The government should start their food strategy by picking ‘low hanging fruit’ – Inside track

Work on the government’s new food strategy is now well underway. The Food Strategy Advisory Board was announced just under a month ago, causing concern due to the heavy industry representation. But while government-led food strategies in the past have tended to culminate in a single published document, this process will be different, focused less on policy and more on delivery.

According to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which is leading the process, the strategy has four goals: increasing the accessibility and affordability of healthy food; maintaining food security; driving economic growth; and reducing the sector’s environmental impacts.

Delivering all of this is no small feat. Our current food system is responsible for a fifth of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions and, globally, food production is the leading cause of biodiversity loss. It’s driving significant health issues and inequalities, with diet related disease the single biggest cause of preventable ill health in the UK today.

The most deprived fifth of the population would need to spend 45 per cent of their disposable income on food to afford the government’s recommended healthy diet. Farmers’ incomes are also squeezed, due in part to the low prices they receive for produce. Addressing these issues is going to require transformative change. Luckily, there’s strong public support for government action.

So where should they start? Today Green Alliance, the Food Foundation and Good Food Institute Europe launched Low hanging fruit, which outlines pragmatic and easily implementable policy recommendations to achieve the government’s four goals. These are not the final comprehensive list of policies the government should adopt as part of the food strategy, rather they offer a good place to start.

Here are the four top lines from our report:

A horticulture strategy is in everyone’s interests Horticulture presents a big opportunity to deliver the government’s number one mission: economic growth. We all know we should eat a lot more fruit and vegetables: to meet the recommendations for a healthy diet, the UK population would have to increase consumption by 86 per cent. According to our research, meeting this demand would add £2.3 billion to the economy, create 23,520 jobs and boost UK farm profits by three per cent. It’s a win on all fronts.

There’s potential for even greater benefits if we increase our self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables alongside this. The UK produces only about half of the vegetables and 16 per cent of the fruit it consumes. Increasing self-sufficiency by just ten per cent would add a further £3.3 billion to the economy. That’s why we’re calling for a to increase domestic fruit and vegetable production and consumption. This should work with the Land Use Framework to identify where production could be expanded. It should also tackle the tricky question of how to bring down emissions from peatlands, which grow 22 per cent of our vegetables, with a plan to expand production on other soils, and investment into technologies which allow them to be grown more sustainably, in wetter conditions, on peat.

Bring unhealthy profits out into the open Horticulture is a good place to start, but the much needed transformative shift in our food system requires other policies to improve the accessibility and affordability of plant-rich diets, which are a win for both our health and our environment. A sensible place to start would be a new legal requirement for businesses to report on a range of health and sustainability metrics, such as sales of unhealthy vs healthy food, and plant vs animal protein. Many already do this of their own accord and would welcome regulation that helps to level the playing field and create a more standardised approach. This would be an important first step towards legislating targets to increase sales of healthy and sustainable foods, driving businesses to use the powerful levers at their disposal, like pricing, offers and advertising. The aim would be to steer away from pushing junk food (where price markups are currently highest), and towards ‘nudging’ customers to make healthier choices instead.

The public sector should serve healthier food Public procurement is another area ripe for reform, given the public sector services 1.9 billion meals a year. The Government Buying Standards (GBS) for Food are currently not up to scratch from a health or environmental perspective as they contain loopholes allowing the supply of substandard food, if it avoids a significant increase in costs. These standards also don’t apply to all public institutions, exempting local government, schools, hospitals and care homes. We recommend that they are updated to reflect the latest evidence on what makes a healthy and sustainable diet and should be made mandatory across all public institutions, which would have significant impact.

Build in fairness for farmers Alongside these changes, a fair strategy should a just transition for farmers, such as better regulated supply chains, with a strengthened Grocery Code Adjudicator better able to take action against unfair practices and Fair Dealing Obligations, which are designed to improve the fairness and transparency of contracts between farmers and those they are supplying, extended to all sectors. It also must include policies enabling individuals and households on lower incomes to be able to afford healthier food.

In the long term, the food strategy should culminate in legislation that sets measurable indicators to track progress towards the government’s goals. Our report is a recipe for fast action.