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 AngliaIn 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
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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.
Better crank up the Victory Gin.
“Three ways to make the UK’s food system more resilient ”
Is the UK having problems with its food supply?
I had not heard.
USA would have turned loose Sting and the ghost of Michael Jackson to raise money about it if you guys would just talk more.
Communication!
That’s why we left.
“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.”
“A report indicates that there are 1.5 million active users of AOL as of 2023.”
Point: AOL appears to be more effective in the modern world.
1.5 million is basically nothing. !
about 0.02% of the world population.
And what does that make the 3000+ members of the network? An unmeasurable part of the world population? Even in the UK, I would say they are are ineffective at any level.
Even in the UK, I would say they are are ineffective at any level.
That’s basically what I was trying to say. 🙂
Somehow I linked their little network with AOL.. early morning BC (before coffee 😉 )
AOL is an acronym.
The ‘A’ is for ‘America’
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that I am included in that 1.5 million. I lost my password and they wanted 30 dollars to reset it. That was some 20 years ago.
There’s plenty of food in the UK, the “problem” according to eco nutters is that a lot of it is the wrong type of food i.e. the things that people want to eat rather than insects, grass, bacteria and other “low carbon” nasties.
Would Sting, the ghost of Jackson be prepared to make a fund raising track under the name USA for UK. Lyrics could include:-
There’s only tofu
It’s time to lend some meat
The greatest gift of all is beef
They can’t go on eating those bugs
Let them know somewhere someday there’s pork
A+, I can hear them singing.
Going to Google “Is Stevie Wonder still with us?”
(answer = “Yes!”)
No, there is no problem with supply. Supermarkets are full of food. There is a problem with demand. The UK diet varies greatly by region and class/income. In the poorer parts of the country its dominated by fast food and ready-meals, so high in vegetable fats and sugar.
If you like, there is a problem with demand, the problem is what people have been brought up on and want to buy. Go into any supermarket in the UK and you will find some aisles full of vegetables, dairy, meat, and you’ll increasingly find quite decent bread. But the bulk of the food offerings will be pre-prepared meals, snacks, carbonated drinks, alcohol.
One of the puzzling things about the paper, as reported (I seem unable to download a copy for some reason), is that it seems to argue that the UK climate will change during the next two decades in such a way as to affect food production. It also seems to be arguing that if the UK goes to net zero this will in some way remedy that.
Its nonsense of course. If you really want to improve UK food self-sufficiency the first thing to do is protect existing farmland – stop covering wheat fields with solar panels, which are useless in these latitudes. And nothing the UK does to get to net zero will have the slightest effect on its weather. Or anyone else’s for that matter! Stop converting farmland to other uses or trying to nationalize it by stealth by inheritance taxes.
The current UK government is following the strangest and most irrational policies on all this that one could dream up. The idea seems to be to destroy the energy supply, and also to destroy farming. It reminds one more and more of the Xhosa famine. Listening to Greta Thunberg and Ed Miliband. And most of the great and good know in their hearts that it is all nonsense and self destructive but are afraid to call it out.
The same bizarre thing has happened with trans ideology, but that is a subject for another time….
I don’t, by the way, see any coming changes in UK weather which are out of the ordinary cycles. The UK does have a very variable climate, its due to being an island on the edge of a great ocean, to the north the Arctic, to the east a continental landmass, and to the south more ocean and the Sahara desert. So you do get, and always have, very long hot summers and very damp cool ones, very dry and very rainy ones, long freezing winters and very mild ones, occasional blizzards as late as March. Its chaotic, its driven by global circulation patterns. I cannot see that anything out of the ordinary is going to happen in the next couple of decades, and farming will coontinue as it always has, with good years and bad, and some crops doing better than others in some of them.
It is ironic that green is not just the symbolic hue of sustainability…but also naiveté and envy…Good luck with that…
Idiots rule Europe because idiots support them. How was critical thinking eliminated there? Did it ever exist??
If it did not exist there’d never been a need for indoctrination, mass censorship, deliberate dumbing down of populations,fear and shame strategies.
No need for the hippie movement and the green parties that popped out in all western countries after that.
Didn’t it used to be the case that, philosophically, Europeans tended to be idealistic and Brits tended to be hard headed realists? And Australians also were down to Earth realists. At least that’s the stereotypes I’m familiar with.
““Every country is like a particular type of person… Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner” – Douglas Adams
Anyone who thinks Small Agrarian groups are better should go live small agrarian lifestyles for 10 years without cheating then tell us how much better they are.
I agree. Live the life you are proposing and show us how it works. A 10 year demo project sounds good for the 3000 members.
Starvation coming to the U.K. if they try that.
very similar to Stalinist 5 year plans of the old USSR.
I was thinking that, except this is a 2050 year plan. Always a multiple of 5 though – fingers on your hand.
Perhaps if great leader had a missing finger we would have had 4 year plans.
It’s been claimed that some species of ETs have either 3 or 4 fingers. 🙂
And millions starved in China too with those glorious 5 year plans, under Mao.
I hear there are some North Korean agricultural experts who are willing to guide these projects.
Once again the Marxists are taking a properly functioning system and destroying it ‘to make it better’.
For Socialists, the stated goal (“saving the world”) is always only the justification and the “necessary” action (destruction) is always the real goal. That’s why – if they get their way – the former never happens and the latter always does.
From the infinite ways to “make things better”, they only ever choose the ones that result in immiseration, destruction and death.
Seems like they need to understand Bastiat’s “Paris feeds itself”.
A Modest Proposal is culturally fitting.
The Science:
1920 – Mises. Socialism can’t work because no prices.
1944 – Hayek. Administrative state can’t work because bandwidth.
1971 – Stigler. Regulatory state can’t work because “regulatory capture.”
Any questions, climate scientists?
“Our modelling yielded some inescapable home truths”
that we carefully programed into our cult model.
😉
Here we go again with arrogant elitists wanting to fiddle with a nation’s agriculture and food systems. Oh how history can repeat itself if we allow it to do so….
Holodomor – Wikipedia
“The Holodomor,[a] also known as the Ukrainian famine,[8][9][b] was a massive man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture. A middle position is that the initial causes of the famine were an unintentional byproduct of the process of collectivization….”
Great Leap Forward – Wikipedia
“The Great Leap Forward was an industrialization campaign within China from 1958 to 1962, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). CCP Chairman Mao Zedong launched the campaign to transform the country from an agrarian society into an industrialized society through the formation of people’s communes. The Great Leap Forward is estimated to have led to between 15 and 55 million deaths in mainland China during the 1959–1961 Great Chinese Famine it caused, making it the largest or second-largest famine[1] in human history.”
*************
Regarding the Holodomor in Ukraine, Putin’s current war against the Ukrainians now gives them two reasons to hate the Russians rather than just one. One could get the impression that being ethnic kin to each other is one of the only thing the two peoples have in common these days.
Ukraine is primarily Slavic.
Russia was heavily influenced by the Mongols.
Not as close of kin as one might think.
SN4, thanks for your reply. For whatever it is worth, this is what GROK AI says about the ethnic relationship between Ukrainians and Russians.
“Ukrainians and Russians share a close historical and cultural connection, stemming from their common East Slavic roots in the medieval Kyivan Rus’ state (9th–13th centuries). Genetically, both populations are closely related, as East Slavs—along with Belarusians—form a genetic continuum with significant overlap. Studies, like those from the Human Genome Diversity Project, show minimal genetic differentiation among East Slavic groups, with Ukrainians and Russians clustering closely due to shared ancestry and historical intermixing.
However, differences exist. Ukrainians have been influenced by neighboring populations, such as Poles, Slovaks, and Hungarians, particularly in western Ukraine, leading to some genetic and cultural distinctions. Russians, especially in northern and central regions, show more influence from Finno-Ugric and Baltic groups. Linguistic and cultural identities also diverge: Ukrainian is a distinct East Slavic language, and Ukraine’s history under Polish-Lithuanian and Austro-Hungarian rule fostered a unique cultural identity, distinct from Russia’s trajectory under the Muscovite and imperial Russian states.
While ethnically and genetically close, centuries of separate political, cultural, and social developments have shaped distinct national identities. Claiming they are “the same” oversimplifies a complex history—think of it like siblings with different life paths.”
Interesting. At any rate, Putin is claiming the Ukrainians are little more than ethic Russians to justify his war on them. He wants to bring them back into the old Soviet-era fold.
My wife is Ukrainian.
She once worked as a Russian translator.
She also identified 3 distinct Ukrainian dialects.
Russian and Ukrainian are not the same as you noted.
Funny that the Dutchy of Muscovy was founded by an exiled Ukrainian prince.
Funny, too, is how the prince of Moscow knelt before the Tartar ambassador from Crimea.
History is interesting, especially when not rewritten by the victors.
History is even more interesting with a vary basic knowledge about the language.
The (U)Kraina is as Russian as Kyiv itself, which was founded by the Rus and was their first capital.
The Kraina was no country at all.
Just as the Serbian Kraina it just means ” Borderlands”.
It was not a specific place but usually a mobile first defense layer against asian, usually muslim hordes that used to attack and devastate Russia.
This Borderland ended up in Russias west at one point and a mix of Russian,polish,Catholic and orthodox people.
An artificial mix and so Russian that even Ukraines president Zelensky is a Russian speaker who barely spoke Ukrainian.
There is no show of Zelensky where he speaks Ukrainian.
Some details of the Holodomor.
My wife’s parents survived it.
Current history lists some 5 million dead.
This was rewritten down from 9 million because we did not want Stalin to be more evil than Hitler.
My wife’s parents lost friends and neighbors in the Holocaust.
Me? I am descended from King Priam of Troy.
Also, William of Normandy and 14 generations of Kings of Suffix.
Does it matter? No.
We are all one race, all humans, and all interrelated.
A shame the world does not act as if we were.
Very nice Eric. I only have one thing to say, keep the government out of the nutrition business, the agriculture business, the food market business in other words keep the government out of the picture period. The only thing government knows how to do better than us is screw everything up. They are masters at that.
I have no problems in them labelling the contents of processed food.
That way I can avoid plant-based crap like fake meat, fake milk and fake cheese..
(which by their very nature are highly processes.)
In Wokeachusetts, the state government claims that forestry here is the most regulated on the planet- and they’re bragging about it. And the result is that only about 2% of growth is harvested annually.
One step away from Soylent Green…we seriously need to stop giving money to such ‘research’, these people need to get off the government tit and actually do something productive for a living
“increase plant-based options and reduce processed meat, using public sector buying power to shift markets. …”
They have tried plant based meats and other plant based crap.
The public sector REJECTS IT.
That’s exactly why it needs to be forced.
“Citizen’s assemblies”? Read “soviets”. Or “fasci”.
Or the ”German Labour Front ” ”Deutsche Arbeitsfront ” It is time more people understand it is exactly the same. It doesn’t matter if you put ‘national’ or ‘international’ before socialism. There is no far right, it is about more or less State control.
“at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, University of East Anglia”
Tyndall would be rolling in his grave in agony !!
Indeed he would:
“Aqueous vapor is a blanket, more necessary to the vegetable life of England than clothing is to man. Remove for a single summer-night the aqueous vapor from the air which overspreads this country, and you would assuredly destroy every plant capable of being destroyed by a freezing temperature. The warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.
The next most significant greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is different from water vapor in that its concentration in the atmosphere is much the same all over the globe. CO2 currently accounts for about 7 percent of the atmosphere’s ability to intercept heat.”
Tyndall was working with home made apparatus an instrumentation that wasn’t calibrated, so was largely guesswork. Many, many researchers since say he over-estimated.
The same UEA that ruined the world with their overcooked predictions of doom and gloom around the ‘rona?
Hunting and gathering is our future.
Within less than a year we would be out of food with the current population numbers.
We need to get better at explaining to young people why central planning doesn’t work:
If a new problem arises, or opportunity, ten’s of thousands of farmers start thinking what to do about it. Some will be right, most will be wrong, eventually the good ideas take hold and the bad ones disappear. With central planners, you have a small number of decision makers with a vanishingly small chance of hitting upon the right idea. They implement bad ideas 99+% of the time and then refuse to admit they were wrong even with people starving across an entire country.Central planners are comprised of people with egos big enough to believe that they are the right person to plan the economy. Human nature being what it is, that small group of central planners will wind up disagreeing on things to the point they start killing each other and whoever is left becomes the new dictator.If the above two points are wrong, then show me a single instance in all of history when there was any other outcome from central planning. The only reason communist Russia did not starve to death and kept their country together was the “black market”. What was the “black market”? It was capitalism working in the shadows where the government couldn’t control it. Government called it the black market but in reality it was capitalists in action working around the central planning to solve problems and keep the economy afloat and people fed.Capitalism wins against central planning every single time because central planning cannot succeed at the best of times. A small group of decision makers cannot think up as many options as ten’s of thousands and try each of them out. Instead they vie for power with the same outcome every time. Dictatorship.
Cuba is a fine example. Anyone who has visited there remarks about what a wonderful time they had and how well run everything is. You know why? Because the tourist industry has been outsourced by Cuba to private companies. Capitalists. The rest of the country lives in poverty. The ONLY part of the Cuban economy that runs well is the part outsourced to capitalists.
“We need to get better at explaining to young people why central planning doesn’t work:”
UK and USA seem fairly set on leadership by old white dudes.
Kier Starmer is age 63
Donald Trump is age 79
Friedrich Merz is age 69
Rishi Sunak (45) and Barack Obama (48) were exceptions.
That’s puppetship. The wizards are behind the curtain.
This is yesteryear’s nonsense. It is truly remarkable that there are still people on the planet that believe it.
Warmer is better for agriculture. Global warming means more food production. Do cows cause warming? Great! We need more cows. And more methane. And more CO2. CO2 is good for you. My model says UEA is wrong about everything. Bunch of dumdums. Save the planet: defund UEA.
Here’s another example of the desperation of the climate alarmists. They are trying to get consumers to believe that they, the academics, bureaucrats, politicians and environmentalists, know not only what’s best for them but also that the populace will accept the proposed mandates, laws and restrictions regarding their the foods they buy and consume. Let these dreamers brace themselves for another failure of climate-saving proposals like EVs, heat pumps and major reductions of air travel.
We are from the government and we are here to help.
Sounds so Soviet. Central planners gotta central.
What do we think the European Union is? It is a centrally controlled bureaucratic economic system. Look what it has done to Europe’s production capacity!
This is a different kind of communism. And THIS TIME it will work. For sure!
There was one quite successful government intervention – WWII rationing. It does seem to have got the country through a time of limited food supplies without that producing malnutrition. There was, just about, enough food. The rationing plan meant it was more evenly distributed than an unregulated market would have done. And sugar, being largely imported, was quite strictly rationed, which probably helped.
One of the more interesting and intelligent aspects of this was mandating a higher extraction rate from wheat flour. Importantly, not 100%. The result was that bread was not whole-wheat. But it did contain all the germ of the wheat, though little or none of the bran. Wheat bran is more usefully used for animal feed. This measure made one of the most basic foods the less well-off relied on much more nutritious.
You can’t get 85% extraction flour in Britain today – or maybe there is one mill which produces tiny quantities. There’s an irrational cult of wholemeal wheat bread among the health food fanatics which has come to dominate messaging and education, so there’s no market for it. Sometimes white flour is mixed with a certain proportion of wholewheat, to give a flour that looks a bit like 86% but has too much bran and not enough of the germ.
So oddly enough there’s one case where UK government intervention worked pretty well. The Chinese and Russian famines are classic cases of man made famines – but they were not driven by a desire to control diets. The disaster we have seen in recent decades from a desire to control diets has been the promotion of the low fat diet. This, in the real world of the food marketplace, has turned into the promotion of a diet high in sugar and in polyunsaturated vegetable oils. The result of this wrong headedness is visible daily in the form of mass obesity, and can be seen in the public health statistics on heart illnesses, strokes and diabetes.
So Britain could not feed its own population without import and I suppose still can’t. That means a deindustrialised (net zero) Britain could no longer buy the stuff it needs abroad .The only reason you need to export is so you can import the products you don’t have.
Hasn’t been self sufficient in food since about 1830. Hence the struggle over Corn Law reform. Could it feed itself? Yes, but a very different diet from today. The diet of most of the people 300 years ago. Bread as the staple, and not our current white refined bread but higher extraction rate. Meat fish eggs no more than twice a week. Cabbage and potatoes. Small amounts of butter, cheese and milk. Lots of oats. Possible, maybe quite healthy, but not like today.
Look up the hunger gap, or maybe ‘hungry gap’. It was a real thing and would be again.