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.
If they think the farming community will take this nonsense laying down on their backs, then they have no idea what a pitchfork feels like.
They don’t like it up ’em!
Mr Worrall is correct in saying that the UK broadly does not have a Mediterranean climate, which means that tomatoes are not the biggest cash crop grown here. However, there are plenty of crops which do badly in heat, indeed in a few hot, dry summers recently, traditional back garden staples like runner beans have failed to set due to nights being too hot.
However, given that Scotland can grow a wide variety of vegetables with temperatures 4C lower than in the southern UK, I don’t think there’s any prospect of us not being able to grow 30+ vegetables commercially.
Here’s a list that have zero problems growing in the UK most years:
Root crops: potatoes, parsnips, turnips, swede, carrot, beetroot, radish;
Brassicas: cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, Purple Sprouting Broccoli;
Beans+peas: Broad Beans, dwarf beans, runner beans, storage beans, French climbing beans, peas, mange touts;
Legumes: Corn, courgette, winter squash, indoor tomatoes, indoor cucumbers;
Alliums: Onion, shallot, leeks, garlic;
Perennials: Rhubarb, asparagus, Jerusalem Artichoke, Globe Artichoke;
As for the sorts of soil you need to grow vegetables on, well, you can improve soil rapidly through creating compost to lay atop the soil and part of that can be done through growing and mowing crops used as raw materials for compost, which can of course also include animal manure.
You can also improve soil through correct methods of animal grazing, be that chickens, pigs, cows horses, goats, sheep etc.
The places where you definitely can’t grow fruit and vegetables are on steep upland hillsides, which have traditionally been places for rearing sheep, allowing deer to live wild etc. The arguments there are whether growing trees instead would be long-term more productive. That’s a totally different argument to animals vs plants as food.
What’s definitely arguable is that you can use animals instead of mowing machines to control grass growth in orchards, in other areas growing trees etc. Sheep in orchards in the spring eating grass and pigs eating the windfalls in autumn are ancient strategies, after all.
The big problem with the false arguments being presented is that they focus solely on ‘carbon sequestration’. I couldn’t care less whether there were 300 or 600 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, since plants will be happy no matter what the concentration is. Any human claiming otherwise is a science denier.
A far better metric to evaluate is ‘% organic matter’ in topsoil, as that is the measure of soil fertility, not atmospheric carbon dioxide. Once you choose that metric, the value of animals becomes obvious. As does the value of compost creation.
The University of East Anglia has about the same reputation for climate rigour as Neil Ferguson had for computer models of Foot and Mouth Disease, Covid19 threats etc etc.
Both should have been in the scientific dock years ago and sent to scientific prison for 10 years minimum for the appalling effects their lack of rigorous science has brought to human societies.
Why anyone still listens to any of them is totally beyond me.
Perfessor Ward and his peers forgot the bit about being frogmarched off to the countryside with barrows hoes and scythes in hand for the Great Leap Forward and don’t bother packing lunch.
Building up such assemblies is a communist method to camouflage their agenda with a pseudo-democratic cloak. The Russian term “Sovyet” even means “assembly/council. How this works, we could already see here in Austria. Our former ministry for Climate (from the Green leftist party) created such Climate assemblies. The alleged “ordinary citizens” participating at the assemblies were of course pre-selected and adviced by moderators.
So the result was predictable: Almost all Green Climate bullshit suggestions were adopted unanimously. The list was then presented as “coming from the people” to apply pressure for the Green agenda, of which the Green communists themselves know, that it would never get a majority in democratic elections.
It’s the UEA. What else do you expect?
You will have nothing and you will be happy.
“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.”
Sounds like something from The Groove Tube.
Spending millions of dollars and 2 years in its production, we have created this advertising campaign.
(topic was environmental).
“You can put your trust in Uranus”
When does the child climate crusader Greta start giving classes in how to raid dumpsters to get food?
Commies don’t even attempt to sell their oh-so-brilliant ideas. Simply use violence to force it upon others.
What could possibly go wrong?
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