Food Thinkers Seminar with David Baldock: "Horses and Carts: can policies in a post Brexit world harness farming to more sustainable diets?"

1. Horses and Carts:
can policies in a post Brexit world
harness farming to more sustainable diets?
David Baldock
City University
16 November 2016

2. Farming and Food: Traditionally Different Worlds
Foster and
strengthen
agriculture
Pursue a balanced
and affordable diet

3. Some Exceptions
 Wartime
 Food safety regulation
 Promoting “healthy” products (eg free school milk)
 Recent focus on dietary change (eg discouraging sugar
consumption) impacts on market
 Tobacco

4. Agricultural strategy in Europe
 The post war productionist era
 The progressively decoupled era; paying for farming
per se. Market forces to prevail in farmers’ choices
 Payments per hectare increase the focus on land
management
 Continued expectation to make sufficient supplies of
healthy food availble
 Implicit assumption that feeding the world implies the
widespread adoption of a western style diet in the end

5. Not a wholly decoupled era
 Still direct coupled payments within the CAP eg for
dairy cattle (over 4billion in 2015)
 Other sectoral aid eg for protein crops
 Geographically focused aid eg for predominantly
livestock farming in the hills and mountains
 Support for post farm food chain within rural
development
 Special arrangements eg for migrant labour in
horticulture

6. Food promotion budget is in fact escalating
 Current CAP food promotion scheme growing from
€111million in 2016 to €133 m in 2017
 Includes 60 internal European schemes and 6 aimed
abroad.
 30% for fruit and vegetables and 17% for meat

7. After Brexit
 The opportunity to start a new approach in the UK to
agricultural policy based on fresh objectives and
primary legislation. New rules unavoidable.
 Potentially bringing a food and healthy diet dimension
into a new policy spectrum
 What would be the goals?
 How embedded in agricultural policy?
 What would be the best mechanisms?

8. Sustainable diets
 An alternative long term goal to general adoption of Western
style diets
 Seeks to capture health and environmental benefits
 Especially in low carbon terms
 Transition to sustainable diets a public as well as private
benefit (GHG emissions from food and drink in UK about
20% of consumption emissions)
 Assumes diets can be defined to some degree

9. Goals
 Sustainable diets everywhere or just in the UK?
 What kind of aspiration does it represent?
 A direction of travel on a purely voluntary basis or a
more prescriptive approach? Timescale?
 Are we confident enough about the nature of the diet
that we can build long term policy on it?
 And confident about the consequences for production?
Less sugar and livestock required. Half?

10. Linking to agricultural policy
 Removing perverse incentives for farmers; a more diet
neutral agricultural policy
 Parameters and metrics for sustainable production chains;
understanding carbon, biodiversity and water footprints
 Climate friendly versus more broadly sustainable production
 A new global distribution of supply; relevance to trade
policy?

11. Closer alignment with agricultural policy
 Rewarding more sustainable approaches per se; systems
(organic and beyond), farming practices, locally conceived
and delivered schemes (eg catchment based)
 Witholding support from less sustainable systems
 More targeted and refined versions of current agri-
environment schemes
 Preference for certain products eg horticulture, orchards,
certain crops, HNV livestock?
 New livestock regime?

12. Increased selectivity?
 How useful and/or effective is it to subsidise production of
foods that are “under “ consumed?
 To lower costs? Eg vegetables
 To increase supply eg fruit and fish?
 To make more locally available?
 Or otherwise appealing?
 Or build new relations between agriculture and the supply
chain?
 Strengthen certification and labelling?

13. The Policy Window
 The timetable for new policy
 The likely diversity within the UK
 The awareness of a new agenda
 The chance for bold but workable ideas
 Horses and carts