What the The Resilient Food System Index is not telling you.
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
We need to talk about this new report from the Economist Impact (note: Funded by Agrichem Giant Cargill).
This report is a ranking of 60 Nations according to their Food System Resilience according to the pillars of 1. Affordability, 2. Availability, 3. Quality and Safety, and 4. Climate Risk and Responsiveness, broken down into a range of metrics.
Shockingly, the UK is ranked in a high position at 3rd out of 60 Nations. As a grassroots food practitioner and a food systems researcher working in Food Systems Resilience I can tell you that this ranking will lull you into a very false sense of security. They are not an accurate representation of reality for people and communities, not production or infrastructure.
The UK’s food system is not resilient: Let’s dig deeper.
RED FLAGS for the UK
Weak language on indicators betrays poor framing in metrics relating to what ‘healthy’, ‘locally accessible’ food means, and the ranking is at odds with…
Poor dietary diversity, variability and instability in food costs (we can link these to previous, current and chronic-ongoing crises impacting food supply chain costs (wars, fuel supply disruption, climate impacts on crops).
Weak disaster management planning
Poor socio-political risk outlook and
Weak investment in crisis and disaster preparedness for the food system (see my previous post for more info on this re: DEFRA, MOD & Corporate investment)
Across all metrics, the UK ranks lower than the average for the grouping of 14 European countries included. This can likely be partly attributed to weakened regs from Brexit.
Cargill, and by extension this report, has no interest in small scale, regenerative, relocalised or distributed food systems as resilience-builders. Their metrics are so high-level and narrow that they are irrelevant to any level of policy planning.
At the local, grassroots level, we know how fragile the UK’s Food System is, that’s why we’re working so urgently at Shropshire Good Food and across the Sustainable Food Places network to build Civil Food Resilience up – because the juggernaut of Central Government is moving so slowly, despite our risks growing more urgent every day. This urgency is being backed up by a growing collection of recent national level research from Sarah Brindle et al, Prof. Tim Lang, the AFN Network and many others.
The Report states: “Our planet’s population is growing rapidly — and so is the need for more food.” This is the narrative that corporate agrichem giants have been peddling (very effectively, with huge marketing budgets) since the post-war period (referring to WWi & WWII, not the current...). They are doubling down on a system that’s not working for the majority of people, or the planet. They are also working to influence the Government to relax regulations on agrichemicals, after Trump decreed that Glyphosate production must increase and only be produced in the USA.
So my question is, if the UK is 3rd, just how rough is the situation for the others?
And as always, when we read reports like this, we must look at who is funding them and what their interests are. Who is this serving? Because sweeping generalities made from weak metrics is not helpful to the British people or the British government for real decision making on food resilience capacity building and investment.
Read the report and draw your own conclusions here:
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