The government’s food strategy needs further work 

In 2018, the then environment secretary Michael Gove commissioned the entrepreneur Henry Dimbleby to conduct an independent review into the UK’s food system, which would lead to the creation of a National Food Strategy. The aim was to take a broad and fresh look at the UK food chain, setting out recommendations to address the multiple challenges it faces. The independent report finally came out in June 2021, with the government committing to publishing a white paper responding to it within six months. 

A little behind schedule, Defra has finally produced its white paper. It is clearly less radical than the independent review – but also shows a substantial change from the government’s own recent policy documents. 

Food production has won out over environmental improvement  

Since the 2016 Brexit referendum, successive UK government documents have emphasised the environmental goals of agricultural policy. The Dimbleby report put the environment front and centre, but so did Defra’s 2018 White Paper, Health and Harmony. Indeed, in 2018, food production seemed to be perceived almost as a by-product: “British farmers, growers and foresters play a vital role in protecting the countryside,” Health and Harmony began, “while producing world-class food”.  

The priorities of the new government food strategy are quite different. The government’s top objective is now a “prosperous agri-food and seafood sector”. Improving the environment and people’s health is relegated to second place, and even there must support “home-grown diets for all”. Environment secretary George Eustice’s foreword sings the praises of domestic food production while devoting less than a paragraph to the environmental challenges UK farming faces. 

The strategy contains no reference to the formerly totemic phrase of “public money for public goods”: instead, the aim of farm subsidies will be to “support farmers in building more resilient, sustainable, and diversified farm businesses”. The only reference to an environmental subsidy scheme is to the Sustainable Farming Incentive, which was previously presented as the lowest tier of environmental land management scheme. While the strategy does suggest that land use change may be desirable, it states that this should not come at a cost to domestic production. In our March 2022 report on Agriculture after Brexit, the number one problem we identified was an unwillingness to address the inevitable trade-offs between the different objectives of agriculture policy. It seems now that the government has started to do so – and farmers are on the winning side. 

DIT has won out over Defra  

Henry Dimbleby’s report took a strong line on trade in food, arguing that the government needed to develop a set of core environmental and animal welfare standards that it would insist trading partners met before agreeing to cut tariffs on their food exports to the UK.  

The government version does restate the government’s commitments (going back to the 2017 trade white paper) not to compromise the UK’s standards of environmental protection and animal welfare. But it remains vague as to how this should be achieved – especially since one specific proposal, to link tariff cuts in FTAs to animal welfare standards, appears to have been removed at a late stage in drafting. ^[1] Instead, the discussion of trade focuses on increasing UK exports. And – oddly, given the strategy’s strong emphasis on domestic production – there are many kind words for imports too. DIT’s free traders have clearly won some important battles inside government. 

Putting the CAP back on?  

It is perhaps not surprising that a report published in 2022 takes a different tone from one commissioned in 2018. The world has been transformed in the last four years by Brexit, Covid and now the war in Ukraine. It is not unreasonable for this to have changed the government’s perspective on the importance of self-sufficiency. And, as we said in Agriculture after Brexit, ^[2] there has long been a tacit goal in the government’s agriculture policy of maintaining levels of domestic production. Making that explicit is no bad thing.  

But it is disappointing that the government strategy does not offer a more rigorous analysis of how maintaining and increasing the UK’s self-sufficiency in food can be aligned with the government’s other goals – notably reaching net zero and keeping the cost of living down. The vision of future agricultural support outlined in the strategy seems old-fashioned, more akin to the classic Common Agricultural Policy than to the proposals set out either in the independent report or in previous Defra policy papers such as Health and Harmony. A dated tone is also apparent in the Defra clichés that litter the document, from the litany of protected food names to a throwaway reference to bottle deposit schemes. The strategy concludes, tellingly, by stating that it is only “the beginning of this conversation”. Four years into the development of a National Food Strategy, it is a shame that more progress does not seem to have been made. 

James Kane was involved as a consultant on the National Food Strategy but writes this blog in his capacity as an associate of the IfG. It represents his views alone and has not been seen or approved by Henry Dimbleby or the NFS team. 

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1. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jun/13/fury-as-government-waters-down-post-brexit-food-standards
2. At pp 57-58