Read the full report at the link above
Executive Summary below:
The food system we have today is both a miracle and a disaster. Defying Malthusian predictions of mass famine, modern intensive agriculture produces more than enough calories (albeit unevenly distributed) to feed 7.8 billion of us: the biggest global population in human history. But the food we eat – and the way we produce it – is doing terrible damage to our planet and to our health. The global food system is the single biggest contributor to biodiversity loss, deforestation, drought, freshwater pollution and the collapse of aquatic wildlife. It is the second-biggest contributor to climate change, after the energy industry.
Our eating habits are destroying the environment. And this in turn threatens our food security. The next big shock to our food supply will almost certainly be caused by climate change in the form of extreme weather events and catastrophic harvest failures. Agriculture alone produces 10% of UK greenhouse gas emissions, despite constituting less than 1% of our GDP.
Cheap, highly processed food is also taking a toll on our bodies. Eighty per cent of processed food sold in the UK is unhealthy.3 There is a sound commercial reason for this: unhealthy food is more popular. The human appetite evolved in a world where calories were hard to come by. We are predisposed to pounce on any food that is high in fat and sugar. And once we start eating this kind of food, we are programmed to keep going: our hormones take longer to send out satiety signals (the feeling of fullness) than they do with lower-calorie foods.
Because there is a bigger market for unhealthy food, companies invest more into developing and marketing it. This in turn expands the market further still. The bigger the market, the greater the economies of scale. Highly processed foods – high in salt, refined carbohydrates, sugar and fats, and low in fibre – are on average three times cheaper per calorie than healthier foods. This is one reason why bad diet is a particularly acute problem among the least affluent.
We have become trapped in a vicious circle – the Junk Food Cycle. The consequences for our health are devastating. The UK is now the third-fattest country in the G7, with almost three in ten of our adult population obese.5 The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) does an annual estimate of how many years of healthy life have been lost to avoidable illness, disability and death. Four out of the top five risk factors are diet related.
This plague of dietary ill health crept up on us slowly, without generating much public uproar. But the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a painful reality check. Our obesity problem has been a major factor in the UK’s tragically high death rate.
The UK now has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape the food system. The pandemic has created a momentum for change – in Government and in industry, as well as among the public. There is widespread recognition that we need to change our national diet as a matter of urgency.
The CEOs of several major food companies have told us that the pandemic has shocked them into wanting to do things better. As one put it: “You wouldn’t believe it if you look at our collective record in the past, but it is without doubt true. Something has changed fundamentally.” They also told us, however, that some changes will require legislation to ensure a level playing field. If food companies are to start making their products healthier, they must be confident that the competition won’t simply move in and undercut them.
The environmental damage caused by intensive agriculture must also be addressed. Our exit from the European Union has already required the Government to draw up a new system of agricultural subsidies. The proposed Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMs) will – if properly implemented – reward those farmers who manage their land sustainably and work to restore biodiversity. But it won’t be enough on its own.
The Government has made a legal commitment to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 and pledged to ensure that 30% of our land is protected for nature by 2030. In order to meet these commitments, we will have to ask a lot from our land – and from those who tend it. The farming sector itself will have to become carbon neutral, something the National Farmers’ Union has already committed to. But some areas of farmland will also have to be repurposed or adapted so that they actively sequester carbon, mopping up the emissions from those industries (such as air travel and heavy industry) that will still largely depend on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future; all this, while maintaining a steady supply of affordable food. We will have to produce more food from the remaining land without resorting to the kind of intensive farming practices that have already done so much damage.
This feat of acrobatics is achievable – but only with a concerted effort of will. We will need to draw on diverse methods of agriculture, including regenerative farming practices that work with nature instead of against it. We must invest in the latest science – AI, robots and new breeding techniques – to increase yields without polluting the land. We must unleash the potential of soilless farming, develop new proteins, and tap the plant-farming potential of the oceans instead of just pillaging them for fish.
Some farmers are introducing livestock back into traditional rotations, to improve the soil and reduce the need for fertilisers. Careful livestock farming can be a boon to the environment, but our current appetite for meat is unsustainable: 85% of total land that produces UK food is used to graze livestock or produce crops to feed to animals. We need some of that land back. The Government’s Climate Change Committee has said we must reduce the amount of meat we eat by 20–50% in order for the UK to reach net zero by 2050.8 In this strategy, we have set a goal of a 30% reduction over ten years. This is significant, and it won’t be easy to achieve.
One idea that has been proposed is the imposition of a “meat tax”. We quickly realised this would be politically impossible. It was – by a long way – the the least popular of any measure we discussed with citizens in our "deliberative dialogues". It would also have the consequence of penalising poorer households, because the tax would have to be imposed by weight. The price hike on cheap cuts or mince would be proportionally much bigger than on, say, steak.
For now, at least, we believe the Government would be better off nudging consumers into changing their habits while investing in methane-reduction projects and the development of alternative proteins. In much the same way that multiple state interventions have made renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels, this would create a shift in behaviour without the need for an unpopular and regressive tax.
Farmers must be at the centre of this transition in our food system. They are the custodians of the land. They know better than anyone how depleted the soil is and how reduced wildlife numbers are. Many farmers are already trialling new ways to manage their land for the benefit of nature. But farms are businesses, not philanthropic hobbies. They need to make a profit. They cannot be expected to develop and adopt more sustainable practices – including some that will deliberately lower their yields, and some that return the land entirely to nature – if it destroys their balance sheet. We are asking farmers to change the way they work for the public good. We must ensure they are properly recompensed. And we must protect them from unfair competition.
This will be impossible if we don’t get our trade deals right. There is no point making UK farmers do all the hard work necessary to reduce carbon emissions and restore biodiversity only to open up the market to cheap food produced to lower standards abroad. This would mean exporting all the environmental harms we wish to avoid, while undercutting – and potentially bankrupting – our own farmers. The Government needs a trade policy that supports its environmental ambitions. Otherwise we will end up transferring damaging practices from one part of the planet to another and driving thousands of our own farmers to the wall.
The National Food Strategy contains recommendations to address the major issues facing the food system: climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, diet-related disease, health inequality, food security and trade. We have grouped them under four main National Food Strategy objectives:
- Escape the junk food cycle to protect the NHS.
- Reduce diet-related inequality.
- Make the best use of our land.
- Create a long-term shift in our food culture
Some of our recommendations will be met with protests from those industries whose business models are shaped to fit the current food system. Change is never easy. But we cannot build a sustainable, healthy and fair food system by doing business as usual. This is an interventionist strategy. Even without the exacerbating effect of COVID-19, the damage being done to our health and our planet by the food system demands urgent action. However, state intervention is rarely, if ever, sufficient by itself. You can’t send in the army to improve the cooking in schools, or imprison people for serving bad hospital meals. Every delicious and nourishing plate of food that has ever been set before a hungry person tasted good because of the skill, effort and care of the individual who made it. Every school that serves its pupils appetising, nutritious lunches instead of fodder that is bland, boring, beige and bad for you does so because of a head teacher, school cook or business manager who aspired to something better. Change starts at a local level, with talented and dedicated people. Some of our recommendations are designed to encourage and harness this individual energy, by making connections within neighbourhoods, communities and professions, investing in skills, and challenging unspoken assumptions about how things work and what is possible.
