Sow, reap, eat
THE Government has promised a White Paper on its strategy for food. As prices rise around the world, a changing climate seriously threatens harvests and increasing obesity is set to overwhelm the NHS, turning Henry Dimbleby’s recent report into action is ever more important. The Government deserves credit for asking for this independent assessment, but none at all for Boris Johnson’s knee-jerk rejection of some of its findings simply because he won’t admit the need for behavioural change. Yet the world-wide pressure on food prices means that the UK needs a strategy for food production. Climateaffected harvests mean we need a strategy for food security and there is also the challenge of obesity-caused diseases.
These three elements are crucial for farmers if they are to plan for the future. The industry has accepted, in large measure, the need to combat climate change, to have the highest standards of food safety and animal welfare and to drive measures to recover our biodiversity. However, all that cannot be done in a vacuum. The most important ‘public good’ that farmers deliver is producing the food that the nation needs, yet this is the very public good that the Government seems most reluctant to admit. Instead, its emphasis is constantly on environment, landscape and access.
After 80 years of production subsidy, ministers are, of course, right to insist on the importance of these outputs and the move to support farming that is regenerative. Nonetheless, regenerative farming must also be productive farming and serve the nation’s need for good food. That won’t happen unless there is a real market for what farmers produce and enough confidence for them to invest in the changes that are needed.
It isn’t a question of either environment or production: it’s both. Recovering fertility in the soil, working with Nature, eschewing chemical pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers and producing higher-quality food all hang together and they don’t come cheap. Nor can food production be divorced from delivering the environmental outcomes that ministers rightly emphasise. All are public goods and all demand the Government sets high standards and rewards those who meet them, not only now, but on a dependable and continuing basis.
That’s why the forthcoming White Paper must set clear targets for home production. Once, British farmers provided about 80% of the food we ate; now it hovers at about 50%. That puts us at real risk. We cannot rely on the rest of the world to feed us. Covid has shown exactly how fragile global supply chains are and governments can no longer pretend that food will be readily available for us to import.
It won’t be enough to measure quantity; quality matters, too. When we set those higher standards, the consumer must be informed by proper labelling. How many people know that British beef has the lowest carbon footprint of any produced in the world? If we are to eat less and better, we need to know what is better—and not only in the shop, but in the restaurant and the fast-food outlet.
This communication needs to reach everyone, particularly families with young children. The first years of life are crucial in creating proper eating habits. Children consume far too much sugar and salt and far too little fresh vegetables, fruit and meat. A change in behaviour is vital for our health, but also for farmers. A strategy for nutrition is all of a piece with a strategy for food production and food security. The promised White Paper must show that Defra understands that.
The most important “public good” farmers deliver is producing the food we need