An important report has just been issued about British food supplies. It states that a declining proportion of food in British shops comes from British farms. It recommends 30:50:50, a mantra for its recommendation that by 2050, British food production should increase by 30% while reducing environmental impact by 50%. The report is issued from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture (APPGSTA), a group set up and supported by most of the leading agencies in the farming industry, those who give advice to farmers, as well as those whose research can impact production and the policymakers in Parliament and Westminster.
This is a topic that affects every one of us in everyday life. I am surprised that there are few mentions of it in the national press, which is dominated by sensationalism, this week about prisoners let out by mistake, and Andrew Mountbatten. However, even if this news does not get through to the general public, those in the industry are being alerted by news notices like this:
“UK food system needs wartime-scale reset to protect economy and NHS
A major report warns the UK food system faces collapse without wartime-scale changes to farming, land use and diets.”
Wartime measures
Wartime scale? That refers both to food rationing and to the huge efforts in world war two by the non-conscripted adult population (women and the elderly) to extend land under food production by cultivating vegetable plots even in city parks. I am linked by ancestry to the food industry, food importing into Liverpool from America from the 1860s, and a grandfather who was a food commissioner at the wartime docks at a time when supplies were being reduced by Atlantic submarines taking out cargo ships bringing food to Britain. His wife (my granny) was from a family that owned a prominent grocer’s shop.
Importing versus resilience
The wartime story gives us an inkling that for the last 150 years, the economic trend has been for less local food production and more imports. That family warehouse in Liverpool was for the importing of the growing output of wheat from North America as the farms spread out over the prairies.
The underlying economic question is whether it is better, on the advice of classical economist Adam Smith, just to import goods that can be produced more cheaply and efficiently in other countries, or whether we need to retain production in this country, both for jobs and for resilience, in case there is any crisis, comparable to the stoppage of food cargo in the 1940s, that requires more home-grown food.
Why the increase in imports?
The report states that the agri-food sector contributes £150bn to the Uk economy and employs 13% of the workforce, or 4.2m people. So, policymaking about the sector, and trade decisions, could affect many people.
There was a 5% increase in imported food in Britain from 2023 to 2024, up to £64.1 bn, with fruit and veg the largest category, originating in France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Ireland. If the Netherlands contribution includes cargo that has been routed via Rotterdam, then it might be inflated by the banana ships that arrive from central America and the citrus from South Africa. There is no climate advantage for the two Low Countries to be able to export to the UK, so if the non-tropical exports are homegrown, it must be due to other price advantages, such as better use of science, technology and investment.
British biosciences: praised but not applied
Better use of science and technology is actually a major part of the recommendations in the APPGSTA report. It is pointed out that two-thirds of recent productivity gains for farmers have been because of genetic improvements in either cultivars or livestock. Yet, as an example of poor government decisions, the ADAS (Agricultural Development Advice Service) for yield enhancement has been closed! There seems to be a gap in government thinking: on the one hand, Starmer praises British biosciences, and yet their potential is not being pushed through into political decisions.
Precision breeding of livestock, using genetic technology, is at risk in current negotiations with the EU over phytosanitary regulations if the UK gets dynamic alignment with EU regulation without a say (rule-taking, not rule-making), which may explain why the negotiations seem to have slowed down.
Use of metrics
Competitors, like the Netherlands, North America and New Zealand, make better use of metrics. New data software for agrimetrics failed in the UK (what is it with these large software contractors?!). Indicators need to change from output units, measured by items or weights, to measures that express the nutritional contribution of the produce. So, no more tasteless supermarket shiny tomatoes! Or low-quality wheat grown for cheap white sliced bread when high-fibre cultivars are possible. There should be sector-by-sector agri-baselines to measure productivity, with indicators such as carbon, water and nutrition. There should be more real-time capture of farm data (tell that to the middle-of-Kent farms that lack good internet connectivity!).
Interestingly, most of the metric-related recommendations in the report were missed in the early reports. Is this because they were all relying on the same AI summary rather than going to the full report? Or because they realised that most readers, especially on their phones, skip over challenging data and jump to the easy-to-grasp headlines?
How to use the land
For farmers and people living in the countryside, this is about how to use the land. The current grant system depends on them setting aside some proportion of their land for nature. Farmers are constantly having to bet on seasonal climate, and crops are being affected by drought and hotter months. For some, it is more profitable to sell up to the investors who are lining up to put solar panels on farmland, such as in Romney Marsh.
There is a growing local argument here in the south east that high-yield farmland should NOT be sacrificed to the climate crisis. The report argues that 60% of farmland should remain for high yield, 25% should be for nature, and 15% for low-intensity farming.
Some interesting nuggets of advice also pop up to solve current farming problems: for instance, that cattle dung could be used to power indoor vegetable farming. Winter rainfall should be better retained at catchment level. Both these recommendations connect to Southern Water and the causes of the sewage-in-rivers scandal. The tax system should incentivise long-term farm planning to get such improvements on the ground rather than the short-termism that prevails now.
Food and climate change
The report is entitled ‘Feeding Britain sustainably to 2050’, and it refers to the EAT-Lancet Commission on food. It is noted that the food system is the largest contributor to breaking the limits, ‘planetary boundaries’, which scientists say protect planet Earth. These concern biodiversity loss, land use change, freshwater use, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, pesticides and microplastics. Six out of nine of these planetary boundaries have already been crossed. A major cause is our food system. Food production and trade are the source of 30% of greenhouse gases.
The EAT-Lancet report makes global recommendations: the US and Europe should reduce eating of red meat; Africa should reduce starchy foods (from maize, yam and cassava); while east Asia must reduce fish. The EAT-Lancet diet improvement would still allow red meat (once a week), with some fish and poultry allowed, and beans (75g) and nuts (50g) daily. Half of every plateful of food should be vegetables. The aims of such dietary change are that it is healthier (saving the NHS resources!), preserves water, prevents extinctions (due to pesticides), reduces greenhouse gas (from those belching ruminants), and preserves tropical forests (such as the Amazon, which is being destroyed for soy plantations that produce animal feed).
The APPGSTA report ends with four steps or recommendations:
- 1. 75% food self-sufficiency by 2050, which entails a 30% increase in agri-output because of projected population growth
- 2. Setting up a new national agri-data institute
- 3. Better farm support on land use, R&D, and regulation for farm innovation
- 4. Better use of agri-research
UK lagging behind
The UK leads the world in agri-science publication but lags behind competitor nations in the use of agri-science in agricultural policy implementation, the route from lab to farm. As stated in the APPGSTA report:
“We suggested that over-precautionary and under-resourced regulatory processes are preventing or delaying access to farming innovations in many areas, including the registration and approval of new crop varieties, crop protection products, GMO imports, novel feeds and feed additives.”
There is already a new ‘Regulatory Innovation Office’. But I fear that public understanding of innovations, like GMO, precision breeding and ‘crop protection products’ (aka pesticides), lags behind. And there are the political differences over the regulation of these within the EU and UK.
And what about the consumer?
It is interesting that those ‘steps’ all concern the farming end of food sustainability and omit the consumer. This is possibly because the contributing agencies listed at the end of the report are all in the agri-sector rather than the food sector, with no sign of an agency representing supermarkets or institutional food providers. But I think the typical reader will be most interested in the food implications of food sustainability for Britain. Honestly, can we change our diet and move away from the fast food and harmful snacks that fatten waistlines? Will 75% of that plateful, with half of it vegetables, really come from UK farms by 2050?
