Today at Groundswell Regenerative Farming festival, we are supporting farming and environmental groups in their call to encourage political leaders to back a landmark consensus on food, farming and nature.

The headline festival debate highlights the shared understanding, forged in January’s Oxford Farming Conference, between farmers and some of the UK’s biggest environmental groups, around the action needed to meet the UK’s climate, nature and public health challenges. The consensus aims to send a ‘strong common message’ to policymakers that acting on nature, climate and food security together is both possible and necessary.

Commenting on the consensus, Sue Pritchard added,

“In our work, FFCC engages with many grassroots networks of farmers. What we hear is that they don’t want zero sum arguments on food security or nature or climate – but rather want governments to recognise the need to rebalance food production in a way that both supports farmers to produce high quality, healthy food, and at the same time act on the nature and climate crisis.

“My concern is that ‘food security’ is becoming the latest fig leaf to deflect attention from the real challenge of developing and resourcing transition plans, regulating markets effectively, and ensuring ‘Big Food’ pays the true cost of their business models. Anything else postpones action on rebalancing a food system that is currently a major contributor to the climate, nature, and health crises.

“Our latest piece of work at FFCC, the biggest ever national conversation about food, which is underway right now, will help to show how citizens feel about many of these issues – and we’ll be taking this to politicians ahead of the next election.”