Transforming our food systems represents an opportunity to address lots of critical societal and environmental challenges, from global heating to food and poverty, from obesity to biodiversity loss. The Food Ethics Council’s mission is to accelerate the shift towards fair food systems that respect people, animals and the planet. We unashamedly want to bring ethics to the centre of the food system. Whatever political party (or parties) forms a UK government following the General Election on 12th December 2019 will have an opportunity to make UK food and farming vibrant, diverse, fair, resilient and sustainable.
Here are ten asks from the Food Ethics Council – what we would like to see in all party political manifestoes:
1. Ensure the UK leads the way on delivering international commitments – including but not limited to the Sustainable Development Goals, the Right to Food and the Paris Climate Agreement
2. Ensure trade agreements do not undercut domestic standards; maintain & further strengthen UK food and farming standards, including farm animal welfare
3. Require all public sector food to contribute to healthy, sustainable diets and to be humanely and fairly produced
4. Give citizens a genuine say in food policy
5. Introduce regulation and incentives to transform our food environments, plus invest in public health
6. Embed food sustainability into education and learning
7. Support sustainable farming and fishing – including investing in UK horticulture, supporting the transition to ‘only the best’ livestock, meat and dairy and promoting a public money for public goods approach in the UK
8. Introduce measures to tackle power and fairness concerns in the food system
9. Ensure food and farming research done for the public good – at home and overseas – has farmers and citizens at its heart
10. Commit to an ambitious National Food Strategy and learn lessons from the Devolved Administrations e.g. introduce an equivalent to Wales’ Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and Scotland’s Good Food Nation Bill
Comments are closed.
How about Food as a human right?
Thanks Sandy. We talk about the need for a right to food in our submission to the National Food Strategy here.
It is not only food as a human right, but should rather be the right food and water as a human right.
Absolutely agree and passionately we should bring back the in house cooking into our hospitals,schools and care homes. We need urgently to get rid of those awful frozen meals that are expensive, have large amounts of salt, sugar and other alien ingredients which harm the digestive system
I think given the state of our environment and what impact it would make in terms of agriculture, I believe it’s time we made growing and eating organic a priority. Labelling needs to be much clearer, we need to understand what chemicals have been used on the food we eat and the soil that we all depend upon. We need to know what impact those chemicals have on wildlife and health. If we really want to think sustainably and boost biodiversity we need to think regenerative!