We all know sugar is bad for our health. But were you aware just how bad it is for our soil? Today, Foodrise publishes a report uncovering the hidden damage growing sugar beet is doing to our soil.

In the UK we use over 100,000 hectares of prime agriculture land to grow a product we really need to eat less of: sugar. British Sugar, the monopoly company controlling the UK sugar beet industry refines around 7.6 million tonnes of sugar beet grown on English soils every year, turning it into over a million tonnes of refined sugar. And they have plans to expand, with a goal to increase production by 50%.

That much sugar sounds like pretty bad news from a health perspective, especially when you take into account that in the UK most adults consume double their recommended daily allowance. But it turns out there’s another casualty of all that sweet stuff: our soil.

Sugar beet is a hard-wearing crop on our soil. Harvesting it, especially late in the year when soil is wet, leads to large quantities of soil being lifted from the fields, stuck to the crop and to farm machinery. We’ve calculated that the sugar beet harvest caused an average soil loss of around 489,000 tonnes a year in the period 2014-2018. To put that in context, the UK’s total soil loss per year, excluding soil loss from harvesting, is estimated at 2.9 million tonnes – so the sugar beet harvest could be adding as much as 20% to our annual soil loss per year.

Consider the fact that it takes between 200 and 400 years to form 1cm of topsoil, and that soil is a resource at the very heart of our agricultural production. Surely, we should be doing everything we can to care for it?

It gets worse. Sugar beet is largely grown in East Anglia and the Midlands, in areas Natural England describes as having some of the best and most versatile land in the country. If we shrunk the area of land used to grow sugar beet by 40%, around the decrease needed to produce just enough sugar to meet our recommended daily allowance, we calculated that we could be growing 150,000 tonnes of peas, 3.1 million tonnes of carrots or 1.8 million tonnes of potatoes.

Once harvested, beet is delivered to one of four sugar beet refineries all owned by a single company, British Sugar. British Sugar is a monopoly: nearly 40 years after the state sold its stake in the company, the company remains the only buyer for the UK’s sugar beet growers, negotiating a fixed yearly price with NFU Sugar, the body representing UK beet growers. We asked British Sugar to comment on our estimate on sugar beet’s contribution to soil loss, but they did not respond to our request.

“We welcome this report, and urge the approach outlined in it to be applied across our entire food system so that the public health and environmental impact of the crops we grow can be considered alongside one another – and informed, ambitious and holistic choices made as a result.” Ellen Fay, Director, Sustainable Soils Alliance

On the one side, two vital and finite resources: our land and our soils. On the other, our health, and the costs to the NHS of treating ill-health related to excessive sugar consumption. Spending on treating Type 2 diabetes alone comes to £8.8 billion per year. With the government adopting policies to incentivise lower sugar consumption, like the ‘Sugar Tax’, it seems nonsensical to continue to use significant area of land to grow sugar.

Sugar is bad for us, and it is bad for the land it is grown on. Yet amidst these challenges, British Sugar plans to grow production by 50% annually – potentially with grave potential effects for our health, land use and soils.

Today, the UK shareholders of Associated British Foods Plc (ABF), the parent company that owns British Sugar, meet for the companies Annual General Meeting. ABF is forecasting strong earnings growth next year, including in its sugar divison.

We hope our new report will open a new front in the fight to tackle our addiction to the sweet stuff. Between 2008 and 2018 (so, excluding the potential impact of the Sugar Tax, which kicked in April 2018), the average decline in sugar consumption has been just 0.2% annually – at this rate, it would take the UK 386 years to reach the WHO recommended daily sugar intake. Policy to address high sugar consumption through demand alone are failing. It is time to explore the potential to constrain supply of UK-grown sugar.

Such a move poses the opportunity to staunch the rapid erosion of UK soils, to incentivise production of healthy vegetables improving food security, and to orient agricultural policy around the twin goals of public health and planetary health. As well as reconsidering the sugar in our tea, it is time to reassess the role of sugar beet in our fields.

Read our full report.

Ten years ago this week, I stood in the streets of Copenhagen with tens of thousands of others, calling for climate justice. We left cold and disappointed. Had leaders taken meaningful action, then it would have taken a 3.3 per cent annual reduction in emissions to keep warming under 1.5°C.

Last week the UN Environment Programme released its annual Emissions Gap Report. Reading it, I felt a familiar sinking feeling. The key findings are unequivocal: global greenhouse gas emissions have to fall by 7.6 per cent each year between 2020 and 2030. Otherwise, we will miss the 1.5°C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement. We can see that we are going to crash, but we cannot seem to take our foot off the accelerator.

And this week climate negotiators from around the globe once again gather, for COP26, the latest round of negotiations on how best to implement the Paris Agreement. To say there is much to be done is a vast understatement: even if every signatory to the Paris Agreement fulfiled their current promises to reduce emissions,  temperatures are expected to rise by 3.2°C.

Globally, countries must increase their collective ambition more than fivefold to meet the Paris target. Together, the G20 is responsible for 78% of global emissions, yet only five G20 members have committed to a long-term zero emissions target.

Amid this broad and somewhat gloomy picture, we’d like to zoom in on one piece of the puzzle which provides some clarity and hope.

Food systems account for 25-30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Changes to food demand – food waste and our diets – are two of the five most promising solutions for mitigation. Importantly, interventions into the food system can meet multiple sustainable development goals and are a vital point of intervention in climate adaptation. Across two policy briefs, on demand-side policy more generally and policy for sustainable diets, we make a case for demand-side interventions and begin suggesting concrete policy actions to help. Actions that show leadership. Actions that are fit for the scale of the challenge.

Changing demand matters: we can feed more people, ensure stronger human health, make better use of the resources that we have. Policy-makers have an opportunity – we hope they’ll take it.

*****

The question of whether it is too late to prevent dangerous climate change might not be the right one. Instead, is a more fundamental question: “is it too late to prevent ecological harm and human suffering?”. The answer to that question is a clear yes. Whether it is the fires in Australia, deforestation in the Amazon or Hurricane Maria the damage to ecology, climate and people is not abstract, nor has it ever been.

So this has never really been a task of hitting a numerical target. Our motivations run much deeper than gigatons, degrees and dollars a day. And food is a hugely important part of the human side of action, justice, solidarity and hope. Let’s make it part of the solution too.

A few days ago the BBC aired a disquieting documentary. ‘Meat: A Threat to Our Planet?’ focused primarily on the industrialised livestock industry which has boomed in the US, and which is quietly arriving in the UK countryside: drone footage shows over 800 US-style ‘mega-farms’ in the UK. These units might be called farms, but they have more in common with a very different extractive and environmentally catastophic industry: fossil fuels.

In 2012, environmentalist Bill Mckibben wrote an article for the Rolling Stone called Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math. Research from Carbon Tracker had just shown that the fossil fuel companies – or Big Oil as they came to be known – had around five times as much oil and coal and gas reserves on their books as climate scientists thought would be safe to burn. And so, set against the backdrop of towering wildfires in Colorado and the hottest June on record, over some six thousand words Mckibben compellingly built the case for the end of the fossil fuel industry, inspiring thousands of students and communities in his call to arms.

Seven years later, as the Amazon continues to smoulder off the back of a new temperature highs set this summer, here is some more terrifying math: there are 23 billion chickens, 1.5 billion heads of cattle, 1.2 billion sheep, 1 billion goats and 1 billion pigs living on factories and farms worldwide. These numbers are growing – rapidly. In just two decades the farmed chicken population has risen from 14 billion to 23 billion. This number, however, is just a snapshot in time – over the course of a year 62 billion chickens are slaughtered. Many of these animals are raised for the benefit of major, globalised corporations and their financiers, not the subsistence farmers that rely on them for nutrition and food security.

Why are these ever-growing numbers such alarming news for our Planet? More animals means more methane and carbon dioxide – from the land converted to house them, from the forest cleared to feed them, from the food they eat and from the industry that sustains, processes and transports them – and the meat products they become. In other words: faster and greater environmental destruction, a heavier burden on the Planet and its people, already struggling to deal with the effects of a changing climate.

For too long, many of us working in the environment sector have been reluctant to talk about animal agriculture. We don’t want to be insensitive to the difficulties faced by farmers especially small farmers, pushed inexorably further into the red by relentless downward pressure on prices; we fear further polarising the vegan versus omnivore debate. But all this lengthy debate has obscured one thing we can all agree we want to see the back of: industrial-scale production methods and the corporate ownership structures that prop them up, the systems in which 70% of animals we eat are raised. Big Livestock.

The scale of destruction that Big Livestock wreaks on the Planet is already approaching that of Big Oil. Together, the top five meat and dairy companies produce as much greenhouse gas emissions as Exxon Mobil. All in all, at least 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock and this is set to grow, fundamentally threatening our ability to avert the worse of the unfolding climate catastrophe.

The deeper you look, the further the damage extends: Some estimates attribute up to 70% of deforestation in the Amazon basin to the beef industry, with investors such as Blackrock bankrolling the deforestation driven by companies such as JBS, Marfrig and Cargill. Through this destruction, and the destruction of other habitats to convert for animal feed crops, especially soya, these corporations are the main driver of the mass species extinction that we are currently experiencing.

And it’s not just environmental impacts we have to worry about. There continue to be alarmingly high rates of serious injury and chronic illness among those working in meat processing plants. Giant agribusinesses force small-farmers to sell-up to make way for animal feed monocultures. Animal welfare, never the industrial livestock sector’s strong suit, is as troubling as ever. Further afield, the routine use of antibiotics in the sector is catalysing the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria; England’s Chief Medical Officer recently warned that antibiotics resistance could soon be killing at least 10 million people a year.

Like Big Oil, the large livestock corporations are in denial about their climate problem. Only 14 of the world’s 35 largest livestock companies have an emissions reduction target. Those that do, woefully under report their emissions. Some observers point out that the big players in the livestock industry have been quicker to rebrand as “protein companies” than Shell and Exxon Mobil were to greenwash themselves as energy companies. But as Noel White, CEO of meat-giant Tyson foods puts it, corporate-backed ‘fake-meat’ will always be an addition to their business, not a subtraction. More emissions, not less.

These corporations will fail us in the same way Big Oil continues to fail us. Ignore their greenwashed rhetoric, the maths is clear: based on their own projections for growth, the industrial meat and dairy corporations will eat up 80% of the greenhouse gas budget by 2050.

Two years after Bill McKibben’s clarion call in the Rolling Stone, there were 180 institutional investors cutting fossil fuel stocks from their portfolio. In 2019, there are 1100 – representing $11 trillion dollars’ worth of assets that investors will divest from fossil fuels. This year, Shell listed divestment campaigning as a material risk in its annual report. The time has come to set our sights wider. Like any globalised financialised sector, Big Livestock relies on the financial and moral backing of thousands of institutional investors and creditors around the world – university endowments, sovereign wealth funds, banks and public pensions. Recent research from Global Witness shows that around 300 banks and investors back six of the world’s most harmful agribusinesses to the tune of $44bn. As investors such as Allianz and Storebrand launch the UN-backed Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, they cannot keep financing companies such as JBS, Tyson and Cargill. Companies that no matter how you spin it, are fundamentally incompatible with a low-carbon future.

As political outrage over the Amazon fires flickers and fades, we cannot just stir the embers. Just as McKibben turned our attention to the financial flows sustaining Big Oil, it is time to turn our attention to those providing financial fodder for Big Livestock.

Banks and investors share the blame for the Amazon crisis.

Yesterday, Foodrise along with 70 plus organisations, including Mighty Earth, Extinction Rebellion and Friends of the Earth, called for immediate action by the banks and investors providing the financial fuel for destruction in the Amazon. As we state:

“The Amazon is on fire. Investors share the blame. They need to become part of the solution.

 The primary blame for the current burning of the Amazon is being placed, rightly, on the violent, regressive and racist administration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who has explicitly encouraged illegal miners and ranchers to set fire to the lungs of the earth. But reckless multinational businesses’ exploitative practices created these conditions – and these same companies will likely be poised to profit as today’s fires opens up the door for tomorrow’s plantations and ranches.”

These companies, such as the meat giants JBS, Minerva and Marfrig do not act alone. Banks and institutional investors such as Barclays, HSBC and Prudential provide hundreds of millions of pounds of financial fodder in the form credit and equity, enabling the destruction of forests and greenhouse gas emissions on the scale of Big Oil.

Over the next months you will begin to hear more from Foodrise about these vital issues, as we work to expose the banks and investors propping up “Big Livestock”. In the meantime, if you want to find out more about the businesses behind the destruction, check out the letter on our friend’s at Mighty Earth’s website and get a sneak peak of our new campaign: The Steaks are High.

Out today: Demanding action: Why food policy must deliver sustainable diets, shorter supply chains and prevent food waste

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) today outlined the massive and urgent task ahead of us to transform the food system.

The report concludes that the climate crisis is already affecting the food system, exacerbating global food inequality, shrinking wheat yields in India and driving environmentally damaging rice cultivation in China. It also definitively shows that food production and consumption is responsible for roughly 25-30% of total Greenhouse Gas emissions. As diets across the world are changing, emissions are increasing. In other words, the way we produce food is damaging life on earth, and our ability to go on producing food into the future — the worst of both worlds.

The implications are clear and the situation grave. To meet the commitment to a warming limit of 1.5°C made under the Paris Climate Agreement, widespread, deep ranging and radical transformation of the food system is needed.

Fortunately, this year, there have been more and more fantastic ideas about how to do this. The Food And Farming Commissions recent report Our Future In the Land, EAT Lancet’s landmark commission, Food in The Anthropocene and Eating Better’s Roadmap to Less and Better Meat.

The IPCC report also sets out priority areas that show enormous potential for transformation. The report splits these areas into two categories, interventions into food supply or food demand.

The problem, as we see it, is that when they are thinking about mitigating the climate impact of agriculture at all, policymakers are currently overwhelmingly focusing on supply: producing more food with fewer resources, usually through an unhealthy dose of the magic of corporate innovation.

But this is to miss an enormous, planet-saving trick: by also acting to change food demand, we can create opportunities for the massive, known wins which can come from large-scale shifts in what food we eat, where it comes from and the way it is wasted. So far, climate policy makers largely avoid food demand, including as part of the Paris Agreement process.

We’re pulling out three ways of changing demand for the better, all of which feature in the IPCC’s most recent report: transitioning to more environmental diets, promoting local food from shorter supply chains and (finally) tackling food waste – something we at Foodrise have been banging on about for a decade.

All three ideas could deliver fast, effective and long-lasting decarbonisation of the food system as well as considerable co-benefits, for land-sparing, ecosystem regeneration, human health and wellbeing. More environmentally-friendly diets, with less meat and dairy, are supported by a substantial body of public health evidence. Less food waste means greater areas of land freed up for other uses (like afforestation), and less pollution disposing of waste. Shorter supply chains help reduce emissions from transport and minimise the risks of food waste- as well as offering important opportunities to build regional economic and community resilience.

The IPCC shows that these changes to demand have massive potential for mitigating environmental breakdown. And while the interventions required to revolutionise our food system are systemic, changing production without changing demand will not transform a broken food system.

So today, Foodrise is demanding action. Over the next two months, we are releasing reports exploring how to put the IPCC’s evidence into policy action. Today we are releasing a primer on demand-side food policy which asks the important question: if policy-makers were to take the potential of demand-side food systems measures as seriously as is warranted by the IPCC’s findings, what should they do?

There’s been a lot of wheel-spinning on policy interventions to change public diets. We’re hoping that this body of evidence can start to shift us from ‘should we do anything about this’, to ‘how can we do something about this’. In other words, it is time to grow up and face the music on the role of the food we eat in driving climate and biodiversity breakdown.

Coming soon:

• The cow in the room – our call for policy for sustainable diets will be published next week.
• And later this year we’ll publish similar policy reports on re-regionalising food economies and public policy to prevent food waste (once and for all!).

Press release – 1 July 2019

Read the full report.

Listen to Foodrise’s Head of Policy and Communications Jessica Sinclair Taylor interviewed on BBC Radio Scotland (00:48 mins).

The Scottish salmon industry currently uses roughly the same quantity of wild-caught fish to feed its salmon as is purchased by the entire adult population of the UK in one year[i]. And it has plans to grow exponentially, aiming to double in size or more by 2030. A new report by environmental campaign group Foodrise estimates that to fuel this ambition, the Scottish salmon industry will need to source 310,000 tonnes more wild fish per year to make into salmon feed, assuming it continues to use the same proportion of wild fish in its feed ingredients[ii].

Fishmeal and fish oil from wild fish, often called ‘forage fisheries’ because they act as forage for a wide variety of other oceanic species, are the cornerstone ingredient in the Scottish salmon industry’s success. Campaigners are concerned that unchecked and under-regulated expansion of the Scottish salmon industry will place severe pressure on wild fish stocks, and the ocean ecosystems and human communities they support, with over 90% of global fisheries already overfished or operating at capacity[iii].

Meanwhile, the Scottish farmed salmon industry is highly wasteful, with around 20% of fish never reaching harvest due to mortalities and escapes during production, according to its own figures[iv]. If this level of waste remains unchecked, a large proportion of the wild fish sourced to feed its salmon is also being wasted.

 While some fisheries sourcing wild fish for salmon feed are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, many are not, or rely on certification by an industry-supported certification scheme, the IFFO Responsible Standard, which certifies fishmeal and fish oil manufacturers, rather than the source fisheries themselves. At a local level in Scotland, several reviews by the Scottish Parliament have raised grave concerns regarding the impact of salmon farming on the Scottish natural environment, including a link to record lows in numbers of wild salmon in Scotland.

Foodrise is calling for the Scottish salmon industry to publish full and transparent information about its feed supply chain, including where it is sourcing wild fish, what types of fish it uses, and what proportion of its marine ingredients come from by-catch or trimmings from human edible fish.

 Dr Karen Luyckx, Head of Research, Foodrise, said:

“The simple reality is that we cannot have our fish and eat it – feeding limited stocks of wild fish to farmed salmon is neither an efficient nor sustainable way to produce protein. We do not accept the industry’s argument that shared use of marine ingredients with other damaging industries such as shrimp and industrial livestock farming as a justification for depleting global fish stocks when we need to urgently check the quantity of animal protein in our diets.

 The Scottish salmon industry may like to sell itself as producing healthy and responsible food in a uniquely Scottish wild environment, but with the companies largely Norwegian-owned and the feed coming from all over the globe, the most Scottish part of the industry is the waters these farms pollute and the landscapes they blight. We are very concerned that the despite its claim to ‘responsible growth’ the industry cannot provide the transparency needed to independently verify these far-fetched claims.”

Dr Krzysztof Wojtas, Head of Fish Policy, Compassion in World Farming

“This new report reveals just how unsustainable Scottish salmon farming is and highlights the urgent need for action. It can take hundreds of wild forage fish to produce just one farmed salmon. Not only is this clearly wasteful – it’s incredibly cruel as well.

Salmon suffer when confined in vast numbers, with nothing to do but swim listlessly in circles. And yet, tens of billions of small fish die in inhumane ways on huge industrial fishing vessels, in order to fuel the salmon kept in these underwater factory farms.

It is deeply worrying that the industry expansion has not been stopped in its tracks, considering the huge environmental and welfare concerns. Transparent information about the industry feed supply should be an absolute obligation of this industry.”

John Aitchison, on behalf of the Aquaculture sub-group of the Coastal Communities Network Scotland said:

 “This is an industry that markets its fish as responsibly and sustainably produced, and with a low carbon footprint. This report shows that the sourcing of fish for conversion to feed for farmed salmon is far from sustainable at the moment, and now the industry in Scotland wants to double in value by 2030, which is almost equivalent to doubling capacity. 

With so many fisheries already operating at or beyond their maximum capacity, where is all the fish meal and fish oil going to come from to feed twice as many farmed salmon, without taking fish from people’s plates in developing countries and further reducing the amount of wild fish available to other species, such as puffins?”

Notes to editor:

[i] https://www.seafish.org/media/publications/SIF7_FS_March_2017.pdf

[ii] https://foodrise.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Fishy-business-the-Scottish-salmon-industrys-hidden-appetite-for-wild-fish-and-land.pdf

[iii] http://www.fao.org/state-of-fisheries-aquaculture/en/i

[iv] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-48266480

Our food system is creaking under the weight of climate change, industrial agriculture, soil degradation, social inequality and corporate profits. While individuals across the country are demonstrating their commitment to a healthy, planet-friendly food system by adopting the principles of food citizenship and low-waste, healthy diets, we have not yet seen a government or business response which could provide the collective action needed to address the huge challenges we face.

So we are heartened that the Government has announced the first review of the food system in 75 years, and hope it will lead to a sincere commitment to drive change across every aspect of how our food is produced, sold, what we eat and what we throw away. In particular, we are pleased to see that the review will cover how the food system can deliver healthy diets for all, while restoring our natural environment and providing resilience against the future climate shocks we know are coming.

We hope that the government will also consider our food system in its global context, bearing in mind the global burden industries like salmon, chicken and pig farming place on our life-supporting ecosystems. Amidst a climate emergency, it has never been more important to think of the role of what we grow and eat in how we ensure a liveable planet for future generations.

There is so much that can and must be done: from supporting and promoting the shift to healthy, low-meat diets, to helping farmers adopt agro-ecological farming methods that restore nature, to ending the massive waste of resources and nutrients through on-farm food waste. We look forward to engaging with this review and wish Henry Dimbleby every success with his endeavours.

On 2 May 2019, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) released their report on the UK’s contribution to stopping global warming by reaching Net Zero Greenhouse Gas emissions by 2050. In essence, the CCC recommends that the UK commit to ‘clear, stable and well-designed policies’ to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050, including a 20% reduction in consumption of beef, lamb and dairy, zero biodegradable waste to landfill by 2025, and afforestation of around 30,000 hectares per year. In addition, the CCC points out that public behaviour changes are essential to facilitate the greater ambition from an 80% fall in GHG emissions by 2050, to net zero by 2050.

While the CCC’s recommendations make it clear that public action will be required to reduce at least half of the emissions needed to reach Net Zero, their report only touches lightly on demand-side measures to address the environmental crisis, leaving a critical gap concerning concrete policy recommendations that the UK could adapt to tap into the vast potential of demand-side mitigation strategies. Demand-side measures to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions present double or even triple wins; for instance, nurturing the UK’s horticultural food production to shorten supply chains and encouraging public institutions to locally source food offer possibilities to increase employment opportunities in the UK food sector and cultivate regional prosperity and resilience. The UK cannot afford to overlook demand-side interventions if we are to achieve ambitious decarbonisation targets.

And despite the progress the CCC’s recommendations represent, a goal of Net Zero by 2050 may simply not be ambitious enough. As Greta Thunberg recently pointed out in her visit to the UK parliament, the UK has only reduced its emissions by 10% since 1990 if you factor in aviation, shipping and imports/exports. In the context of the efforts of Extinction Rebellion and others to seriously ramp up ambition, we should be setting the bar even higher for UK emissions targets. And the greater the ambition, the greater the role demand-side measures will have to play – without rapid adoption of low-waste, plant-heavy diets, we will continue to crash through targets as well as ecological boundaries. To address the demand-side gap in the CCC report, Foodrise has developed a policy brief, including various possible demand-side policy measures that could be adopted by the UK government (see full response here) with regards to public diets, food waste, and the supply chain. Specifically, we recommended:

Public diets – cutting meat and dairy consumption by 50% by 2030:

• Implement a cross-government set of public dietary targets focused on shifting the public towards plant-based proteins, reducing public consumption of meat and dairy by 50% by 2030, and adopting a ‘less and better’ approach as advocated by Eating Better.
• Apply these targets to public procurement guidelines in order to shift public food procurement towards a ‘less and better’ approach and model behaviour change needed.
• Create an industry agreement to implement dietary shift targets across retailers, food service and hospitality, similar to the Courtauld 2025 targets on food waste.
• Impose a ban on advertising of meat products across all mediums, including online, similar to the ban on tobacco advertising.
• Implement behaviour change campaigns targeting a broad section of the public, focused on the well-evidenced health benefits of a plant-based diet.
• Create new environmental labelling schemes in order to give customers clear guidance on ‘better’ meat and dairy.

Food supply chains – cutting food waste across the supply chain by 50% by 2030:

• Implement a binding national target to halve food waste across the entire supply chain (including at farm-level) by 2030, backed up by rigorous measurement of food waste at all stages of the supply chain.
• Require all food businesses over a certain size to report on their food waste generated throughout the supply chain.
• Tighten regulations to require food businesses to comply with the food use hierarchy, including penalising breaches of the food use hierarchy, such as the practice of sending edible food to Anaerobic Digestion for disposal.
• De-regulate the ban on feeding food waste to pigs and implementing regulation to guide the safe processing, treatment and feeding of pigs using food surplus which cannot be safely redistributed to human consumption (Foodrise 2018b).

Shortening supply chains:

• Local government should facilitate new food business entrants to the procurement marketplace, prioritising those with regional operations, and that have local ownership or a cooperative ownership structure. This could include seeding new employee-owned businesses to meet local demand.
• Facilitating the engagement of a larger number of smaller suppliers by providing centralised services such as transport hubs that reduce the number of delivery journeys required in and out of major procurement centres
• Implementing a procurement scorecard or weighting system which prioritises environmental outcomes, including food waste reduction and meat and dairy reduction, in food service delivery contracts for public institutions.

Read the full policy brief here.

Last week my colleague was arrested. If you’ve been following the news recently you can probably guess why – she was committing an act of peaceful civil disobedience, alongside over a thousand other Extinction Rebellion protestors, leading to arrests of protestors on a scale which the UK hasn’t seen for decades.

Extinction Rebellion’s week-long and counting uprising has swept through London streets, and our consciences, stirring some difficult and conflicting feelings and questions, for those in power, the police, ordinary non-protestors getting around in the city, and of course, those of us who work in the environmental sector.

For me, last week was one of awakening, and, surprisingly amid the repeated reminders that time is running out to act to avert catastrophic impacts of man-made climate change and ecological collapse – of hope.

Working on, thinking about, these issues on a day to day basis is beyond difficult, it’s nigh on impossible. As another colleague has said, what we are all facing, whether we can acknowledge it or not, is grief: grief for the loss of our planet as we know it, and all its many beauties, as well as for the many impacts climate change will have on people’s lives. And it is dangerously easy to feel, amid the highs and lows of any job and the scale of the challenge, that anything we can do is too little, too late.

On Monday morning as I took the tube to Marble Arch to see the beginning of the rebellion, I felt anxious. I’m not a natural rule-breaker, and Extinction Rebellion’s model of deliberate civil disobedience and acceptance of the consequences – arrest – felt intimidating. I was there because I felt compelled, and more than a little guilty, not because I was a fired up, signed-up rebel.

A week’s worth of visits to the different rebellion sites – Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Marble Arch and Parliament Square – later, and though I still wouldn’t describe myself as a natural rebel (some things don’t change so easily), something has shifted. I found myself passionately explaining to both a dubious family-member, and a scathing fellow charity worker, that it didn’t matter that Extinction Rebellions’s three demands had little detail in the way of ‘how’ to achieve them: the point was that it had succeeded in giving a larger than life demonstration of the huge urgency we face. We live amid an ever-growing emergency, as Greta Thunberg reminds us, but most of the time we don’t act like it. Extinction Rebellion had made manifest that emergency in the streets around us, and for me at least it was a huge relief. It was as if something unacknowledged but deeply painful was finally being spoken aloud.

A few moments stand out: my first encounter with the police in arresting mode on Waterloo Bridge on Tuesday night, which I found much more frightening than I expected (unlike my mother, who drew on her Greenham Common experience and blithely sat at the police’s feet chatting to fellow protestors and eating curry). The passer-bys who said ‘thank you for what you’re doing’, as well as the one who called me a ‘stupid c*w’. Poignant singing and tears among a group at Parliament Square as more arrests were made. The banner apologising to the police for their cancelled leave, because ‘the government is failing all of us’. A samba band leading a joyful, frenetic procession around the statues of our former Prime Ministers. Above all, how normal and right the car-free streets, atmosphere of kindness and impressive levels of tidiness at all the sites felt.

Extinction Rebellion, in all its messy, human, yet surprisingly disciplined glory, has given me hope. Not delusion: the reality is that outside this bubble of climate activism there is a long, long way to go. And the question of ‘what now’ looms large: with no official response from the government, I think about the need to force a shift from a policing response to a political one, and about how Extinction Rebellion will make a transition from organising to negotiating.

And I think about what we as Foodrise – an environmental organisation that is trying to work within the frameworks of our charitable status – will do next to make our small contribution to this tidal wave of fear, hope, rage, and longing for change. Internally we have been asking ourselves how we ‘up our game’ – an acknowledgement that Extinction Rebellion has changed the game for environmentalists, as well as that traditional tactics are manifestly not bringing the change we need, or at least not fast enough. There will always be a role for serious research, policy and political advocacy as well as offering ways to support nature to the many parts of the population for whom Extinction Rebellion’s approach is bemusing, infuriating or simply unappealing. But there is also a tangible sense that more is needed.

At Foodrise, we have some ideas: our Executive Director Carina Millstone blogged recently on our nascent campaign to expose the financers and banks funding ‘Big Livestock’ – a sector of the food system with an awful lot to answer for when it comes to ecological collapse; and we are also setting our sights on the UK sugar beet industry, another profit-driven food system which is bad for our health and for our planet’s health. And more is on the way, with Foodrise asking itself some tough questions about what sort of organisation it wants to be.

But for now, it feels important to hold on and celebrate the sense this extraordinary week has given me, and I think many others, of – as Rebecca Solnit would put it – finally finding some hope in the dark.

In a series of bizarre tweets last night, President Trump appeared to announce a bold and surprising new direction in his plans to build a wall along the border between the USA and Mexico. While the plans were previously thought to involve a solid construction made from concrete or steel, The President last night tweeted his intention that the ‘wall’ would in fact be a newly-planted forest and wildlife conservation corridor stretching the breadth of the United States.

Mr Trump’s tweet, sent at 2.03am, read: “It is time for the people of America to embrace not only our Mexican brothers and sisters, but to embrace also the glorious biodiversity of nature’s kingdom. LET’S MAKE THE ENVIRONMENT GREAT AGAIN!” A following tweet stated that the forest would be made up of seven billion trees, one for every person on the planet.

If true, the ‘wildlife wall’ would be the world’s largest afforestation project, and it is already being hailed by environmental groups as a turning point in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss. Environmental leaders expressed hopes that this move from the President indicated a turning point in the US’ climate policy, with optimism that the coast to coast conservation corridor would lead to further environmental policy to combat climate change and reengage with international climate policy.

The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change last year published a report setting out the dangers of global leaders allowing emissions to grow to the point that global warming exceeds 1.5°C by 2100. They urged the use of mass afforestation to remove carbon from the atmosphere, alongside rapid decarbonization of the world economy. In the land and agriculture sector this will include reduced food waste and adoption of sustainable diets.

Foodrise strongly welcomed the move. Executive Director Carina Millstone said:

“We welcome President Trump’s announcement of mass tree planting at the US-Mexico border: a truly promising innovation in the tradition of wildlife ‘reserves’ or ‘corridors’. The proposed wildlife wall will help turn the tide on climate change and biodiversity loss and clearly cements President Trump’s position as one of the great environmental leaders of our age. Next we hope to see him publicly declaring his adoption of a low meat diet and urging his followers to do the same. Those of us who thought Trump’s wall was a grotesque vanity project rather than a brilliant way for the President to covertly push his extraordinary environmental agenda have been well and truly fooled this 1st April.”

At this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference on 3 and 4 January, Foodrise is excited to host a session opening up some of the questions about land we’ve been asking ourselves recently.

Land has to answer a multitude of needs: space for people to live and for them to explore and enjoy, space and habitats for wildlife and natural ecosystems, a resource for food production and to generate economic prosperity. Land is also a very important piece in the puzzle of how we meet our immense climate challenge, as well-managed soils and vegetation such as forestry are vital to sequester carbon and reduce the risk of climate change.

70% of UK land is given over to agriculture. What we choose to grow, and how, are important questions, both for the long-term health of our soils and ecosystems, and for the health and wellbeing of the population. To help explore this question, Foodrise uses a measure of agricultural productivity which takes into account nutritional benefit and environmental benefit – so an agro-ecological farming system which keeps soil carbon levels high, provides habitats for wild species and doesn’t pollute the environment, while providing highly nutritious food, would score well.

Meanwhile, intensive monocultures of crops like sugar beet, which provide very low nutritional benefits (or indeed negative health impacts), with accompanying negative impacts on the natural environment, for example from nitrogen fertiliser run off into local water systems, would score badly.

This is one way of looking at the question of how we use our land – but there are many others. To explore some of them, we are convening a panel including an organic sheep farmer, a bio-economy expert, a woodlands expert and a climate change expert to discuss our question: What is land for?

Here are the details:

What is land for? – Oxford Real Farming Conference, Friday 4 January at 1.30pm

Chair: Jessica Sinclair Taylor (Foodrise)

Speakers: Krysia Woroniecka (Foodrise), Liz Bowles (Soil Association), Sarah Hickingbottom (BioVale), Darren Moorcroft (The Woodland Trust), Indra Thillainathan (The Committee on Climate Change).

More info.

(For a startling visual insight into how the UK’s land is used, watch this short video ‘The UK in 100 Seconds’ by Dan Raven-Ellison).

Foodrise welcomes the Government’s long-awaited update on their Waste and Resources Strategy, which was published today. We are very pleased to not only see Defra move towards a circular approach to deal with waste, but also adopting several Foodrise recommendations on how to tackle food waste. This includes consulting on mandatory regulations for large food businesses to report transparently on their food waste and to commit to prevention targets, a move Foodrise strongly supports, and reviewing best before date labels, one of our current campaigns.

However, we were disappointed that Defra will not include in their consultation strengthening the food use hierarchy through legislation. Currently businesses are required under existing waste regulations to follow the food use hierarchy and yet hundreds of thousands of tonnes of edible surplus food gets send to digesters every year.

Jessica Sinclair Taylor, Head of Policy and Communications at Foodrise, said:

“As Defra acknowledge, progress on preventing the environmental tragedy of food waste has plateaued in recent years and we’re overdue a new injection of political energy towards turning this trend around. We’re delighted to see that the Secretary of State has acknowledged a need for new powers to match ambition on creating a circular approach to waste, including the option to require major food businesses to commit to food waste reduction targets. If we’re to meet the UN’s global goal of halving food waste by 2030, we will need to stop relying on businesses doing the right thing, and start requiring them to.”

Defra’s Resources and Waste Strategy – our highlights

“Our determination to cut food waste has not been matched by progress, which in recent years has plateaued.”

Across the UK we waste around 10 million tonnes a year of food – and that’s before taking into account waste occurring on farms, a major area of Foodrise research. 10 million plus tonnes isn’t just a lot of food: it’s an environmental and social tragedy, and one that we can address with the right political will and action.

“So far we have focused on food waste after the farm gate. But at the primary production stage of the supply chain there is also significant scope to prevent waste food.”

We celebrated Defra’s inclusion in the Agriculture Bill of a provision for powers to require farmers to monitor how much waste occurs at farm-level. We’re calling for retailers and other food businesses who buy farmed goods to take responsibility for waste their practices (such as requiring fresh produce to look a certain way) cause on farms.

“We will consult in 2019 on introducing regulations to make reporting mandatory for businesses of an appropriate size.”

This is heartening. Defra has long refused to consider regulation to make food waste reporting mandatory, and transparent business-level data on waste has been a central tenant of Foodrise’s approach to ending the food waste scandal. We will be responding to the proposed consultation to strongly call for mandatory reporting, and mandatory targets to reduce and prevent waste – including in businesses’ supply chains.

“In the future we will work with the NHS Estates and Facilities Team at NHS Improvement to support the creation of a new ‘food standard’.”

Public procurement is a key area where Foodrise has argued the government could be doing more to not only prevent waste, but also incentivise other key ingredients for a more sustainable food system, including local sourcing and encouraging less consumption of industrially produced meat and dairy.

“In 2019, we will review the current recommendation for most pre-packed uncut fresh produce to carry a ‘Best Before’ date.”

Foodrise has long campaigned to remove ‘Best Before’ labels on fresh produce, with supermarket giant Tesco heeding our call in this year and removing date labels from over 100 fresh produce lines. We’ve been calling for other supermarkets to follow Tesco’s lead and hope Defra’s review will encourage the laggards over the line.

“Where existing legislation cannot match our ambitions, we will take new powers to strengthen it.”

This is important. Progress to date has clearly shown that voluntary action by businesses alone is not enough to topple the UK’s food waste mountain – new regulation will have an important role to play too.

And what’s missing?

Anaerobic Digestion (AD) is a good option for preventing unavoidable and inedible food waste from going to landfill – but we would like to see Defra paying more attention to the mis-aligned incentives supporting AD as a ‘green energy’, which may result in perfectly edible food being fed to digestors rather than people. Our campaign Indigestible will launch next year with more on this important issue.

Retailer responsibility for waste both in their supply chain and in their customers’ homes is largely ignored. While retailers don’t force anyone to throw food away needlessly, their well-refined sales tactics help create a culture of ‘over-purchase’, where we buy more than we need and end up with waste. We’re calling for retailers to take the first steps towards properly understanding their relationship with their customers’ food waste by paying for research which breaks down household level food waste based on people’s shopping habits – including where they shop.

The food use hierachy is an essential tool for managing food waste, and for preventing food from becoming waste in the first place. A simplified form is already enshrined in existing waste regulations, but data from those food businesses who do publish their food waste data shows that it isn’t strictly followed, with large quantities of edible food heading to AD. As well as new guidance, we’d like to see Defra strengthening existing regulations to ensure food businesses adhere to them.

Feeding inedible food waste to animals – in particular pigs – is a key element of the food use hierarchy and Foodrise research published earlier this year showed that it can be done safely. Defra now needs to commit to scoping how this planet-saving approach to producing ‘better’ meat could work in practice.

Experimenting with new (and some very old!) ideas for how to use up surplus food, or transform it into other delicious dishes, is a core principle for The Alchemic Kitchen, Feedback’s new social enterprise project based in Liverpool.

On Monday 17 December we’ll be cooking up a business breakfast for the Knowsley Third Sector network meeting being held at the Knowsley Youth Mutual Centre – an opportunity to promote the circular food economy while nourishing local cooperation. We’ll be providing porridge with a hot fruit compote made from rescued fruit collected from the Banana Bunch greengrocers in Old Swan on Saturday afternoon and a strata (savoury eggy bread pudding) made using “ricotta” created from short date fresh milk, stale bread, short date eggs and ready prepared but not saleable vegetables, sourced from Tesco and Fareshare. I’ll be introducing myself to the local sector and explain what our Regional Food Economy project, and our exciting Alchemic Kitchen is all about through a classic show and tell model demonstration in the kitchen.

More events are coming soon in 2019 – from training workshops with local groups, to more work identifying sources of surplus and doing a little alchemy to create new products, as well as setting up and outfitting our very own experimental kitchen. Find out more about the Regional Food Economy North West project, and stay tuned for further updates…

The 24th ‘Conference of the Parties’ – the UN’s yearly round of international climate negotiations – takes place this year in Katowice in Poland. Foodrise are delighted to have the opportunity to be there and to trigger debate about the role our food system must play in addressing climate change to keep the planet at a liveable temperature – at or below 1.5 degrees warmer than today.

Find out about how we’ll be playing our part:

4 December | 15:00-16:00 | UK Pavilion 

Changing our food habits and empowering women and girls for a liveable climate

What do food waste prevention, a shift to plant-based diets, universal reproductive rights and empowerment for women and girls all have in common? These four interventions are all critical, though often overlooked, opportunities to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This panel will draw on expert knowledge of effective policy interventions in four areas which have been highly ranked by Project Drawdown as part of a comprehensive plan to halt and reverse climate change.  It is striking to note that these four interventions, while often overlooked by climate policy makers, have far higher emissions reduction potential than many other, more obvious actions, such as changes in construction materials, insulation or energy efficiency. We will suggest concrete actions for government, business and civil society, including examples of success stories from the UK, most notably for food waste prevention. We will further show that these interventions deliver benefits beyond emissions reduction alone: improving health, securing livelihoods, and ensuring fair life chances for women and girls.

Chair: Carina Millstone, Executive Director – Foodrise

Speakers:

• Markus Ihalainen, Research and Engagement Officer, CGIAR
• John Lotspeich, Director of External Affairs, Marie Stopes International
• Jessica Sinclair Taylor, Head of Communications and Policy, Foodrise

6 December | 14:00-16:00  | EU Pavilion

‘Meet the Experts’ session 

Come meet Foodrise experts Carina Millstone and Jessica Sinclair Taylor and hear about the role halving food waste and meat consumption by 2030 can play in achieving a liveable climate.

7 December | 10:30-14:30 | EU Pavilion  – Room Vienna

Agriculture’s future, delivering net zero emissions – trade, consumption, smallholders, value chains

• What tools and policy developments are needed to promote change & maximize opportunities for climate action in the agricultural sector?
• What is the role of trade in delivering climate mitigation and adaptation in land-using sectors?
• How can biomass value chains be made more resource efficient & make best use of sustainable, renewable energy?
• What is the role of demand side measures focused on diet and behavior?
• How can we engage the world’s farmers (including the 1.5 billion smallholders) in climate action?
• How can synergies between climate and development pathways be maximized?

This session will explore the role of agriculture in reaching net-zero emissions globally. It will debate the key levers for a low carbon, resilient farming sector & barriers to change including presentations on both supply & demand side measures. The session will specifically address opportunities and challenges related to trade policy, engagement with producers, working with small holders & consumption.

Speakers from organisations including: IEEP, Agricord, SACAU, IFFA, IIED, SNV and Foodrise among others. Read the full session summary.

More info here.

The IPCC today delivered a chilling and much needed warning that the window for action to avoid catastrophic global warming is rapidly closing. The new report lands a few months before national delegates gather in Katowice, Poland, for the next round of UN negotiations on how to achieve the ambitions set out in 2015’s Paris Agreement. The report urged a stiffening of ambition from the current agreement for states to keep global temperature rises well below 2 degrees and to ‘pursue efforts’ to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. What does all this mean for our food system?

The IPCC climate experts agree that keeping the planet on a path to no more than 1.5 degrees of warming by the end of the century will require large-scale, land-related measures such as afforestation or peatland restoration – which may well compete with food production for a growing global population. (Women’s right to choose the size of their family, through ready access to contraception and free universal education for girls are two other critical, but much ignored pieces of the land-use puzzle).

In addition, the IPCC reports that the gains provided by the nascent global transition to renewable energy are being cancelled out by uncontrolled deforestation to make room for agriculture – much of it to grow animal feeds such as soy and corn, feeding the profits of the world’s intensive meat industry.

The food system is thus at the heart of both our climate and human development destiny. While change in how we use land and produce food, such as afforestation, and low-input farming methods like agro-forestry, will be essential, Feedback urges policy-makers not to forget the potential of changing demand as well, in particular food waste reduction and a shift to diets which are healthy for both people and planet. Reducing food waste alongside meat and dairy consumption would make a serious dent in deforestation, allowing the IPCC’s recommendation of large-scale afforestation to reabsorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, to proceed with minimal impact on food availability.

Halving food waste by 2030, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, could make a major in-road into the agricultural emissions gap – the gulf that has opened up between nations’ stated emissions reduction plans and what is needed to achieve 1.5 degrees. Project Drawdown has calculated that halving food waste by 2050 (20 years later than the UN’s current ambition) could avoid emissions equal to 26.2 Gt of CO2 – a huge saving. Feedback has long argued that the common sense measure of feeding omnivorous farm animals such as pigs on currently shockingly high levels of industry food waste, is one way to mitigate the climate cost of the meat industry. Long term however, deeper action is needed.

The world’s five biggest industrial meat producers contribute more annual GHG emissions than ExxonMobil, Shell or BP and the livestock sector accounts for around 15% of global emissions. Meanwhile, in industrialised countries the average person eats twice as much meat as is healthy for them. As a recent Chatham House report has argued, it is frankly not enough for governments to deprioritise dietary change towards low-meat and dairy diets as ‘too difficult’ – large-scale behaviour change is possible if tackled head on, with an appropriate regulatory framework. And it will be necessary if we are to build a food system for the future that combines access to healthy food for all with the contributions needed to avoid high levels of global warming. This report should give us all pause for thought – and redouble our energies to make sure our food system nourishes our planet rather than deplete it.

Foodrise responded to reports in the Daily Mail that Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Michael Gove has pledged a £15m fund to support the redistribution of up to £1 billion-worth of supermarket food surplus. Foodrise’s supermarket food waste scorecard pointed out that Tesco alone last year sent 20,000 tonnes of edible food surplus to be broken down into bio-gas.

Carina Millstone, Executive Director, said:

“It’s heartening to see the Government heeding calls to fix incentives that make it cheaper to break good food down for bio-gas rather than to ensure it feeds people. However, the challenge remains for supermarkets to find ways to reduce how much waste they generate in the first place, with disastrous consequences for our soil fertility. Using public money to clean up the supermarkets’ addiction to waste isn’t progressive, it could even turn out to be a get out of jail free card for a broken supermarket model that puts the retailers’ bottom lines above our long-term food future.”

Foodrise are delighted to announce the launch of our new website, showcasing our strategy to regenerate nature by transforming our food system.

After our work over the past eight years which has transformed food waste from a non-issue to a global priority, we are expanding our efforts to other critical issues that need to be urgently addressed if we are to move to a fair and ecological food system.

We will be working towards the great challenge of meeting the world’s protein needs, sustainably, with new campaigns on industrial meat and farmed fish.

We will also be focusing our attention on the tragedy of land misuse, depleting our soils, with two new campaigns on the production of ‘bad energy’, made from food and crops, and the cultivation of sugar: both disastrous for the health of citizens and soils.

That’s in addition to continuing our programmes to build a new food system from the bottom up, creating a vibrant food commons through gleaning and community feasts, engaging young people to support them to become ‘food citizens’ and piloting a regional food economy as an alternative to our current globalised, financialised model.

We hope you enjoy our new site, and we look forward to engaging with many of you on our new and exciting work. Many thanks to Clear Honest Design for their amazing work producing this site.

Carina Millstone

Executive Director, Foodrise