Thread by @suepritch

A bit of a long thread here on the leaked food strategy.
So it reads like it shares many aspirations with its critics. More regenerative, carbon and nature positive farming, with support to farmers and food business to innovate to tackle big global issues;

making it easier for everyone to get good food in healthy food environments; UK leadership for a more sustainable global food system and progressive trade relationships; making better, more transparent decisions about how we use our scarce resources fairly, particularly land.

Big However: this is a govt that is reluctant to intervene in markets. And yet it is global food 'markets’ that are stacking up more problems for government, mainly by externalising the true costs of their operating models.

Here are two revealing illustrations of what I mean, from the production side, and the consumption side.

Much chicken production is now concentrated in a small area, around the Wye Valley. Super efficient for the producers and, they argue, cheaper chicken for the customer. But it is awful for local communities, it's bad for animal welfare and it is destroying the environment.

Yet the multinational companies behind this concentration of operations are making eye-watering profits. It’s citizens and governments who pay the true cost.

On the consumption side, some foods are just bad for people's health. Nestle identified 60% of its portfolio in this category. And yet companies still make them and spend a fortune marketing and advertising them (dwarfing healthy eating campaigns).

They place all the responsibility on consumers to "make better choices”, while those same companies make huge profits for themselves. And citizens have to pick up the cost - to their own health and in their taxes.

Adam Smith knew: big corporations need strong boundaries to stop them externalising their true costs. If govt decides not to set boundaries, it ends up paying in other ways - for health care for diet related illness, cleaning up the environment, benefits for low paid workers...

So governments end up spending taxpayers money on subsidising the most polluting food businesses who are also harming their own citizens… Money it could use in other ways - investing much more in all those things that this food strategy describes...

...a farming transition towards more climate and nature safe practices; in boosting local food enterprises around the UK; in ecosystem restoration; in levelling up health inequalities; and using public procurement for more healthy, sustainably produced, British food.

Responsible food businesses and citizens want the same thing. For governments to use their powers to legislate and regulate sensibly, to limit harms and to level the playing field for fairer, healthier, more sustainable food and farming. Can our politicians catch up in time?