That means you need some basic food production within walking distance of where you live — wherever you live. Local food systems need to be developed, protected, supported, nudged to change and regulated to create a different outcome from, say, the American Midwest. You can’t just “leave it to Tesco”, the NFU or single-issue campaigning groups. And you then have to help the poorest people in our society to access and afford nutritious food, as they do in civilised countries. This should be a basic human right in modern Britain; no one need go hungry. And then there is the powerful link between our health and what we spend on the NHS. A healthy food system would massively reduce the cost of the NHS.
The world will be saved, or destroyed, by what we consume — so a major part of the battle is what appears on our supermarket shelves, and what doesn’t. But the government can’t put all this on the “consumer”. Contrary to the mantra, the consumer isn’t always right. Processed foods are designed to make us crave their sugars and fats — to make us zombies.
And the consumer, more often than not, is still a mum, and she’s juggling her career and parenting, so she’s knackered and feeling broke, and she’s often distracted by kids hanging from her arm. That consumer doesn’t have the time, food knowledge or money to make perfect food and environmental choices. People need government, retailers, farmers and environmentalists to work together and do a heap of environmental and healthy diet thinking, and legislating, for them.
We need tougher regulation to ensure higher environmental and welfare standards. And we need to enforce fair dealing between supermarkets and farmers. That relationship often seems to be bullying and exploitative. A powerful Groceries Code Adjudicator is needed — one our over-powerful supermarkets are scared of. We need to ban “loss leaders”, where the supermarket gives away the farmer’s product, inflicting the loss on them. And we need to end the deeply misleading labels often found in British supermarkets, usually in the form of British flags above shelves of imported products. Does the Red Tractor logo even mean anything, anymore?
Our island is crowded and imperfect and we need lots of different things from land, ranging from dinner to renewable energy, carbon capture, commercial forestry, and healthy populations of insects and birds. Our landscapes are going to have to become much better at delivering multiple outcomes. Having a national “land use framework”, a plan for how we fit our disparate needs into our landmass, would be a good start. Navigating these choices is the work of grown-ups who know their stuff and who can find compromises.
The worrying news is that the messaging from the new government is that there will be “no significant change from current policies” in Defra. It is part of the “don’t scare the horses” strategy that won the election. But that isn’t a position you can hold for more than a few weeks. We’ve been drifting too long already; we need this government to be brave and bold.
The truth is you have to grapple with and manipulate things across the whole rural economy if you want our landscapes to be more progressive. Either you make this a priority and work across departments to get things done or you have to spend massively more on the farming and environment budget to mend the damage, probably both.
One of the key jobs is to grow the emerging Environmental Land Management (ELM) system for supporting farmers to deliver more nature. In England, we no longer have agricultural “subsidies” (unlike most of our commercial rivals and other devolved nations within the UK whom we compete with). The government doesn’t pay farmers to keep sheep or cows — they pay for environmental outcomes: buying woodland, wildflower meadows, or the flooding of fields by the hectare. If we want more nature, we have to buy it through this system. You now get exactly as much, or as little, as you pay for. But the budget was set at the moment we left the EU, years ago, and through inflation is declining rapidly in real terms. We are going backwards. So, there will be no “nature recovery” until this government commits to spending more.
A simple first step, that would cost nothing, would be publishing the latest numbers for the ELMs scheme. We simply don’t know if the post-Brexit agri-environmental schemes have the farmer take-up and reach to create the change that’s needed. Let the light into Defra and let the numbers out. Every farmer who can’t access such a scheme is an opportunity lost for change to more sustainable or regenerative practices.
Defra ministers need to get down to the Treasury and win the arguments about where money is needed and why. The NFU estimates that raising the agriculture budget from about £3.7 billion to £5.5 billion could bring about the transformation we need to see, and, though I might spend the money differently from them, it is probably not a bad estimate of what’s needed: £2 billion of new money. Raise that, when possible, to £4 billion in new money and you could radically transform our food system and our landscapes. For context, that’s how much was spent on unused PPE in the first year of the pandemic.
And, please Defra, avoid the same mistakes many previous governments have made. No new websites. No new schemes. No new abbreviations. No lengthy “consultations”.
“Let the light into Defra and let the numbers out.”
The basic infrastructure for what is needed exists already. The knowledge for making the countryside better already exists. So focus on the resources and the delivery process. Make sure the existing schemes are open to as many farmers as possible, and ensure there are skilled staff at Natural England to process farmer’s applications: progress can die in those bottlenecks, as I suspect Liz Truss and others long ago realised.
We also need strict planning and emissions laws that make it impossible to create monster chicken, pig or dairy farms. And yes, when we stop our farmers doing that, the quid pro quo is we can’t then allow them to be displaced on the shelf by less ethical imports. When we do better than the global race to the bottom, we have to support the more ethical system we’ve created with our trade policies, something every prime minister says they’ll do then renege on.
On top of this, we must stop land being a tax dodge for the super wealthy. Nature-friendly small farms need support to continue, but the wealthy descendants of Norman warlords from 1,000 years ago don’t. Cap any farming support payments for vast estates, wealthy NGOs and pension funds. And while we are at it, land reform would be great in England — with a community right-to-buy of the biggest estates. It may sound like I’ve gone fully communist but fuck it… Imagine communities up and down Britain having their own food systems: their own orchards, their own horticulture, their own regenerative herds of cattle and sheep, their own eggs. Imagine how healthy, robust and resilient such communities could be. Imagine how green and pleasant that England could be.
We all really need that “New Deal” for farmers. I just hope that Keir Starmer has worked out what that means, and how bold he now needs to be.
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Subscribe“A healthy food system would massively reduce the cost of the NHS”. Why stop there? If the author had claimed that a healthy food system would guarantee eternal life it still wouldn’t have been the most ridiculous and overblown assertion in this fatuous article.
The NHS could stop promoting Carbohydrates, and that might improve the ‘food system’.
” a community right-to-buy of the biggest estates. It may sound like I’ve gone fully communist but f**k it”
Uh. Yeah, it does. Hard pass. Collective farming? Not one of the noted successes of agricultural reform in the twentieth century.
Fascinating article.
For nearly everyone reading this, it is an utterly unfamiliar terrain. Townies have lost touch with farming (and fishing). We don’t know what goes on.
But then, for 40 years, we didn’t need to. The Common Agricultural Policy handled everything. We just grumbled about butter mountains and wine lakes.
So James asks a fair question. What do we want from the countryside? There’s a long-overdue debate wanted here.
Rather we have lost touch with what malnutrition and the threat of starvation mean. The author points out we only produce about half of what we eat, yet everything he demands – heavy subsidisation of small scale producers like himself, even heavier regulation, curbs on private investment in agriculture, bans on intensive chicken, pig and dairy farms, restrictions on “less ethical” food imports (which would also make other things more expensive, because it would make comprehensive trade deals with food exporting countries impossible), subsidies for “delivering nature” – would reduce yields and increase the price of food. Affordable food, and particularly affordable meat, is directly linked to increased heights, and closely correlated with rising life expectancy and higher IQs. There is nothing ethical about making food far more expensive, particularly in a society with low economic growth where families are struggling to make ends meet. The author would complete the transformation of farmers into yet another client group of the state, producing what the government dictates, rather than what customers need.
He said the opposite of passing the cost on to the consumer. He rightly pointed to the bullying & exploitative role played by supermarkets which profit while farmers go bust.
As for the health benefits of food, especially meat: consuming animals full of the antibiotics & other drugs needed to keep them alive in utterly unnatural conditions, along with all the stress hormones those animals produce living in such conditions, is a surefire way to a health disaster.
Tesco’s operating margin is 4%. And if you eliminated that, people would end up paying a lot more. Plenty of folk don’t have that luxury of being able to afford that.
Mr Rebanks I suspect is a confirmed socialist when it comes to farming!
“That means you need some basic food production within walking distance of where you live — wherever you live. Local food systems need to be developed, protected, supported, nudged to change and regulated to create a different outcome…”
You lost me after this comment. It sounds very naive, very expensive and almost completely unrealistic.
Yes I agreed with every word up to this point. As if today’s mixed communities would or could pull together on any such project.
It sounds like a traditional local market (with stalls and fat blokes shouting ‘apples one quid a bag’) to me. Why not have supermarkets closed on a Sunday morning (or two mornings a week) so a local market, and bakers, and butchers get some time without corporate competition?
Up here we’d have to get through the winter on pickled neeps and salt fish once a month. “Localism” is a restaurant trend, not a sustainable food policy for the masses.
A deeply conflicted article. The author starts by imploring the new government to set up a discussion about what our countryside is “for” then tells us all the requisite plans are already settled and government should just get on with implementing them.
Did the author bother reading it back to himself?
The shame is, i could have found.much to agree with him about, especially in terms of healthy food production and consumption. The danger is that the kind of muddled thinking which ensued might leach into government thinking faster than phosphates leach into our rivers from over-intensive farming practices. In other words, this article doesn’t help one little bit, apart from raising the issue.
With a stonking great majority and a fragmented opposition Starmer & Co could really implement a grand vision for Britain.
Food grown closer to the communities that eat it would be great idea. But he won’t do that. Instead he’ll spend money on expanding ULEZ cameras across our major cities. And that way they can charge owners of older cars frankly ridiculous money to drive on potholed roads they are unwilling to fix.
We need a quiet revolution. Not one that saves the Ukraine or Gaza or the planet. One that saves the UK (do that and then do the other stuff). Labour should do that. But they won’t.
We could always get in some experts on land redistribution from Zimbabwe.
Of course we need to grow more of our own food, have more ‘wilderness’, stop allowing foreign companies to to sell us their unhealthy subsidised junk food etc.
But the prerequisites are fewer people so we have more farmland and fewer mouths to feed. Also removing subsidies from farming chemicals (lack of pollution costs from herbicide etc and over encouragement of use of pharma drugs rather than good breeding) and returning full ownership of farms to their farmers.
Food ‘needs’ to be more expensive, clearly it is critical to life and is presently undervalued by Govt and Society.
This is a familiar piece … farmers calling for Govt intervention … on the basis that the consumer doesn’t know what he wants and doesn’t understand anyway .. and of course more tax payer £’s.
Maybe Mr Rebanks look at the New Zealand model, I understand all Govt. grants and subsidies ended in 1978, and farming is one of the more successful sectors of their economy.
NZ is a country the size of England and Wales with a population of 5 million, half of which live in 2 cities. It lends itself to large farms, particularly in the South Island, where much of the hill land only supports low stocking rates. Removing subsidies drove a lot of small farmers out of business, with a great deal of pain; but it worked economically because NZ’s human and natural geography made that sort of model efficient.
Britain, particularly England, is a densely-populated land, which can’t produce all the food it consumes. This is being exacerbated by town-orientated politicians and technocrats trying to turn large parts of our productive farmland into a pastoral vision, a big wild garden. Leaving Britain, an island nation, utterly vulnerable to even the tiniest of sieges or sanctions.
Removing small farm subsidies wouldn’t work for Britain the way it has for New Zealand. Different land, different people, different economic and strategic setup.
From what I watch and read about DEFRA it strikes me they are offering money to farmers to take land out of food production and this article does nothing to disabuse of that opinion.
A classic piece of rural romanticism aligned with the modern farmer’s stance of outstretched hand(s). As background I grew up on a farm, went to a different elite university, have studied agricultural economics for most of my life, and have lived in a rural area of Scotland very similar to the author’s fells.
The vision proposed is utterly at variance with the social and economic forces which shape British agriculture. The most important is rural depopulation. Few want to work in agriculture. Everything the author proposes requires much more labour intensive methods of farming. Where do the people come from, especially if he wants to turn the countryside even more into a playground for urban romantics?
The second factor is pressure from Net Zero folk to promote forestry and discourage livestock production. The outcome is to push land use in most of Scotland and Northern England to intensive plantation forestry. Where I live that means forestry on all the hills with livestock confined to valley floors. This makes perfect sense given current incentives but it doesn’t correspond in any way to the author’s depiction of what could be.
For more than 50 years British agriculture has been trapped between pressures to keep food prices down by relying upon an increasingly global market for agricultural products and the desire by romantics to protect the British countryside from the logical consequences of that globalisation. You can’t have both. Current policy is an unhappy compromise between the countryside as a public park view of the world and the reality of what is required to keep prices down. Don’t blame the supermarkets – they are just the vehicle of the desire of both government and customers to keep food prices down.
The author can have his vision if he is willing and able to persuade the public to accept far higher food prices – or the same in much higher taxes to subsidise farmers. Best of luck with that. The agricultural history of the last century has been a consistent choice to give more weight to lower prices and more capital-intensive production over any of the alternatives. Given its support it is very unlikely that the new government will make any other choice!
Agree here. But, can we afford food costs to go up while increasing higher housing costs reduce the amount of disposable income? Maybe there is a cunning plan but I doot it!
After all the time and effort taken to compile this piece, let’s just hope that he is given that weekly column at the Guardian.