The real problem and barrier to progress in achieving the meaningful change that UK farmers and food producers need, is agreeing on what change is needed and what that change will therefore be.
The number of people, business owners, organisations and lobbying organisations that have an interest in the future of farming and food production, simply because of the many areas that the food chain touches and relates to, is mind boggling.
Every one of them has a different take on what’s happening. What the real issues or causes and effects of the problems are. And therefore what the solution needs to achieve.
In many cases, that also means they will already have an idea of what the solution needs to be.
This is where everything hits the metaphorical brick wall. Because we all have a habit of getting emotionally tied into the dynamic of the experience we have vs the problem as we see it vs what we know the solution needs to be or look like for us.
Work together. Find all that we have in common. Then we will have common cause
It’s frustrating to watch the same old arguments unfold and play out between different interests that have so much more in common than what are probably just a few ideas that divide them.
Ideas that would probably be progressed anyway, by focusing on what aims we share in common, with the people that we might today be refusing to listen to. Because the few things we appear to disagree on appear to make everything else they have to say or can do to help us, wrong.
For instance, we all:
- Need to eat (healthy food that will not harm us)
- Need to drink (clean, healthy water)
- Need food and water that is natural with a good nutritional base
- Want eating healthy food to be ‘normal’ or easy
- Want food to be readily accessible to us at a price that we can afford
- Need Food Security
- Need the UK Food supply to be sustainable
- Need the planet to continue being able to support our lives
- Want to be happy
And there will certainly be more.
However, the issues we see about issues like climate change (and whether it’s real), money, being vegetarian or vegan, rewilding, wild animals, animal welfare standards, who deserves to be guaranteed access to food, hedgerows, building on productive land, what a sustainable life really looks like and just about everything else that can be argued as being personal to us and therefore how we see ourselves, is a belief.
It isn’t what we have in common.
That’s why adopting a purist approach and saying anyone or all of these priorities we have MUST be the end result, in order for us to agree, is what stops us all from coming together to achieve something that could quickly become very good.
This post has been taken and adapted from the book Food From Farms Guaranteed, published on Amazon, 16/02/24.
Adam Tugwell 