The Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) has said that tomorrow’s (Tuesday, May 16) Farm to Fork Summit in 10 Downing Street must be “more than just a tick the box exercise”.
The event, to be held by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, will look at the importance of food production and the role it plays in the feeding of the nation and in international trade.
However, the TFA has said that the event must go even deeper than this, with its national chair Mark Coulman claiming that the UK is already addressing these issues “very late in the day”.
“Issues around climate change, the war in Ukraine, the [Covid-19] pandemic, and global inflationary pressures generally, have rightly heightened the sensitivity to issues around food security. However, we are coming to these issues very late in the day,” he said.
According to Coulman, the TFA has been arguing for years that the government should be paying more attention to issues around food security.
“To date, regardless of political persuasion, governments down the years have lacked the necessary foresight to properly address the issue,” he said.
“We have had a myriad of reports over the past 25 years focusing on the need for the government to give a higher priority to food security issues and yet, little if anything has been achieved.
“This urgently needs to change, and it is therefore vital that this summit is more than just a tick-box exercise”.
Farming and the supply chain
Coulman said the summit especially needs to highlight and recognise the role that the farming community plays in “delivering our food security and for the ongoing environmental management of the 70% of the UK landmass under its care”.
“However, with the phasing out of the Basic Payment Scheme and the, to date, piecemeal development of new public payments for public goods schemes, we are in danger of placing both our food and environmental security at risk,” he said.
“The UK and Devolved Administrations must ensure that new schemes are properly thought through, developed and implemented to secure the resilience of the food security and environmental benefits being delivered.”
The TFA has released ten “key points” that, it said, the government must take forward after the Farm to Fork Summit. These are:
- Identify that market failure exists in the structure of supply chains;
- Confirm and enhance the role of the Groceries Code Adjudicator (GCA) in tackling the market failure in food supply chains;
- Use newly found trade freedoms to enhance the UK’s ability to export the outputs of its food and farming industry;
- Ensure that the UK does not undermine its domestic food safety, environmental and animal welfare standards in allowing imports into the UK which fall below those standards;
- Provide the necessary support to secure the labour requirements of the food and farming sector through a more targeted approach on visa provision focusing on needs rather than a “narrow definition of skills”;
- Implement the 74 recommendations of the Rock Review from the Tenancy Working Group to ensure that the tenanted sector of agriculture can play its full part in delivering the food and environmental security of the nation;
- Fully implement all the planned elements of the new Environmental Land Management schemes without delay and ensuring fair access for all active farmers including tenants and commoners;
- Safeguard the loss of land from agriculture to schemes targeting rewilding, woodland planting, renewable energy and other developments which detracts from delivering food security with uncertain benefits for the environment;
- Make it a legal requirement for public sector food procurement to take a “Britain first” approach;
- Provide plan led productivity support for farms to improve innovation and fixed equipment.
“This is a complex area for which there is no single, silver bullet. We have wasted too much time already,” Coulman said.
“We must now give adequate focus to all that needs to be done to ensure that we deliver the food security we need for our nation now and into the future.”
