This report commissioned and published by Defra in 2006, sought to examine the issue of food self-sufficiency and whether this is a desirable goal for the UK.
It concluded that discourse centred on self-sufficiency is fundamentally misplaced and unbalanced. The real issues extend beyond the UK, beyond agriculture, beyond food. Hence food security cannot be the object of a single policy, but needs to be underpinned by a range of crosscutting policies.
These would include:
- promoting and, where appropriate, developing business and contingency planning, together with relevant industry players; improving co-ordination and information flows across industry;
- contingency governance arrangements;and early warnings preparedness for private sector;
- strengthening energy security;
- promotion of food security in developing countries through development andentitlements; and boosting efforts to tackle climate change which can have
- disproportionate effects on the food security of vulnerable countries;
- strengthening the multilateral trading system, Single European Market and international relations generally;
identifying and strengthening resilience and capacity of strategic infrastructure e.g. ports; - tackling domestic poverty issues; also a question of localised access to healthy food, which could have implications for competition and local planning policies;
- developing and enforcing food safety regulations;
- promoting a flexible, skilled and market-oriented agriculture, across the EU and domestically, able to flex production in extreme circumstances;
- promotion of global food security through appropriate international R&D.
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