From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… Use citizens’ assemblies … to engage and build public … consent for system-wide change, protecting it from culture war politics. …”

Three ways to make the UK’s food system more resilient – according to new report by 150 experts

Published: October 15, 2025 6.17pm AEDT
Neil Ward
Professor of Rural and Regional Development at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia

In 2022, six days before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and destabilised energy and food supplies, my colleagues and I started building a network of researchers, practitioners and policymakers to identify ways to create a more sustainable future for the UK food system. Three years later and this network has more than 3,000 members. 

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Sticking with the status quo is not an option. Large-scale change is inevitable over the next two decades, especially as the effects of climate change continue to unfold.

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Our modelling yielded some inescapable home truths. We will need to change not just how we farm, but what farming produces and what we eat. And land use will need to change to strengthen carbon sequestration along with our ability to adapt to climate change. Three types of transformation are required.

…Read more: https://theconversation.com/three-ways-to-make-the-uks-food-system-more-resilient-according-to-new-report-by-150-experts-265603

From the roadmap report;

Roadmap for Resilience: A UK Food Plan for 2050

… A net zero UK will be achieved through a pace of land use change not seen since the Second World War – with more-active management than in the past four decades. …

… 2. Set targets for dietary change and animal numbers, so that progress in reducing consumption of the highest emitting foods can be monitored and more actively managed. Public procurement can be used to build new opportunities for suppliers, with one goal to make healthy and sustainable options more straightforward and affordable. Targets could be legislated for through a Good Food Nation Act to establish a statutory obligation on government and public bodies to give effect to food system transformation.

3. Require major food businesses to publish food system transition plans with measurable targets aligned with national climate and health objectives.  …

… Policy and market mechanisms:

• Require major food businesses to publish transition plans with measurable targets aligned with national climate and health objectives, building on measures in the NHS’s Fit for the Future.

• Transform food environments through regulation, including stronger advertising restrictions on high fat, salt and sugar foods and mandatory front-of-pack labelling.

• Reform public procurement standards to increase plant-based options and reduce processed meat, using public sector buying power to shift markets. …

Read more: https://www.agrifood4netzero.net/our-work/the-roadmap/

Britain has a terrible track record with centrally planned food initiatives. Who can forget the Tanganyika Ground Nut Scheme of 1947, when British Empire bureaucrats thought they understood food production better than African farmers, and launched a failed attempt to cultivate ground nuts in what is now modern Tanzania. Since then British agricultural policy has largely been an ongoing demonstration of why central planning leads to resource misallocation and inefficiency.

This terrible idea has all the hallmarks of another Groundnut disaster – prosperity through central planning and bureaucratic ignorance.

The reason much of Britain is devoted to livestock farming is it is too cold or the land is too low quality to do anything else with the land. Livestock are great at turning marginal land into a profit. Reducing livestock numbers on marginal farmland will not suddenly free up more land for fruit trees.

Even where I lived in the south of Britain, there were bad years when the tomato crop was reduced or didn’t ripen. And frost was always a danger – though thankfully frost risk could be mitigated by large sheets of polypropylene plastic frost blankets, a crop saving innovation which would be unlikely to survive the transition to our more sustainable future.

Britain already has large criminal networks who smuggle exotic meats into Britain for paying customers. No doubt in the coming era of Climate Prohibition many Britons would be so impoverished they would have to survive on whatever healthy enlightened mashed gruel the government decided to allot, but the survivors of the ongoing war on the British middle class would have no problem sourcing whatever food they wanted.