Our food and vital natural systems are experiencing recurring and increasingly significant shocks. Crop yields are crashing. Livestock, water, soils and wildlife are stressed. War and drought-related shipping disruptions continue. We are facing a Super El Niño , and the risk of floods is high. Further food price inflation is expected and there’s no sign of this stopping. 

All of this matters hugely for our resilience and long-term economic, food and national security.   
 

Land use can be multifunctional

To fix these issues we need more than a few policy tweaks – and we can’t leave it to the big food industry.  

There must be a major rethink of whole systems of food production, land and water use, and what we demand of the land. This includes:  

• food (including the 30% of all food grown that’s wasted) 

• bioenergy 

• animal feed 

• water storage, cleaning and slowing 

• energy and the built environment 

• wildlife and wellbeing 

• recreation 

Many of these purposes can, happily, be achieved together. We can combine good cropping and livestock with nature-based mixed farming (but not at intensive levels). We can build developments that include nature and create green corridors. We can store water and slow it down on farmland and wilder land. 

We can improve the nation’s diet and still eat affordably and healthily.  

But this depends on tackling current demands on land and how the food supply chain operates - and the food industry knows that.¹ We cannot have multifunctional land use if we don’t change ‘what' and ‘how much’ we grow. Large-scale biofuels², industrial livestock feed³ and highly processed foods need a complete reassessment. With 40% of our food imported – from countries facing just the same challenges - we need to produce more domestically. But we need to change what we grow.  
 

We all need to eat – and we deserve healthy food 

It has been clear for decades that what is being marketed to us – in shops, in adverts, in food service - is not what we need. In the UK, 53% of the calories we eat are ultra processed⁴. For many struggling with energy and housing costs, and with climate and conflict-driven food inflation, this food – often the cheapest food available – is the only option. This creates huge health inequalities, and costs billions in ill health.  

New jabs and pills to drive weight loss are a poor fix for what has been the inexorable growth of the over-promoted, under-nutritious, nature-killing, over-packaged junk food domination of our diets.  
 

Nature is essential 

Just as critical as diet-related ill health is the huge nature loss, that ‘invisibility of nature’ to quote the old food strategy⁵, which comes with a cheap food industry driven diet. The damage is extreme as such foods rely on extremely uniform, cheap, monoculture commodities and livestock feed produced with excess chemicals and energy. It leaves little habitat in or around fields, here and overseas. 

Climate extremes are also taking their toll on depleted natural systems. Vegetables and fruit are under huge water and heat stress meaning lower yields. Cereals harvests are the worst on record.⁶ Global supply chains are experiencing logistics constraints as wildfires cause chaos, and rivers used for trade dry up. In each case, water availability and extreme weather conditions are acting as common denominators.  
 

We need a food strategy that changes supply and demand

Farmers are facing other huge challenges, including inflation running at over 7% for their inputs such as fuel. Changing what and how they grow or rear is key for farmers, not least to reduce the need for input costs. Our recent dairy report showed what’s possible, and the Organic Action Plan⁷ is welcome.  

However, to drive up healthy, more diverse, climate resilient and nature boosting foods, we must curb marketing of foods and habits which drive poor consumption. 

Instead, farmers should be supported with new and better food marketing options. We must see: 

• far more support for farmer and grower transition,⁸
• strong regulation of the whole food chain 
• core food trade standards

Better dietary outcomes are why we have supported the campaign for Good Food Bill, but much wider action is needed. 

It’s a food resilience approach with good outcomes for all. And it is what the government said it would do. In its 2022 food strategy it identified three ‘interlocking sets of system dynamics, feedback loops and market failures that we need to address to transform the system’: 

1. the junk food cycle
2. the invisibility of nature
3. poor supply chain resilience

Four years on and if the last few months of drought have not woken this rather neglected policy up, then the UK government will fail to feed its people. 
 

A whole food system response  

Politicians are always reluctant to change anything to do with food. The fear of prices looms high.  

But it is so abundantly clear that the current food set up is failing against extremes of weather and global conflicts and it’s harming our health, economy and natural infrastructure. 

Dame Angela Eagle needs to get brave and involve eaters (all of us!), as well as farmers, retailers, food service, manufacturers and traders, in designing a brand new, radical food policy for an adaptive, resilient, healthy (for us and nature) and fair food system.