Ctre of post-Brexit food engulfed by uncertainty
concerning food supply, quality, health and consumption, which go beyond just the concerns of quantity of supply by integrating the restoration of ecosystems and food system resilience.
This will require leadership and we suggest setting up a new National Commission for Food and Agriculture that it can creatively build a noncompetitive national consensus about the overall priorities and principles to be adopted as the country proceeds through Brexit.
The historical precedents for this lie in the wartime agricultural committees of both world wars and, right up until the late 1970s, in the overall national agricultural policies which espoused productivism as an economic and food security set of principles.
Aligning the UK to global sustainability commitments, as well as proactively engaging with international development goals for fairer and more sustainable food trade with lower- and middle-income countries, should now be matched with a renewed domestic commitment to increasing UK self-sufficiency in food production and consumption, at least to levels attained in UK “high farming” periods of the 1970s – 80% or above.
There is thus no contradiction from a food security and sustainability perspective in augmenting selfsufficiency at home and creating fairer trading relationships abroad. Indeed, our national points of reference here should be Norway and Switzerland rather than the more deregulated New Zealand. Most if not all advanced countries seek to protect and promote their national agri-food systems, and governments who ignore their responsibilities in this regard, history tells us, do not tend to last very long.
So what should some of the building and guiding principles of the UK framework for agri-food include? I am heartened to see that some of these priorities are increasingly now beginning to be debated by many in Westminster, if not yet at the heart of government. I will list some of the principles I presented last week at the Westminster Food Brexit conference which brought together over 300 delegates from the food industry:
Redevelop national food and agricultural policies which foster more diverse, multi-functional and ecologically sustainable farming systems which encourage value–added and the growth in “shorter” chains to the market;
Invest in creating more national self-sufficiency, especially in temperate fruit and vegetable sectors;
Link towns and cities to their rural and agricultural hinterlands through integrating food planning into local government actions;
Foster farm-based diversification and environmental partnership working, for example as the innovative Wye and Usk Valley partnership is doing and the Green Pasture-led Farming Association;
Invest in “smart farming” based on a variety of circular-economy principles, all of which could “scale out” a full and diverse range of organics, and wider environmentally sensitive farming schemes (such as LEAF);
Find ways to relax regulatory burdens on local and devolved authorities to encourage green public procurement of local and regional foods;
Invest in farming, food, hospitality and tourism training and skills to attract the young into these sectors, providing real career pathways, such as through the R&D funding mechanisms and enhancing and widening the agri-food training partnership.
Planning for a sustainable UK food future
It has for some time been seen as politically unfashionable for UK governments to openly advocate a planning approach to various sectors of the economy and polity. The chronic food security and sustainability vulnerabilities which emerged, especially since the combined food, fuel, financial and fiscal crisis of 2007-8, and now the prospect of Brexit and the concurrent prospective regulatory divergences in Europe, are making the need for a robust and engaged national planning exercise in the field of food security and sustainability an urgent need unseen since the immediate post-war era.
The UK food system is currently a victim of both a series of (avoidable) market and now state failures which will, if not addressed proactively, be severely exacerbated by the Brexit process.
While it seems that food businesses are currently “planning for the worst and hoping for the best”, Westminster as a whole, in a spirit of cooperation with the devolved regions, needs to get a grip and protect and build national food resilience by once again investing in its domestic food and farming infrastructures.
Terry Marsden is professor of environmental policy and planning at Cardiff University and director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute.