I was fortunate to attend this week’s Farm to Fork summit hosted by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and DEFRA as part of a delegation of farmers, growers, processors, retailers and academics. It was a golden ticket to a supposed yellow brick road for broad discussions on tackling rapid food inflation and rising farm costs and bolstering the UK’s food security. 

The last 18 months have highlighted the fragility of our food system, which has lurched from one crisis to another. With extortionate input costs, weather extremes and soaring food prices, it’s been a challenging period, to say the very least. What can’t be ignored in conversations about food security is how these circumstances lock heads at the same intersection: climate change, nature loss and dietary ill-health.

Tweaks to the status quo or grasping the enormity of food system change?

Clearly, we need to devise solutions, and it’s welcomed to see food and farming moving higher up the political agenda. The Summit has helped sharpen minds on the need for remedial action. There were welcomed announcements in better support for our beleaguered horticulture sector, renewed commitments on trade, maintaining the independence of the Grocery Code Adjudicator and reviews into supply chain dealings.

But whether the Summit’s mission to tackle food security drives tweaks to the status quo or genuinely grasps the complexity and enormity of the challenge, addressing the root causes and not just the symptoms, remains to be seen. Questions about the long-term resilience of our food system very much remain. 

The Summit was narrow in scope, owed to the tight window the collective had to right the food system’s wrongs. Self-sufficiency was a talking point. Welcomed, in my view, if it weren’t for the glaring omission in linking self-sufficiency and our own security to the pressures of impending climate and ecosystem breakdown.

We need less intensified production and greater land and diet diversity 

On the Summit’s agenda were export opportunities to get more UK food on plates worldwide as part of the government’s drive for economic growth. Viable for many farm businesses? Most certainly. Sustainable? Not if predicated on our current production systems. In 2020 alone, our reliance on imported inputs to maintain production cost the sector £8 billion on fertilisers, pesticides and animal feed. There’s economic growth somewhere, but the £ signs aren’t landing on the sector’s balance sheet.

The externalities of a food system reliant on intensive business models are felt elsewhere in the UK economy. The total costs of soil degradation, water pollution and dietary ill-health total over £8 billion per annum.

I would have welcomed more discussion on what the UK imports, which can otherwise be produced here, especially food shipped from climate-vulnerable locations. A real push to incentivise more diverse fruit and vegetable production on UK soils. Still, exports vs imports dwarf any practical discussion on addressing the issues of domestic production: the what, where and how of producing food that feeds us well.

We need greater land and diet diversity, not more of the same. We need less intensity and a more sound ecological understanding of how we balance food production with the natural capacities of our rural environments, which desperately need restoration. The government’s Food Security report (2021) acknowledges that climate change and environmental degradation are the biggest medium to long-term threats to our food production. This awareness didn’t translate through to the cut-and-thrust of the Summit’s focus.

Adaptive, multifunctional land use for genuine, long-lasting food security

Rather than tunnel vision on boosting existing production systems as opportunities for economic growth, we need strategies for closing the input supply chain, building natural fertility and pest control while optimising existing forage. Lucrative economic opportunities based on agroecological production are achievable. We just need the vision to get there.

In certain landscapes, we can bolster food security through natural flood risk management, carbon storage and sequestration. Others will require careful husbandry of soil and greater diversity of what we grow, focusing on producing food for people over commodities and animal feed. In all areas, it means working with nature. We need adaptive, multifunctional land use if genuine, long-lasting food security is the goal. 

Technology and innovation can contribute to developing this vision, but not under the guise of a silver bullet distraction from wider systemic change. We need to build a food system that relies less on the externalities of chemical and tech solutions and return to the ecosystem services we’re impoverishing through overreliance on unsustainable inputs, which makes the shine and lure of external tech solutions all the more glittering.

We need farmer-to-farmer learning and trials to adapt to the demands of farming in an unpredictable climate. We need farmer-led innovation for biodiversity recovery and climate adaptation. We need locally-contextual approaches to what farming in this way means for rural communities the length and breadth of the UK. It’s not a one-size fits all approach, as we’ve seen in how the current paradigm costs us in degraded soils and chemical fertilisers. 

Ramping up food production underpinned by extractive inputs and focusing more on commodities rather than feeding people well isn’t a solution to a food security crisis. The consolidation and commodification of our food system is considerably costing everyone. This is well established in existing reports which outline how intensifying production drives more demand for cheaper food, making scarce already scarce natural resources and creating a negative feedback loop of costly burdens and fragility.

Narrowly fixating on efficiency gains without incentivising and promoting farming’s transition to whole-farm, nature-friendly approaches misses the mark of what true food security means. This Summit mustn’t be a flash in the pan for our food and farming to be in the spotlight, but the beginning of a concerted effort to create a genuinely regenerative food system.

Read NFFN’s Rethink Food: A Plan for Action report which demonstrates how a transition to nature-friendly farming can play a central role in food system change.