Looking Back, Looking Forward: Sustainability and UK food policy 2000 – 2011

The Sustainable Development Commission has published its final food related report: Looking back, Looking Forward: Sustainability and UK food policy 2000 – 2011.

It charts the development of UK food policy and progress in becoming more sustainability oreiented between 2000-2011 (the lifetime of the SDC). It identifies six major themes that shaped food policy during the 2000s:

• Governance
• Climate change
• Nutrition and health
• Children
• Food security
• Fairness and social justice

It narrates the story of their evolution, and concludes that while progress has been made, not enough has occurred to dispel our concern about failures to achieve systemic change. It argues that a consensual strategy came together towards the end of the decade (culminating in Defra’s Food 2030 vision.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland too, were driving parallel but different and interesting policy developments in the 2000s. Yet while there was progress in awareness and delivery on sustainability in some respects, not enough has occurred to dispel the SDC’s concern about failures to achieve systemic change. To make matters worse, just when a genuinely consensual perspective had finally taken root, and a policy process had begun, both with input from the SDC, it seemed to go into suspended animation in Whitehall after the 2010 election.

As for now, the report argues that the present Government’s approach to food policy is characterised by:

• budget cuts
• greater involvement by business in shaping and delivering on the obesity agenda
• approaches to public health that emphasise personal responsibility (the nudge agenda) rather than the need to alter the social and economic context of consumption
• the weakening of the Food Standards Agency
• lack of real momentum in delivering on Food 2030

The report warns all four Governments of the UK not to step back from the challenge of making our food systems more sustainable, calling on them to raise their game and speed up the pace and scale of change in the light of uncertain oil prices, climate change and public health challenges.

The SDC’s core recommendations to UK Governments include the need to:

• Work with business, civil society organisations and experts to develop ambitious Delivery Plans to support the goal of creating more sustainable UK food systems by 2030
• Prioritise reversing the decline in UK food production, helping expand vegetable crops sustainably and increasing UK fruit production
• Enable the meat and dairy industry to reduce its reliance on grain feedstuffs to lower land use and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• Work to create local food partnerships to harness local government, health authorities, community groups and local business to meet local sustainability goals
• Increase efforts to reduce food waste, planning for zero food waste to landfill by 2015
• Ensure practical food experience in schools including cooking skills and food growing
• Reflect the cost of ensuring a nutritious and sustainable diet in minimum wage and benefit levels
• Mandate health and sustainability standards for all publicly procured food