animal welfare<\/a>, biodiversity, carbon outputs and sequestration, nutritional composition, soil and water quality. Such a\u00a0vision\u00a0could be described as idealistic Utopianism\u00a0\u2013\u00a0something that may appear more likely to\u00a0emerge\u00a0from the\u00a0Green Party,\u00a0given its observed\u00a0contradictions. However, this\u00a0need\u00a0not\u00a0\u00a0be\u00a0the case if the UK Government and its devolved administrations embraced the reality of the challenges and seized the opportunities that a well-invested,\u00a0progressive\u00a0and supported British food system can face into and solve.\u00a0<\/p>\n\u00a0No coherent national strategy<\/p>\n
Few folk\u00a0outside Whitehall\u00a0who are\u00a0involved in the UK food system\u00a0believe that the UK Government has an appropriate\u00a0and\u00a0acceptable\u00a0take on a proper national food strategy;\u00a0ie,\u00a0a framework for facing into the delivery of much higher domestic food production, so self-sufficiency, while\u00a0meeting the wider societal requirements of a modern state. There\u00a0exists\u00a0a broad church of views\u00a0ranging from those favouring an elevation of\u00a0far\u00a0more local and organic production models through to those that believe that feeding c70m+ people cost effectively\u00a0necessitates\u00a0a degree of large-scale industrial capability\u00a0\u2013\u00a0and all in\u00a0between.\u00a0Despite these variances, I believe\u00a0this church has more in common\u00a0than\u00a0not.\u00a0One\u00a0consistent\u00a0view however\u00a0\u2013\u00a0and agreed by all\u00a0\u2013\u00a0is that from Number 10\u00a0down, there is\u00a0dis-interest,\u00a0ambivalence, a disconnect\u00a0and\u00a0disrespect for the domestic food system that is ignorant,\u00a0ill-advised\u00a0and increasingly dangerous.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0A dangerous policy vacuum<\/p>\n
Precisely\u00a0where\u00a0this attitude\u00a0emanates from is hard to discern.\u00a0Is\u00a0it\u00a0because the UK is such a highly urban and post-industrial state, where the rural constituency of the food system in particular is disadvantaged, or is it because trade associations and wider lobbying organisations are too fragmented, too divided, and so inconvenient for politicians and\u00a0administrators to efficiently and effectively work alongside? Whatever\u00a0the reasons, the industry and its wider ecosystem know that there is something wrong.\u00a0There\u00a0is a vulnerability around low levels of food self-sufficiency (sub-45\u00a0percent\u00a0in Great Britain, sub-60\u00a0percent\u00a0for the wider\u00a0UK) that in a de-globalising world is more\u00a0a vice than a virtue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
However, the\u00a0powers that be\u00a0remain\u00a0largely blind\u00a0to these\u00a0realities,\u00a0despite a plethora of warnings signals\u00a0largely\u00a0spoken\u00a0with forked tongue when the subject arises.\u00a0It is\u00a0unfathomable\u00a0that\u00a0government\u00a0in its broadest extent, from the Department of Health through to the Ministry of Defence, is not asking the Cabinet\u00a0whether we should be concerned about our food security position.\u00a0I have omitted DEFRA from this point because, up to the present day, one senses that its senior civil servants would struggle to spell the word \u2018food\u2019 if asked without warning, never mind ask questions of national food security\u00a0\u2013\u00a0though\u00a0maybe Ms\u00a0Eagle and Ms\u00a0Reynolds represent politicians that wise up the dimness that surrounds them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To be clear, those warnings signals\u00a0are\u00a0growing\u00a0in number and\u00a0magnitude,\u00a0hence\u00a0I am flabbergasted\u00a0as to\u00a0Whitehall\u2019s\u00a0inactivity,\u00a0which is\u00a0bordering on incompetence. Within the past decade the UK food system has been subject to the quite seismic shift\u00a0that resulted\u00a0from\u00a0the EU\u2013UK Referendum of 2016, for which the political class of the UK has singularly failed society at every level;\u00a0a political adjustment augmented by the global Coronavirus pandemic;\u00a0Russia\u2019s heinous invasion of Ukraine;\u00a0the US\u00a0imposing tariffs upon external trade partners that has wiped out the British bioethanol trade;\u00a0and now a\u00a0war\u00a0centred on Iran, where global hydrocarbon supplies are being challenged. Among\u00a0all this, there is the greater variability of weather patterns\u00a0\u2013\u00a0whether caused by a warming earth or not\u00a0\u2013\u00a0which does not make farming any easier. What further signals do the\u00a0powers that be\u00a0in Westminster, in particular, need\u00a0to enact a proper national food policy that embraces a\u00a0more progressive and robust system that\u00a0structurally builds national security\u00a0over time?\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Time for leadership at the highest level<\/p>\n
The time was yesterday for the UK Government to\u00a0tackle\u00a0the\u00a0issue, the opportunity, of how\u00a0we produce a lot more of our own food in ways that are aligned with the challenges, the values\u00a0and the priorities of British society in an ever more\u00a0challenging, volatile\u00a0and uncertain world. The food ecosystem must keep knocking on the door of 10\u00a0Downing Street to demand a responsible approach, and the Prime Minister must accept that DEFRA is not the body to answer such an important question. As a starting point, I return to the need for a Cabinet Minister for the UK Food System\u00a0that embraces a multi-generational and multi-departmental\u00a0\u2013\u00a0ie,\u00a0difficult\u00a0\u2013\u00a0journey to make the UK food system fulfil its potential on so many fronts.\u00a0In\u00a0so doing,\u00a0it could\u00a0unlock\u00a0the potential of the largest, and one of the finest, industrial systems in the land. \u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
About the author<\/p>\n
![\"Dr](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/clive-at-desk-120x120.jpg\")
Dr Clive Black\u00a0is Vice Chairman of\u00a0Shore Capital Markets<\/a>. Clive joined Shore Capital in 2003. After a Ph.D at Queen\u2019s University of Belfast he was Head of Food Policy at the NFU, a strategic planner for Lord Haskins at Northern Foods plc before joining Charterhouse Tilney where he was a No.1 rated consumer analyst, becoming Head of Pan-European retail research at ING. He has been highly ranked in Thomson Extel surveys for many years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Broken records are hard to repair and replay\u00a0\u2013\u00a0while\u00a0being\u00a0a broken record is painful and frustrating. Alas,\u00a0regarding\u00a0the security of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":498140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-498139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=498139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/498139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/498140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=498139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=498139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=498139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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