The Government’s recently published Food Strategy Policy for England is packed with positive objectives:
- A prosperous future for our agri/food and seafood sectors.
- A nature positive, secure food system providing greater choice, quality and the opportunity for healthier diets.
- International trade opportunities that will not compromise our regulatory standards for food.
Fine words, but let’s compare the good intentions for these three sectors with what is currently happening on the ground.
Agri/food and seafood
As I highlighted in my recent article ‘What about our Food Security’ Boris Johnson maintains that farming models forced on the UK by the EU have ‘held this country back and held our economy back’.
However, government policy is currently putting UK farmers out of business whilst heralding the import of cheap, lower quality food products from the other side of the world. They propose ‘rewilding payments’ and retirement schemes to UK farmers to take land out of food production, encouraging those involved to leave the industry.
Brexit has had a devastating impact on our fishing and seafood industry. The new Food Strategy Policy proposes a prosperous future for these sectors. However, most of the fish and shellfish caught by UK fishermen, or farmed around our shores, has traditionally been sold to continental buyers. There is little demand from UK consumers for many of the species caught in our waters. Brexit has removed the quick and easy access – required when dealing in fresh produce – to these important customers. This fresh produce can’t be sent fresh to Australia or India. So how is the ‘prosperous future’ for our agri/food and seafood sectors to be achieved?
Nature positive secure food system
There is nothing positive about allowing the decline of our pollinating insects. But in January this year the Government voted to re-introduce the use of neonicotinoid insecticides. The use of most neonicotinoids was severely restricted in 2013 in the EU and UK due to their potential negative impact on bees and other pollinators.
I am sure I am not alone in noticing the dramatic decline in recent years, of insect debris on my car windscreen when I travel through the countryside in summer. Despite our previous ban on this type of insecticide, insect life in this country is still in serious decline. It’s not just about bees, our pollinators in general have a major part to play in the future of our food security.
The Prime Minister announced from a courgette farm in Cornwall, that we must grow and eat more healthy fruit and vegetables, whilst President of the National Farmers’ Union Minette Batters, warns that more and more home produced healthy food is being ploughed back into the land because we don’t have enough workers to harvest it.
The ‘benefits of Brexit’ have our crops rotting in the ground, our pigs culled because we no longer have the process-workers to prepare them for the food chain and now soft fruits, surely one of the healthiest foods available, is being left for the birds as there is no-one to pick them. As we have experienced over recent years, a Prime Ministerial announcement on what we need to be doing, doesn’t mean it will happen.
I noticed in our supermarket delivery this week that the fresh salad products had been imported from the continent with a shorter shelf life than the produce available in my local farm shop. We have plenty of salad growers in the UK, but the shortage of labour means they cannot get their produce to market.
Anglian Water alone discharged sewage into rivers for 170,326 hours in 2020, according to the Environment Agency. When natural water courses are available, livestock drink from these sources. Hardly a ‘nature positive’ approach to healthier eating and a ‘secure food system’..
Regulatory standards for food
The Prime Minister and our Minister for Brexit Benefits have called for ‘a bonfire of EU rules to power Brexit innovation’. This will include many of the food standards we have helped develop and maintain during our membership of the EU.
There has been considerable news coverage about the lower standards that will potentially apply to the food products we import from America and Australia. Cumbrian MP Tim Farron has claimed that the deal with Australia will ‘throw our farmers under the bus’.
There is now talk that the Department for Trade apparently want standards of animal welfare to be ‘voluntary’ in the trade deals they are seeking to negotiate with individual US States, following the Biden administration’s rejection of a national level deal.
The policies the Government are following conflict at every level with ‘a strategy for international trade opportunities that will not compromise our regulatory standards for food’.
Fine words or fantasy
Positive objectives are to be encouraged, but set against the negative impact of current Government policies, this Food Strategy Policy for England will require major U-turns to be anything more than fantasy.
