Ways to protect our increasingly  threatened food supplies

A guest blog by Karine Nohr

It seems counterintuitive to talk about food shortages this week, but the unraveling problems surrounding the  food supply chain are beginning to show how woefully unprepared we are for the unfolding food crises. Increasingly, many UK households are struggling to put a regular healthy meal on the table. At the same time, many farmers are also financially squeezed because not only are they facing very low profit margins imposed on them by the supermarkets, who control 90% of our food supply (with profits for shareholders being protected) but agricultural problems increasingly include flooding, desertification of land due to over-farming and also water shortages in producer countries from which we source much of our food (such as Morocco and Spain). 

Please bear in mind that we import 46% of our vegetables and 85% of our fruit, making us very vulnerable to shortages. 

A further dynamic in this unfolding crisis is food waste. This comes into particular sharp relief at Christmas, with massive overbuying of food that ends up in the bin. 

Yet another dimension to the food crisis is the spiraling numbers of people with diet-related ill health problems; in addition to the personal suffering, the cost is pushing the NHS to its knees. 

There is often a disconnect between food growing and food consumption. In urban areas, it may be difficult to access locally grown food. Understandably many urban dwellers feel that there is no land available for them to grow food. Local authorities, who have a multitude of increasing demands on their diminishing resources, are struggling to find ways to help communities out of this mess, and making significant changes seem to be beyond their capacities. 

So the question is, what can we do? Well, there are quite a few possibilities.

Sheffield Food Works upcycles locally grown and surplus food that could otherwise go to landfill. Their box schemes, cafes and frozen ready meals are distributed to community groups and those in need. They have 3 central Sheffield food hubs, in Sharrow, Upperthorpe and Hackenthorpe. Subscribing as a patron, for a minimum of £10/week, you’ll get a box of food from their surplus supplies. https://thefoodworks.org/.

The Urban Agriculture Consortium (UAC) works across the UK, exploring and promoting new ideas and solutions that amplify and accelerate the development of agroecological, resilient food growing in urban and peri-urban areas.

In cities such as in Hull, Bristol, Cardiff and London, small scale initiatives are under way to try and address these problems. One possibility is that of public land being given over to citizens for urban food growing. These   community-lead projects engage citizens to come together and grow food, leading to a multitude of benefits which include increasing numbers of people understanding sustainability, increased community resilience, better health outcomes, reduced crime rates and increased resistance to flooding. Local authorities must support these projects and enable them to rise to the challenges that may surface, keeping a vision on the bigger picture and its potential, rather than getting bogged down by relatively minor details that can usually be tailored out with vision, trust, imagination and optimism. 

Sheffield University is funding a project to try to collate information on these kinds of initiatives, so that knowledge can usefully be shared. 

Community Land Trusts are another, whereby a community comes together and buys land, deciding collectively how best to use that land, such as food growing,  improved access to jobs, playgrounds, community gardens and affordable housing. Some such projects exist in our own city.

Community groups need to be embraced into city-wide policies. Community groups tend to be wise stewards of their land and there are several examples of this around the country, such as the Climate Innovation Project in Leeds.

People acting collectively leads to increased equity in their communities, which leads to greater trust, more collaboration and greater resilience. The business, cultural, community and public sector can work cohesively together to build a vision that inspires people to pull together, with locally-lead values that are outlined collectively. 

The Land Workers Alliance is promoting the idea of community gardens, with the aim of cities producing 60% of its produce from within 100 miles, that there should be dense rural networks of growers, food hubs etc and every primary school child should have 2 portions of locally grown food with every lunch. Their estimates are that this would keep £5.9 million in local economies and that of the £2.7 billion spent on vegetable imports, 20% of this sum should be diverted to local organic and agroecological produce. 

Our cities must adapt to a changing world and the need to do this fast is apparent to increasing numbers of us. We need to be imaginative, we need to have visions of what can be done. We need to decentralise and build community networks that provide a structure for local distribution, we need to promote a diet that is good for  people and the planet, trade fairly and transparently and we need to operate in a low-carbon way.

So, be brave, start small and think about how you could join in to ‘Dig for Britain’. To see more of what others are doing see www.urbanagriculture.org.uk/.

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