The report, “A food Brexit –timetogetreal”statesthat Governments have provided no policy vision for the future of UK food production or consumption other than a belief that agritechnology and an export drive will suffice for farming, and that reasserting a 200-mile exclusion would resolve unsustainable fish sourcing: “They will not,” it concludes.
Food policy specialists, from three universities, Professors Tim Lang, Erik Millstone and Terry Marsden who drew up the report said that for the Government not to talk about or to plan openly for the disruption that Brexit would cause was “bizarre and irresponsible”.
“It is as though there has been a collective amnesia about how Brexit could seriously undermine food security in the UK. Because of the intrinsic importance of food in Brexit and in the nation, the current UK political system is failing its citizens,” he said.
The report also warned that the crisis could not have come at a worse time for the food and farming sectors:
“The Food Standards Agency is a shadow of its former self. Defra has had years of cuts and suffers a serious staff shortage, just when the UK needs many of the best and brightest civil servants to negotiate the most important element of Europeanisation – our food.”
“To leave the EU would sever the UK from many bodies which underpin food – from scientific advisory bodies to regulators, from research programmes to subsidies to regions. What is going to replace these? There is silence from Defra and the Government.”
Stating that US agribusiness was “salivating at the prospect” of flooding the UK with low standard food, Lang said the realities of a Food Brexit were awesome – yet the British public had not been informed about its implications.