Food and Fairness Inquiry

The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has awarded us funding for a two-year project to put social justice back at the heart of progressive policy, business and campaigning on food issues.

The past few years have been boom-time for progressive ideas like sustainable development and public health promotion. Yet, as those ideas have exploded up the agenda, the very feature that made them progressive – their commitment to a fair society – has dropped out of the bottom.

The global food crisis and mounting obesity mean that action on sustainability and public health is at a peak in the food sector. Yet sustainability is often taken to mean little more than ‘eco-efficiency’, where social justice becomes an optional add-on. Health inequalities are taken seriously in policy, though mainly as a consumer issue – the role of workplace injustice in creating food poverty is largely neglected. Meanwhile, the food sector has witnessed some of the worst documented abuses of workers’ rights in recent years.

The fact is that it is hard for businesses and governments to do well by the environment or public health without compromising their commitment to fairness. Just think how higher environmental standards can become part of the cost-price squeeze on producers and workers.

Focusing on fruit and vegetable production, our project will highlight rules, institutions and assumptions that give rise to such trade-offs, and work with policy makers, businesses and campaign groups to challenge these structural causes of injustice.

You can read out our Food and Fairness Inquiry in details here