The Long Read: The National Food Strategy

Reflections on the new National Food Strategy

After digesting the new food strategy and considering the reflections and reviews of other professionals in food policy, this is our analysis, and what it means for Shropshire, our communities, and people.

As a note, I write this as someone who has lived and breathed food policy for over 15 years of my career and have watched in disbelief as our food system and regard for farmers has continued to slide into the background of policy and governance. Opportunities have been missed and leadership on food system transformation has been weak. The result has been a heavy corporate influence that has impacted billions of people, our economy, our environment, knowledge, links to nature and confidence in our own abilities to feed ourselves and know food. Something has to change quickly, which is why I finished my PhD in Food Policy and started a Market Garden, and then became the coordinator of SGFP: We can’t wait for government to hand down a perfectly formed solution for us to take action (perfect is the enemy of the good, afterall). The grassroots must lead the charge on change, as indeed it always has. The National Food Strategy is a positive step for central government, but it’s essentially playing catch up with what we already know, and what many of us have been doing for the last decade(s).

-Daphne Du Cros, Shropshire Good Food Partnership

By and large, the National Food Strategy (NFS) is being well received, with comments saying that it picks up where Henry Dimbleby’s strategy left off (a good document that should have been put to work right away), particularly that it makes the effort to connect the dots on food, farming, culture, public health and environment.

We need to move from left to right. Image from From Just in Time to Just in Case, the Report on Civil Food Resilience by Prof. Tim Lang for the National Preparedness Commission, 2025.

As a document written by DEFRA, it is hoped that it will have enough ‘oomph’ to result in some significant action, however this requires central government and the treasury to approve sufficient funding over the course of the transition to make it happen. (A whole other conversation is just how quickly this transition needs to happen, and that we can’t wait for government to take the lead on getting it moving where we can activate at the local, county and bioregional levels – more on this in another post).

The NFS was written by a group which included industry (Sainsbury’s, McCain, Greencore), along with academics, think tanks and NGOs, including Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming. Others included UK Hospitality, National Farmers Union, British Retail Consortium, and Food and Drink Federation.

Some gaps:

The NFS will not be written into law and while it is unclear why, this does lead to questions about how effective the strategy will be if not adopted as formal policy via a white paper. Indeed, it makes it easier for actions to ‘slip’. This also links to observations that the ‘how’ and ‘who’ is unclear in the strategy – specific levers and approaches to achieving its aims need to be detailed very clearly for them to have process and be achievable. This means that measuring progress, accountability and transparency are something to keep an eye on. A criticism is that the voices and roles of the youth, small farmers and ‘bottom up groups’ are less visible in the document.

Since food touches nearly every part of our lives – from energy use, health, personal budgets, environmental quality, biodiversity, land use, planning – the level of coordination across government will be massive: ‘a key objective of the food strategy is to deliver a more coordinated and coherent approach to food issues across government’. This is an area that food systems actors and policy researchers have historically been frustrated by, as it leads to ‘siloing’ of food themes into separate departmental areas, and that’s not how a system works. This means that there are bureaucratic barriers to harnessing its full potential - both to transform systems in positive ways and reduce expenditure through strategic planning and long-term thinking. It will take significant work and leadership to shift the cultures within our governance institutions and this presents an opportunity for organisations like Food Partnerships that understand the food system and can take a systems approach to link up different areas.

Children & Education: The health of young people is cited as being of significant importance in the strategy, noting obesity, but it must go beyond this. The strategy lacks guidance on curriculum change, especially in the area of food, farming and sustainability – an area that we at SGFP are working in alongside our partners lobbying for this change at the national level. Our young people will be inheriting a vastly different world and will be the ones taking on the reinvention of the food system and providing food for a large population in a challenging environment. Embedding knowledge of food, health, environment and production must be central – these skills will provide them with the awareness that we are a part of our natural system and not separate from it, as well as the confidence to navigate the future in a way that supports their physical and mental health and wellbeing. This must be integrated from primary through to post-secondary levels and presents an opportunity for our agricultural universities to show continued leadership through developing curriculum around systems thinking, horticultural training and a better food system transition.

Some Optimism:

-The strategy seems to have really taken on-board the need to embed Civil Food Resilience into the UK’s approach to food, as per the earlier report by Prof. Tim Lang earlier in the year. This report highlighted how vulnerable the UK is to crisis (and we’re seeing multiple and increasing threat levels from climate, reduced crop yields, war, geopolitical instability, corporate monopolies in the food system, pandemics and the mounting environmental and ecological impacts of intensive farming.) This is something that each community, county and region needs to be considering and actively planning for – the memory of empty shelves during the early pandemic should be motivation enough to get organised: more complexity is coming – that was our practice run.

Image from Farmer's Guardian. Recognising the instability of our food system.

Additionally, this is the first strategy that clearly recognises the impact of intensive farming systems on the environment and the need to change this. This alone is a monumental departure from the business-as-usual approach pushed for decades by big industry. Multiple legal challenges have been changing the landscape of intensive livestock units and planning approvals in the UK and Europe, and are effectively debunking the tired narratives justifying the need for harmful production to feed a growing population. This puts pressure on governments and councils to take responsibility for human health, the natural environment and the multiple impacts from intensive production. This provides an opportunity for the national government to make it easier for county councils to turn down planning applications for intensive operations that don’t meet rigorous standards.

- Recognition of a transition in the food system:

‘The transformation ahead will be led by the people who know the system best - our world-class farmers, fishers, producers, and workers. We will continue to listen, learn and act…’

Recognising that there is an event horizon within the next decade where our primary horticultural importers (Spain, the Mediterranean, and Southern Europe) will be unable to continue to export to us to such a large extent due to climate change (drought, flooding) – the UK, we produce about 12% of our horticultural needs. This needs to increase for us to be more resilient and food secure.

This must begin by rebuilding the trust with farmers and food producers and ensuring that they and their work are valued, culturally and economically. It also must include investment in the UK horticulture industry, which has become fragile due to the UKs reliance on other nations. This means a lack of skilled labour, and weak supply chains (UK grown-seed is elemental, but has dwindled), a huge loss of infrastructure, processing and routes to market.

-The strategy recognises the need for healthy food for all – on the back of the Cost of Living Crisis, 15 years of austerity, the surge in Ultra Processed Foods (UPFs) and the obesity epidemic, this is essential. A recent report that successive governments have been heavily lobbied by large food chains makes this a crucial area for bold leadership and getting back to the roots of what healthy diets and equitable access to good food means. The Strategy seems to address this in the need to switch from unhealthy diets to healthy, good food. People have made it clear that they won’t tolerate fake food anymore, with over 68% of meals for British School children being UPFs.

-The NFS states that it is looking to its regions for leadership and action: This means that it is recognising local leadership, local food culture and the role of local food partnerships – another recommendation from Tim Lang’s report. The Sustainable Food Places network also was able to contribute a briefing to DEFRA to highlight the roles of food partnerships and how best to harness their work for transformative food system action. This is what we do at the Shropshire Good Food Partnership, as well as our partners across the marches through the Marches Real Food & Farming Network.

The launch of the NFS recognised that this is a long-term transition, not a quick fix: ‘Transforming the food system is a major change that will require a long-term programme of work. We cannot deliver everything at once. We will be honest about the constraints and complexities we face. The next key milestone will be development of metrics, indicators and implementation plans for the food strategy outcomes. As we do this, we will continue to listen to and engage stakeholders across the food system.’

It is for this reason that investing in the role of local food partnerships is so valuable at this early stage. As organisations with partners across our local food landscape, this offers an opportunity to mobility at the local and county level to lead change. We know that local organisations are more nimble and responsive than the juggernaut of national government – indeed, many of the over 110 Sustainable Food Places members have been doing this work for over a decade in their communities, cities and counties.

Echoing some of the thoughts of the SFP, SGFP recommends:

1. A Food Resilience Strategy at every level: National leadership in a food system transformation must support and give guidance for local action—encouraging every city, town and region to develop a food strategy, with local food partnerships as core delivery vehicles.

2. Clearer Mandating and Support: Government, including local councils and Town and Parish Councils, must recognise the value that local food partnership bring to their communities and regions, with funding that supports further resilience building work, including making links across the food system to break away from the limitations presented by historic siloing, network building, benchmarking progress, collecting local data, and ensuring national accountability.

3. Policy Tools That Empower Local Action: National policies—such as mandatory food standards in public procurement, and stricter rules on unhealthy food marketing—must align with and enable local change. This includes investment in training, education, planning support for landworkers, infrastructure, celebrating and rebuilding local food cultures and improving farmer livelihoods and routes to market.

4. Working in partnership for Crisis Planning: Councils have a statutory responsibility to create crisis response plans, and a part of that is ensuring food access and availability. This is an area that is rarely dealt with in a comprehensive way and local food partnership, according to Prof. Lang’s report, are ideally suited to support in this area and should be a part of the crisis planning and response process.

5. A nested approach to food systems: In our Bioregional Growth Plan for the Marches, we advocate for a systems approach to food resilience, which builds food skills, knowledge, capacity and engagement at all levels: from the farm level (regenerative farming), to communities (regenerative community design), which act as a distributed joined up network across the County, and to the Bioregional level for deep structural change.

6. Curriculum change to embed food, farming and sustainability across all levels of education: Young people will inherit our food system and the role of reinventing it as it faces multiple overlapping crises. We owe it to them to build-in the skills that they need to take up this challenge by developing and applying a curriculum that delivers systems thinking, climate awareness, skills and practical tools that allow them to shape their lives and communities from a place of empowerment.

What we will be doing at SGFP to respond to the National Food Strategy and build capacity across our County’s Food System:

Engaging with our MPs and Councils:

·      To build a partnership that can develop a county-level food resilience strategy that reflects the aims of the National Food Strategy, but shows leadership through our role in the broader bioregion

·      To continue to support Town and Parish Councils to develop local food resilience strategies

·      To collaborate with our Local Resilience Forum to build food into the crisis response plan in a way that can reduce the impact of food system shocks: This includes preparing proactively for food crises by relocalising supply chains, mapping resources, and strengthening networks.

·      Bring a wide range of voices from our network of partners to share a wide range of views and the links and gaps that exist across the food system

·      Address issues in the planning system that impact farmers and landworkers, and impact the natural environment upon which we all depend

Working with our Partners:

·      We recognise the need for a ‘unified voice’ for Resilience across organisations that we work with, which means building collaborative capacity to reach more people, identifying where our work overlaps and links up, and communicating in a coherent and cohesive way to build knowledge of resilience, systems and the actions needed to transform our system to build the future we all need

·      To work together to develop a food strategy and resilience plan that reflects the ecological limits and the system within which we all exist, and the practical steps to take during crisis

·      To build networks and capacity in a nested way, in line with our bioregional growth plan for the Marches

Engaging with farmers and communities:

·      Community engagement — Empowering citizens through food skills, education, and pride in local food heritage, including storytelling and resource building to improve access and awareness to local food and producers.

·      Regenerative farming — Promoting farming practices that restore ecosystems, improve biodiversity, and align with planetary limits. Support for horticulture and rural skills, and land-matching

·      Relocalisation of the food economy — Building infrastructure for direct sales, local procurement, and community-supported agriculture.

·      Supporting Schools to link food, farming and sustainability into their curriculum while decarbonising the school food systems and building skills and resilience to climate collapse.

Please get in touch with us if you can support our movement to transform Shropshire’s food system.

hello@shropshiregoodfood.org

Written by Daphne Du Cros, Phd Food Policy