This summer Growing Food Citizens joined forces with three local Climate Action Groups to run an amazing poster competition to make people locally more aware about the food they eat, and how we can reduce the food that is often wasted in our homes.

Enlisting the creative flare of our children and young people, we asked them to take part in our exciting competition and design an eye-catching poster reminding people to think about the food that they buy and reduce food being wasted. Encouraging people to eat local and seasonal food, which is better for our planet and climate, whilst also encouraging them to try growing their own food!

Lots of people across the UK, and in Buckinghamshire, have noticed how bad we are about using up all the food we purchase, and we often then throw it away! This isn’t the best use of our money, plus it’s bad for our planet as it wastes resources; as well as produces gases linked to the climate crisis. We also wanted to encourage people grow their own vegetables and eat locally grown food that doesn’t get flown across the world which also impacts badly on the environment.

The four winners were:

Clara Richards- Aged 8 (Don’t Waste Food)
James Bowers- Aged 7 (Grow Your Own)
Orlaigh Nowak-Scase – Aged 8 (Grow Your Own)
Gracie Harrison Age 9 (Buy Food Locally)

All the winning posters will be appearing out and about in community spaces, near shops, allotments and town halls for Zero Waste Week 2021 to raise awareness around making our relationship with the food we eat better. All the winners received family passes to the Green Dragon Eco Farm in Buckinghamshire, which we are sure they will enjoy.

Thanks also goes to the support from Zero Carbon Haddenham, Hazlemere Climate Action and Climate Action Wendover.

The latest IPCC report, out earlier this week, is a stark wake up call which should strengthen negotiators’ resolve in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow this November. The report was also unequivocal on the role of tackling methane emissions in addressing our clear and present climate danger.

Methane is a highly potent greenhouse gas, 28 times more so than carbon emissions at warming the atmosphere. Here’s five things we took away from the IPCC report on methane and what it may mean for public and private sector climate policy.

1. Methane is the cow in the room when it comes to keeping 1.5 degrees alive

Action to reduce methane emissions can avoid 0.3°C of warming by 2045, according to UNEP. 0.3 degrees may not sound like much – but when you consider the global temperature has already risen by 1.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and the IPCC projects us to hit 1.5 degrees at or before 2030, 0.3 suddenly seems a whole lot more relevant. Methane’s potency means that cutting levels urgently is one of the most effective ways to slow warming in the short-term (while continuing to cut carbon emissions to prevent longer term warming).

2. Agriculture – and livestock – are one of the biggest drivers of man-made methane emissions

Figures from the IPCC report show that significantly more methane has been emitted from livestock production than from oil and gas production in the past two decades. Addressing livestock represents a unique opportunity to reduce the chance of dangerous climate change: ruminants are estimated to have produced enough methane to have caused a third of total global warming since the industrial revolution. According to the UNEP, healthy diets which are high in plants and lower in meat and dairy could achieve yearly methane reductions in the region of 15-30Mt/year. 

3. But meat isn’t on the climate policy table – yet.

Yet for all that there are a variety of so-called ‘shovel ready’ policy measures that politicians could adopt to curb methane emissions – many focused around helping to shift public diets so people eat more plants and less meat and dairy – livestock and methane aren’t yet on the table at COP26, or in the UK’s domestic climate policy.

While our government gestured towards ‘healthy diets from a sustainable food system’ in our Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement, it then took two steps backward by insisting that it will meet its climate targets ‘whilst maintaining people’s freedom of choice, including on their diet’. Yet high-meat diets are currently the default and there is often far less choice of alternatives. As the National Food Strategy argued, to address stubbornly high food system emissions, we need to curb our current appetite for meat.

4. Climate-friendly farming is possible – and it needs government support

Meat has a place in a 1.5 degree future, but it isn’t the one envisaged by the behemoth livestock companies of the world – the Cargills and Faccendas, which between them displace indigenous peoples, destroy lower impact and fairer livelihoods, deplete freshwater resources, deforest the ‘Earth’s Lungs’ and produce more emissions a year as a sector than than ExxonMobil, Shell, or BP. Our future consumption of meat and dairy, at much lower levels than is currently the norm, is likely to involve a patchwork food system, in which agro-ecological production co-exists with forestry and nature conservation, and in which ‘surplus’ food is recycled back into the food system in animal feed. But this future needs public investment as surely as we need to be divesting from some of the livestock industry’s worst emitters. 

5. Supermarkets will find themselves in the spotlight.

When Foodrise ranked UK supermarkets on their action on meat and climate in June this year, the results were underwhelming: none scored more than 50% on our scorecard, and all continued to drive meat consumption with promotions and offers. Yet change is in the air, with all UK supermarkets recently committing to a new target to halve the emissions from their products by 2030. With meat, dairy and fish representing around 70% of emissions from the products supermarkets sell, it’s simple maths that supermarkets will have a hard time meeting their new targets without selling a lot more plants and a lot less animal products.

Failure to shift food systems onto a more sustainable pathway, including through dietary change, rules out meeting the 1.5 degree target. The pathway to ambitious methane reductions lies right before our feet – whether governments will help us tread it is yet to be seen. 

Read our longer briefing on methane mitigation through sustainable food systems changes here.

Last week’s National food Strategy correctly responded to the overwhelming weight of evidence when it called for a 30% cut in meat by 2032: we likely need to make a bigger dietary shift yet to reduce climate change. People are ready to cut down – both the English and Scottish climate assemblies saw assembly members from all walks of life voting for measures to reduce meat consumption. ‘Less meat’ doesn’t mean ‘no meat’ and for personal, social or cultural reasons, some people will still want to eat some meat.

Where this meat should come from and how it should be produced is a big question, especially in an era of trade deals and post-Brexit changes to agricultural payments in the UK. One answer comes in a new Foodrise position paper, ‘Living Well on Leftovers’ which shows that we can produce about a third of our non-ruminant (pig and chicken) meat intake using only food waste as a feed. In doing so, we could significantly decrease the climate footprint of rearing these animals, which mainly comes from growing their feed. Indeed, scientific evidence shows that a diet that is plant-rich yet contains some animal products from animals fed exclusively on leftovers uses less land than a diet containing no animal products at all.

Eating meat and animal products contributes up to 60% of the greenhouse gas emissions from our food system – and with food production and consumption contributing a third of overall emissions, reaching safe emission limits without addressing animal source foods is impossible. The National Food Strategy said we need to eat 30% less meat, though we would need to eat even less than that if we want to make room for countries that currently hardly eat any meat at all to eat a bit more.

It’s not all about the climate; livestock use 70% of agricultural land; growing crops for animal feed requires millions of hectares of soya production, much of which comes from the Amazon region, which has now become a net-carbon producer. There are more livestock on the planet than humans, so that’s a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of feed crops. Reducing pressure on natural habitats requires smaller livestock numbers.

But is it necessary to cut out meat altogether? Of course, that’s a personal choice, but from a sustainability science perspective it is a nuanced question – Foodrise’s definition of ‘better meat’ is currently meat from animals which are reared only on food waste and by-products and do not graze or eat crops from land that could be used to grow human-edible crops. In fact, eating some meat, fed exclusively on leftovers, maximises the nutritional output of our land (because there’s always some surplus in the system which if it isn’t fed to people or animals would go to waste). A diet with some meat also allows us to get some of the nutrients, like vitamin B12, that are more readily available from animal products (but which do not require us to keep eating the amount of meat that we currently do!).

Eating a high-veg diet that contains only products from animals fed on leftovers meets the four objectives of the National Food Strategy:

1. High welfare, low-impact meat amongst a colourful veg-rich diet fulfils the first objective to escape the junk food cycle and protect the NHS.
2. Government interventions that make this diet accessible and affordable for all will avoid a two-tier food system and meet objective number two: reduce diet-related inequality.
3. The third objective, to make the best use of our land, actually requires us to consume the diet described in our paper- all other dietary scenarios have a higher land footprint, including a vegan diet.
4. The fourth objective, create a long-term shift in our food culture; is about making sustainable diets the easiest to access and to produce; we can produce all our meat in the UK, rearing non-ruminants using only our own leftovers and with no need for imported soy or purpose grown feed crops.

To meet the pre-conditions for a low/better meat approach, we first need to lower our meat intake, then create a regulatory system that allows us to feed treated food waste to non-ruminants like pigs, chickens and salmon. This would mean creating the systems, resources and oversight bodies to ensure that food waste is processed safely – we’re not advocating a return to the low-oversight approach which led to the Food and Mouth outbreak in 2007. There are other important considerations – cost savings from using feed from leftover food shouldn’t lead to an increase in intensively farmed pigs and chickens. We have a proposal for how this approach could be trialled safely and fairly in our paper.

We know we urgently need to adjust our diets to include more veg and less meat in order to protect communities around the world that are vulnerable to dangerous climate change. But we don’t have to cut out meat altogether and can actually have a more nutritious diet that uses less land if we use food waste to feed non-ruminant livestock, instead of importing damaging soya and other crops from fragile habitats.

This week, the long awaited National Food Strategy was released, the first major review of England’s food system in 75 years. The strategy takes significant strides in tackling meat overconsumption, food waste and food inequality and it is exciting to see many of the things we have consistently campaigned for feature in the strategy.

After a pandemic which has exposed the shameful extent of food inequality in the UK, and as alarm grows over unchecked destruction of nature, this Strategy shows us that a vibrant, productive, sustainable food system is within our reach, but that Big Food’s business as usual – on sugar, on meat and on waste – cannot continue.

Making the clear case for meat reduction

To effectively address climate change, we simply have to eat less meat. The National Food Strategy recognises this and calls for a target for meat reduction – a big step in the right direction. Without immediate action, the global meat and dairy industry will account for almost half the world’s 1.5C emissions budget by 2030. Raising meat uses 85% of our land in the UK – land we need to preserve nature and plant trees. Crucially, the strategy also points out that some of the most powerful players – supermarkets – must play a central role in this change. It includes a survey showing 50% would support a government target for supermarkets to reduce their meat sales – Foodrise’s supermarket scorecard calls for all supermarkets to adopt a target to halve their sales by 2030.

Mandatory reporting on food waste for large corporations

The Strategy calls for corporates to take more responsibility for what they sell – recommending that the government makes it mandatory for big food businesses to report on how much they waste, among other indicators. While not the whole story, this is vital: we have consistently called for food waste reporting to be mandatory, it might not seem like much but knowing exactly how much waste there is, is a crucial first step to reducing this industrial scale problem. Globally, around one third of all food produce is wasted, yet we don’t know the exact amount as currently corporations do not have to report it. The government has considered making it a legal requirement to publish how much food goes to waste; we hope the strategy’s strong recommendation for mandatory reporting pushes this into law.

Failing to address farm food waste

Although the strategy rightfully calls for mandatory food waste reporting for large corporations, it does not adequately address food waste on farms. Our wasteful food system forces farmers to produce more food than they need to secure contracts with large supermarkets. Research in this area is sorely lacking, but conservative estimates suggest that 3.6 million tonnes of good food is left to rot on UK farms every year. From our Gleaning Network, we have seen firsthand piles of perfectly good produce being wasted on farms, it’s heart-breaking for the farmer and disastrous for our planet. The government can address this, by including big farm businesses in mandatory food waste reporting and helping farmers by addressing unfairness in our food supply chain.

What about access to good food?

The Strategy is right to focus on how the government can help create good green jobs in farming, and make it easier for people in every income bracket to eat a healthy, fresh and sustainable diet. But more healthy start vouchers won’t work if there’s nowhere to buy fresh, healthy food in your area. Foodrise staff working in Merseyside see every day how poor access to good food hampers people’s confidence, health and ability to feed their families well – that’s why we’ve helped set up a mobile veg van to visit some of the worst-affected areas, but that isn’t a long-term solution. Government needs to cough up the cash to seed local and regional food economies, help local authorities and bodies like schools and hospitals buy local and provide the resources to help civil society get beyond the food bank model.

Failure to address sugar from beet to sweet

Much media coverage has been given to the recommendation for a ‘sugar tax’. The proposed tax is on wholesale sugar (and salt) — the idea being that this will push food companies to reformulate their products and reduce sugar content. But a critical part of the picture is ignored: production. The UK produces vast amounts of sugar in the form of sugar beet, enough to exceed our Recommended Daily Allowance (RDA) three times over. To make matters worse, we use our prime agricultural land to produce sugar beet. The level of sugar production is at odds with aims for sugar reduction; if we continue to produce three times more sugar than we need, what will happen to that over-supply? To address sugar effectively, we need to produce less of it in the first place.

The elephant in the room – who has the power?

The Strategy makes many good recommendations but fails to effectively analyse who has the power to create or perhaps more importantly to stop vital change. Our food system is largely controlled by a handful of large corporations. In a system dominated by corporations profit maximisation will always be the ultimate goal. We must ensure we have a national food strategy that works for people, not profit. That means a government that is prepared to intervene where necessary to curb corporate power. At this crucial moment for people and planet, as we begin to recover from the pandemic and face the growing realities of climate change, Foodrise’s work feels more important than ever.

Further reading:

Foodrise’s Meat and Climate Scorecard

Meating the climate challenge: Why supermarkets must urgently cut their meat and dairy sales

When there’s no waste, there’s a way (to net zero) A call for policy for food waste prevention

Too much of a bad thing: The use and misuse of UK soil and land to grow sugar

Commenting on the publication of the National Food Strategy which aims to set out a plan for a healthier and more climate and nature friendly food system, Carina Millstone, Executive Director of environmental Charity Foodrise said:

“After a pandemic which has exposed the shameful extent of food inequality in the UK, and as alarm grows over unchecked destruction of nature, this Strategy shows us that a vibrant, productive, sustainable food system is within our reach, but that Big Food’s business as usual – on sugar, on meat and on waste – cannot continue.”

On the Strategy’s plans to address sugar consumption through a sugar tax on manufacturers:

“Addressing the UK’s dangerously high sugar consumption means going beyond the strategy’s strong proposals for a sugar tax to address what this means for English sugar beet production, and especially the corporate monopoly of British Sugar, which produces enough sugar every year to exceed the entire population’s recommended allowance by two thirds – and in the process uses roughly the same area of land to grow sugar beet as we do all other veg crops combined.”

On food waste:

“The Strategy glosses over the vast amounts of food wasted on farms every year, which leaves farmers to suffer lost income in silence, and inflicts untold damage on our climate and nature. Backing mandatory reporting on food waste for all big food businesses is one thing, but the history of food waste action in this country shows we need targets, not just transparency, particularly to tackle the hidden blight of food waste on farms.”

On supermarkets fuelling demand for meat:

“The National Food Strategy’s strong target for meat reduction is the right move in response to the overwhelming science on meat production, nature and the climate. Crucially, it also points out that some of the most powerful players – supermarkets – must play a central role in this change. To make this a reality, supermarkets must stop actively fuelling demand for meat through misleading labelling, and promotions, as well as listening to the 50% of the public who think supermarkets should set a target to sell less meat.”

On better support for food access:

“The Strategy is right to focus on how government can help create good green jobs in farming, and make it easier for people in every income bracket to eat a healthy, fresh and sustainable diet. But more healthy start vouchers won’t work if there’s nowhere to buy fresh, healthy food in your area: seeding local and regional food economies through access to funding and training, and helping civil society get beyond the food bank model is vital.”

Further response out tomorrow.

UK supermarkets are fuelling demand for meat and dairy products which is harming public health and the climate, reveals a new supermarket scorecard published by environmental charity, Foodrise, today.

The scorecard ranks the UK’s top 10 supermarkets on their efforts to reduce the environmental cost of the meat and dairy products they sell. The Co-op, Tesco, and Waitrose top the rankings but even the Co-op, the best performing retailer, scored just 45%.  Asda, Iceland and Lidl ranked bottom with the worst performer, Lidl, scoring just 17%.

Carina Millstone, Executive Director of Foodrise, said: “UK supermarkets are continuing to drive demand for meat and dairy products that are already responsible for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions – and fuelling deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere. It’s time for supermarkets to step up to the plate, slash their meat and dairy products and offer customers more sustainable and healthier options”.

The scorecard revealed that many supermarkets have improved their environmental policies since the last assessment in 2019 but that they were failing to translate this into action:

• All 10 supermarkets actively encourage meat consumption through promotions, and not just to avoid waste when products near their expiry dates. This means retailers are fuelling – and not simply responding to – demand for meat.
• Only one supermarket, the Co-op, is accurately measuring and publicly reporting on the climate impact of the goods it sells – but only for its own label products.
• Half the supermarkets including Tesco, M&S and ALDI continue to use misleading or ‘fake farm’ labels and names such as ‘Trusted Farms’ which give the impression that their meat is produced to higher standards than is the reality.
• Options such as organic or free range make up less than 20% of the products offered by all the supermarkets, while Iceland offers no free range or organic options. Only 3 retailers – Asda, Morrisons and Tesco – ensure that more than a quarter of the ready to cook meals they offer are vegetarian or vegan.
• None of the supermarkets reveal how much meat and dairy they sell as a proportion of their protein sales, making it difficult to track their progress.

More promising signs include the steps taken by all retailers to promote healthy fruit and vegetable consumption, commitments from the Co-op and Sainsbury’s to link board or senior leadership remuneration to achieving environmental outcomes, and supermarkets’ work to put pressure on Brazilian suppliers to prevent products linked to deforestation from entering their supply chains. All the retailers, with the exception of Iceland and ASDA, have made a public commitment to drop meat linked to deforestation; however they have yet to remove these products, including chicken and pork fed on soya grown in deforested areas, from their shelves.

Meat and dairy production contributes to climate change through direct emissions from animals and their waste and through the destruction of important ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest to raise cattle or grow soy for animal feed. The UK imports the majority of its soya from South America, at least 90% of which is fed to animals, particularly chicken and pork.

The 10 supermarkets control 94% of the UK grocery market and have a huge influence on what we eat through the products they sell, and the way in which they market, package and promote them.

Many customers want to reduce the health and environmental impacts of their food with 43% of people surveyed by YouGov say they often make the choice to reduce their meat consumption when shopping.

The government’s Committee on Climate Change has said the UK need to cut meat and dairy consumption by 20% by 2030 to meet its climate commitments while the University of Oxford estimates consumption of meats such as beef should be cut by as much as 89% to meet the NHS Eatwell guidelines.

Carina Millstone said: “With 3 out of 4 shoppers visiting supermarkets several times a week, it is clear that retailers have a special responsibility to help their customers enjoy food that is both good for them and for the planet. Supermarkets must also take responsibility for the emissions of their sales, and commit to reducing these by selling much less meat and dairy and much more fresh fruit and veg.”

Simon Billing, Executive Director of Eating Better added: “Foodrise’s scorecard shows retailers are still focused on boosting meat sales, despite setting net zero targets and pledging to help us eat healthier and more sustainably. Making it easier for shoppers to buy more meat and dairy than they need, or probably want is not the way forward for our health, or that of the planet.”

Mathieu Flamini, former professional footballer and environmental entrepreneur, said: “Reducing my consumption of animal protein and dairy improved my health and my performance on and off the pitch: I was able to recover quicker and cope with the daily workload better. I was not only doing myself good by eating less meat, but as a nature lover I was also able to reduce my impact on the planet. Together let’s all do our bit, including also the businesses like retailers who supply us so much of the food we eat.”

Foodrise is working across the UK and Ireland to mobilise students to take action against industrial livestock. Below, Harvey from the Climate Justice Campaign at Jesus College, Cambridge, outlines why universities must look beyond fossil fuel divestment when cleaning up their finances. If you are a student (or not!) and would like to get involved, you can find more information here and get in contact with our campaigner, Mia, here.

We thought it would be easy. When we started investigating our College’s current investments, we wanted to find out exactly how much we were investing in fossil fuels. Full divestment, we supposed, needed to confront the big-name extractors and polluters and challenge their social license to operate. What we realised early-on in the research process, however, was that fossil fuels are just the very large tip of a very large iceberg: conventional divestment simply wasn’t going to cut it.

We were shocked by what we found. Our new report Investing in Exploitation and Extinction: Why Climate Justice Demands That Jesus College Goes Beyond Divestment exposes the College’s £807,000 in the fossil fuel industry. It also finds, however, a minimum of £4.3 million in additional worst-offending exploiters and polluters, which would remain ignored by a traditional divestment announcement.

Through just one of the 22 funds in its portfolio, Jesus College is currently investing £37,482.51 in major dairy distributor, Mengniu Dairy Company. While this may seem insignificant in comparison to the £124,689.27 that it invests in Shell alone in another of its portfolio funds, the  ecological impact of this investment may be on par with the oil giant’s. Indeed, Big Livestock and fossil fuels are responsible for an equal share of our annual methane emissions. Methane is 28 times more powerful than CO2, meaning that its production through industrial animal agriculture, which often involves the twin process of deforestation and ecologically destructive monoculture, is accelerating our trajectory towards a 3-4℃ rise in global temperatures – in contrast to the IPCC’s recommendation that we must limit global heating to a maximum 1.5℃ rise. Methane levels are at the highest they have ever been – and they continue to rise. Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture are now estimated by the UN to contribute at least 30% of total net anthropogenic emissions. The corporations  take no responsibility for their skyrocketing methane production. “Few of these companies are even reporting their emissions”, says Shefali Sharma, European director at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and author of a recent report which found that just 13 dairy firms were associated with emissions equal to those of the entire UK. In other words, responsible financial practices must involve moving away from financing industrial animal agriculture if they are to be ‘responsible’ at all.

Leaving aside the well-documented health consequences of our meat and dairy consumption, the industry threatens our future wellbeing.  As we begin to recover from the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the bankrolling and legitimisation of industrial animal agriculture by institutions like Jesus College is increasing the likelihood of future pandemics. According to a recent white paper by Humane Society International (HSI), the industry’s corporate negligence is providing the perfect conditions for viruses to develop and spread. Expansion of farms (which often involves large-scale deforestation) brings wild and domestic species into contact with one another, potentially causing ‘viral spillover’. Novel viral strains are also created through cramming vast numbers of stressed animals in a tiny space. Around 75% of infectious diseases are now zoonotic (jump from animals to humans), according to the United Nations Environment Program. Should investors and consumers continue to finance Big Livestock, another global health crisis surely awaits.

An acre of rainforest is deforested every second, frequently for cattle grazing, with countless species displaced from their homes or even driven to extinction. Those who stand up to the corporations which continue to perpetrate this violence are ignored or silenced. More than 1,100 Indigenous activists, small farmers, judges, priests and other rural workers have been murdered in “land disputes” in the last two decades alone. This is an industry whose bottom line is built on violence. And yet it is an industry that remains ignored by most of the divestment announcements from Cambridge colleges and other institutional investors.

True, effective divestment will never be easy. As we found out when researching our report, the scope of the climate crisis is large, encompassing and intersecting with many other social injustices worldwide: from modern day slavery to the arms and mining industries. Looking back, it is easy to wonder whether we would have been better off remaining convinced that fossil fuels were the beginning and end of the climate breakdown. It is overwhelming to think how many other industries and systems of oppression need to be confronted before we can begin to comprehend what climate justice will look like.

That is not to say we should give up, however. We have an obligation to use our privilege to do everything we can. This means reframing the way we think about divestment. As our report proposes, we need to move away from passive public-equity investing, and start actively investing in real change, through impact bonds and other schemes which will actively utilise our financial capacity to have a positive social and ecological impact. This is a time-intensive, ethically treacherous process.

The changes we need to see in the way we invest will not happen overnight. But the first step towards actualising climate justice is simple: it’s time we knew our enemy. It’s not just fossil fuels. It’s exploitation: of people and of planet. It’s violence: landgrabs and the suppression of Indigenous resistance. It’s profiteering from environmental collapse. We know that, even now, we have much more learning to do, but that’s what ‘beyond divestment’ means: we are calling on Jesus College and other higher education institutions to learn with us, to explore just how embedded the climate crisis is in not only the way we invest, but also in the way we work, study, and eat.

There is a vast and wide range of expertise within local community food sectors, and in Buckinghamshire this is no different. So, when local group Grow Together were considering how to progress their Urban Harvest Project, we called upon our local network to take part in a HarvestHack event.

The Food Heroes Project in the Netherlands inspired our HarvestHack through its work bringing together innovative food entrepreneurs working on the reduction of food losses in the ‘neglected’ parts of the food chain. We wanted to try this approach in Buckinghamshire and see if we could conjure up energy, inspiration and provoke new ideas to help progress and develop Urban Harvest for this year’s yield.

Facilitated by Foodrise’s Growing Food Citizens team, the event spanning just under four hours provided a mix of experience of orchard management; community growing, social enterprise and business, food waste redistribution and commerce; as well as voluntary sector engagement. Meaning that people were enthusiastic to share their thoughts, good practice and understanding to explore how to overcome barriers based on their own experience and knowledge.

Two clear directions were identified through breakout rooms and discussions, one being an enterprise based approach of customer demand, production and sales; the other community, education and collective action. Both would help to reduce fallen fruit from being wasted but interestingly would take different routes for a future pathway.

‘This has given us so much to think about, I was overwhelmed by people taking the time out to participate and help us develop our project.” Sheila Bees Grow Together Urban Harvest Coordinator.

Urban Harvest are now looking at community based partnerships to embed raising awareness of reducing food waste and how to upkeep fruit trees and bushes on private land; alongside the picking, preserving and product processes for this coming season. We wish them luck securing funding to continue inspired by the event and to see all the innovative ways to prevent fallen and unused fruit going to waste.

I don’t consider myself naive about the state of the world, but every so often I read something that leaves me utterly dismayed. Since the start of the pandemic, there have been many horrifying stories of how badly workers have been treated; one story that truly shocked me was that managers at meat giant Tyson bet on how many workers would contract COVID-19. If we ever needed evidence of how utterly broken our food system is, managers literally betting on workers’ lives should be enough. 

The pandemic has highlighted the different realities we all live in: as has been pointed out, we may all be facing the same storm, but we are definitely not in the same boat, despite what that cringe-inducing celebrity Imagine video may want you to think. Or, Gwyneth Paltrow’s pandemic low point being eating bread, whereas for many it was not being able to eat at all. Research from the Food Foundation shows that food insecurity remains higher than pre-Covid levels, affecting an estimated 4.7 million adults (9% of households) over the last six months. This compares to pre-Covid levels of 7.6%. 

As someone who has worked in food policy for years, the pandemic sadly confirmed my worst fears about our current food system – that it’s an inherently unsustainable system based on extracting cheap labour and precious natural resources. This extractive industry sees its workforce as expendable, which is how we ended up in the paradoxical situation where workers are essential but also deemed unimportant, essential but underpaid. Research from the Living Wage foundation shows that 16% of key workers earned below the Living Wage in April 2020, and when it comes to supermarket workers, the situation is much worse, with almost half (45%) of the 900,000-strong supermarket employee workforce earning below the Real Living Wage. Through my work, I’ve had many discussions with supermarkets, and whenever the topic of food being too cheap (i.e. the price does not reflect the environmental impact of its production) is brought up, supermarkets are quick to argue that cheap food is important for food access. If supermarkets are concerned with food access, why not simply pay their own essential workers more? 

A 2021 report by the Baker’s Union found that one-in-every-five people working the food sector cannot afford the food they produce, serve and sell. This is particularly shocking in the context of research by the High Pay Centre,  showing that Ocado had the highest pay ratio for UK companies, with a 2,605:1 ratio between the CEO and an average employee (meaning that, for every pound earned by an average worker, the CEO earns £2,605). Tesco and Morrisons also feature in the top 10 corporations with the highest pay ratio: Tesco’s is 305:1 and Morrisons’ is 217:1. Moreover, Waitrose continues to refuse to return the £85m of government business rates relief despite record-breaking profits and other supermarkets giving the money back. It’s time to recognise that food access is not supermarkets’ key concern, but instead using cheap labour to sell us cheap food. Supermarkets will tell you that they don’t control the market, but that is simply untrue:  the ‘top ten’ UK retailers control around 94% of the UK groceries market share, and 75% of UK individuals say they visit a supermarket twice or more a week. They are the market; you can’t dictate the terms of the game and then claim you are powerless to change it. If supermarkets truly care about food access, it’s time to put their money where their mouth is. 

The reality is the climate movement has to centre social justice, which means that there must be a redistribution of wealth and power. If the food system continues to be dominated by corporations, then the concern for delivering profit to shareholders will always come before protecting people and the planet. The pandemic has highlighted that, to fight climate change, we need a post-corporate food system; we need to put our trust in the collective, in the real essential workers. We must redefine the function of billionaires: they can never be heroes when their hoarding of wealth is diametrically opposed to the equality we need to secure a just future for everyone. 

A new report analysing investments held by the Parliamentary Contributory Pension Fund (PCPF) reveals that Members of Parliament hold pensions investments in a fund holding US$67m in stock from companies among the top 35 largest global meat and dairy companies. The fund—iShares Emerging Markets Index Fund, managed by multinational corporation BlackRock—includes shares of JBS, one of the biggest meat producers in the world whose business practices have been repeatedly linked to deforestation in the Amazon rainforest and Cerrado region.

“I welcome measures in the Environment Bill to hold companies accountable for the illegal deforestation they cause. Indigenous people are being exploited by these companies and are in many cases being deprived of their land and livelihoods. But this new evidence proves that the bill must go further,” said Neil Parish, Member of Parliament (MP) for Tiverton and Honiton. “It is unacceptable that whilst MPs vote on this bill, our pension pots are being invested in companies fuelling deforestation. All pension funds should check where their money is being invested, and Parliament should be leading by example. However, we cannot rely on goodwill alone. This new evidence shows exactly why the bill must be toughened to include financial institutions in the due diligence obligation.”

“I am shocked to learn that MPs’ own pensions are funding companies which have been repeatedly linked to not only deforestation—legal and illegal—but also to terrible working conditions on Brazilian beef farms,” said Kerry McCarthy, Member of Parliament (MP) for Bristol East. “The UK’s complicity in deforestation overseas is a black mark on our record. We need strong regulation and leadership to stop this, and the Environment Bill is our best opportunity to get this right.”

Among the US$67m invested by the iShares Emerging Markets Index Fund in companies among the top 35 global meat and dairy companies, approximately US$8m was invested in JBS, a Brazilian company known for its role in deforestation. The PCPF is exposed to this invest in JBS through its shares in the fund. Though these figures represent only a fraction of PCPF investments, they signal the failure of voluntary measures aimed at reigning in the financial sector’s investment in companies posing serious and ongoing risks to forests and driving activities that contribute to climate change. Tropical deforestation increased 12% in 2020 even as the global economy shrank 3.5%, worrying scientists and advocates alike on the potential impacts of an economic recovery on the globe’s dwindling natural habitats.

Devastating yearly occurrences linked to deforestation, such as tropical forest fires, can destroy large swathes of land, people’s homes and endangered wildlife. According to the report, strong domestic laws to hold companies accountable for the deforestation they are fueling must not exclude the financial sector or risk failing to address one of the most integral parts of the supply chain.

In 2021, the UK government plans to introduce a new, ‘world-leading’ deforestation regulation. But so far, the plan excludes the financial sector. The European Parliament, on the other hand, recently recommended a regulatory approach to ending deforestation that incorporates the financial sector. A proposed due diligence obligation requires the sector to prove they do not profit from forest loss.

“The UK government prides itself in its domestic climate leadership, but isn’t sufficiently tackling deforestation, an integral part of global climate change mitigation”, said Carina Millstone, Executive Director at Foodrise. “It rightly wants to ensure goods purchased in the UK are not linked to deforestation but is not taking the same action for UK pensions and investments. The exposure of MPs’ pensions to companies like JBS, repeatedly linked to deforestation, shows that any law that does not create due diligence requirements in the financial sector will fail to protect delicate forest ecosystems and all but preclude global climate goals.”

“Every day, indigenous peoples and forest communities are standing up to protect their climate-critical forests – often in the face of attacks, land grabs and violence,” said Shona Hawkes, Senior Global Policy Advisor at Global Witness, “The UK government has rightly recognised we need to end the UK’s complicity in global deforestation – but to achieve this we must cut off the money pipeline from UK banks and investors. The Environment Bill must be strengthened so there is absolute clarity that no UK businesses, including financial institutions, can back companies that are a threat to forests or the people who depend on and defend them.”

One-fifth of the 150 financial institutions with the greatest influence on tropical deforestation, including Rabobank and UBS, have published policies for all key forest-risk commodities, which indicates that they recognise this issue as a priority. However, the absence of legal regulation means that accountability is in question.

This year, as the UK government hosts the G7 and the UN Climate Summit COP26, it has the opportunity to help forge strong global agreements and action on deforestation. The private sector is also increasingly pressuring Brazil and other forest nations to end deforestation. More than 40 companies, including investors and major retailers, recently issued an open letter pressuring Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to kill proposed legislation that would open up the Amazon to greater destruction.

“These findings reveal that parliamentary pensions—like most—are invested in companies that are out of step with our values as a society. We know from our own research that the public does not want to see their pensions fund practices such as deforestation that contribute to climate change, drive biodiversity loss and harm our planet,” said Huw Davies, Senior Finance Adviser at Make My Money Matter. “In fact, over half of UK pension holders would switch to a green pension if they discovered that theirs was invested in companies with links to deforestation*. We hope that this report will encourage all schemes to green their pension by not only committing to net-zero emissions, but also scanning for – and removing—any links to deforestation within their portfolios.”

World leaders have noted that action on climate change and biodiversity loss this decade is critical. Deforestation is the second-leading cause of carbon emissions globally, after burning fossil fuels, and a major contribution to species extinction. Agricultural expansion drives three-quarters of deforestation worldwide, with beef, soya and palm oil responsible for 59% overall.

*Survey conducted by YouGov and commissioned by Make My Money Matter in March 2021