The UK government’s report into how to make the country’s food sector more sustainable merely provides a “framework” for further action, farming minister Jim Paice insisted today (10 July).
The Green Food Project is “not the end of the affair”, Paice said, as he launched the report at the Great Yorkshire Show agribusiness trade event in the north of England.
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The project saw farmers, manufacturers and environmentalists asked how the food industry can reconcile the demands of producing more food to feed a rising population while alleviating its impact on the environment.
“The project has stemmed from what is sometimes seen as two sides of the debate on the production of food and care for the environment,” Paice said. “So we brought together a steering group representing different factions within food manufacturing, the foodservice industry, and a number of environmental groups.”
He added: “I want to emphasise that this is not the end of the affair. The reason we wanted a working project was because we wanted to keep a level of continuity. What we’ve brought together here are a number of action points, but they all require further action. Some are relatively minor, some are hugely important and very big.
“This is the first time anyone has ever embarked upon something like this, trying to bring together these aspects therefore has been a major piece of work but it has also brought out where there are clear issues that need to be addressed. They are important to lead us forward as we try to find, not just the information, but the framework in which to develop future food and farming policies.
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By GlobalData“We never expected this to suddenly produce a blueprint or manifesto, but it has set out a framework from which we will then go on to develop specific policies so I strongly recommend it to you all. It’s a first class piece of work.”
Guy Gagen, chief arable adviser at the National Farmers Union, said there was an opportunity for regulation to be introduced from the report.
“We, from the NFU’s point of view, see that agricultural production and research has been neglected, quite seriously neglected, for a very long time,” he told attendees. “We’ve got to focus on the problems in hand … understand how to connect agricultural productivity knowledge exchange and how to benefit the environment. If we combine those rather than having them separately delivered, I think we might get further.
“We also see an opportunity for appropriate regulation. Regulations have been put in place over the last few decades. Perhaps what we will see is [regulation] of a blanket nature, specifically perhaps on the way fertiliser and nitrate, pesticides and others are managed.”
But while, many factions within the food industry have welcomed the report, the Soil Association’s director of innovation Tom MacMillan, highlighted the risk the report could fail to deliver as previous reports and recommendations for greening the food system have.
“This report is weak when it comes to the key challenge of making it easy to eat a diet that doesn’t seriously damage our own health and that of the planet. We believe that the government should be bold enough to lead a much more robust discussion about the links between production and consumption, if we are to tackle the twin challenges of environmental degradation and the growing problem of diet-related ill-health.”
Paice, however, was keen to point out the report is “a stageing post, it’s not the end of the game”.
“This whole exercise has caused a lot of deep thinking and a lot of organisations to frankly move outside their comfort zones to thinking about issues they would maybe not normally think about. That has taken some considerable effort and I appreciate that.”
