We need to ask the questions: ‘What does it mean to be a stakeholder?’ and ‘Who are the real stakeholders?’
Because the interests of the people who are guiding, influencing and controlling the most visible forms of food standards that communicate what farmers do to those who consume the food produced, are not focused or aligned with the interests of the most important stakeholders who are located at each end.
The focus of power and influence in UK food production is instead directed to the many middle parts of what is in the main an otherwise unnecessary chain.
No value is added. But production prices are squeezed from every angle, whilst the price to the consumer is repeatedly being raised.
The role of commercial, profit and greed-led businesses in UK food production is bad enough. But any argument that statutory authorities have the right to dictate the direction of food production and also insert themselves into the food chain as a key stakeholder, is willfully and deliberately misplaced and, in all honesty, wrong.
Government and the public sector exists to serve the people. Not to make every decision that will dictate what any person or what any business can do.
This is where we are all getting our relationship with the establishment and every part of it wrong.
This post was taken and adapted from the book Food From Farms Guaranteed, published on Amazon, 16/02/24.
Whilst I am hesitant to say anything that places advocacy and lobbyist organisations like the NFU and any of the representatives who speak for them in a bad light, because I don’tintend to, it has to be said that no matter what meetings they have, what promises they receive or whatever headlines they make, lobbyist organisations like them will not achieve the results that farmers need.
Because for them, the approach that would be needed and the perceived risk to the relationships that they have with politicians, government departments, NGOs, business and retailers, or many other organisations by doing what needs to be done, is perceived to be too high.
This isn’t a criticism. This is how established and well-known lobbying organisations work, right across every area of public policy.
They value the relationship that they have with the establishment more than they do the need to do whatever it will take to achieve meaningful solutions for the people and businesses that they represent.
That results in compromise, fudges and being grateful for nothing more than politicians, business and public sector leaders paying lip service to the idea that the change they offer is the same thing as a genuine outcome being achieved.
To be fair, one of the myths that too many of us have bought into is the idea that politicians and the establishment do actually know and understand what they are doing. That they have integrity with the responsibility they have to the electorate, and that they are therefore people we can trust.
Few have a real appreciation of the interconnectedness of every problem that exists within the realm of Public Policy, and I’m afraid that I speak from experience when I say that this very much includes the politicians who are supposedly in Westminster and within the devolved Administrations who are there to legislate on our behalf.
This post has been taken from Food From Farms Guaranteed, Published on Amazon 16/02/24.
To read in FULL online, please click the link immediately below:
Like many with a careful eye on the problems our Farmers are facing and the massive issues that currently surround everything with UK food production and the access that everyone has to food, I had a moment of hope when I first saw that simple but effective ‘No Farmers, No Food’ yellow badge and black tractor, on social media just a few weeks ago.
What I saw next or rather what I couldn’t see concerned me. That was the absence of any detail about who was behind this Twitter account that was quickly gaining followers, and most importantly who and what the people behind it are all about.
For anyone who did a basic search on Google around that time, it would have been quickly obvious that no organisation in the U.K. with that name exists. But that there has been a very similar campaign built around No Farms No Food No Future in the USA since at least 2018.
It wasn’t long before a scattering of the people who represent not only farmers, but also different areas of the massive range of issues that are tied up in U.K. agriculture’s problems, began to openly question the populist nature of the account and what were its real intentions.
Regrettably, however well intended, populism can create a lot of buy in from vulnerable people very quickly. But then has a habit of hurting those same people very badly just as soon as it’s clear the hollow words don’t actually work.
It wasn’t long before the ‘founder’ of No Farmers No Food finally outed himself. For those watching the political terrain and current affairs with an eye on social media, it wasn’t any great surprise to see that James Melville was that name.
I only know of James because his posts are almost continuously hitting my timeline. I may have even briefly followed him when he first appeared there some months after the first lockdown in 2020. When dissent against lockdowns, social distancing and all the madness suddenly became popular to talk and publish about ‘out loud’.
To be very fair, James is clearly a very talented marketing specialist. He knows how to rack up followers, likes and a lot of popularity online.
But follows, likes and hundreds of thousands of people nodding their heads in agreement as they sit down to have a poo, a successful political campaign with real tangible, life-changing outcomes does not alone make!
Everyone is capable of change and as George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.’
So, the growing promises and popularity of the No Farmers No Food ‘campaign’ certainly hadn’t been a subject I’ve wanted to tackle directly by name, before there was any documented outline of what they intend to do and what really underpins their cause.
Last night, No Farmers No Food released a document that not only outlined what they see themselves about and what they see their value as being. It also leaned heavily on the words and feeling of farmers of different kinds who are desperately looking for change across the U.K. (A copy of the NFNF Press Release from 19 February 2024 can be found at the bottom)
There’s nothing wrong with anything that has been said. Other than the fact that Farmers and those that support them are even having to say it.
However, just because there is strength of feeling and so many within the industry and within the communities that surround it who are looking for solutions and someone who is going to instigate change, it doesn’t mean that the first few people with a visible loud haler and some words that everyone thinking about these issues can relate to, will be any different to anything or anyone who has come before.
This is where the real danger of what looks and sounds like something new and different presents. I’m afraid to say that I have not read anything in the release that I haven’t seen attempted or even being worked on by existing organisations, right now, or even before.
Farmers don’t need another group or organisation, that has a louder voice and gets more follows, but doesn’t get anything done. Even though good marketing plans and clever words will make it look like they have or that they can.
Regrettably, clever words, clever marketing and clever narratives are everything that’s already wrong with how the establishment, the respective UK governments and the politicians within them operate.
No organisation or groups of organisations are going to win friends by putting out adverts about the margins that farmers receive that might mention profit, but leave the scanning reader with the impression that after selling a kilogram of apples to a supermarket, the grower actually only receives 3p, when the pack price on the shelf is over £2.
This kind of approach is no different to scoring an own-goal. Not because the detail is technically wrong. But because mirroring the actions of those who are already blind will achieve absolutely nothing, whilst it also shows the same kind of sleight of hand or manipulation used by politicians that many members of the public are now desperate to move away from.
Strong, effective marketing from people with the skills and ability like James, have massive power to help and to create the change that is now necessary, IF Farming across the UK is to be saved from a destructive fate that many suspect, but very few really see. However, marketing is only a small part of that formula, because there’s a lot more than simple but effective messaging that needs to be achieved.
What the people heading popular campaigns say and what they represent isn’t the pathway to change itself. Even if they appear to be able to open lots of doors.
Yes, It’s nice to know that there are all sorts of people from all backgrounds and industries who are able to hear stories and compelling lines that they can all identify with when they are unhappy about a world that is giving everyone plenty to be unhappy about.
But where’s the purpose?
Where are the solutions that actually work?
Where is the real recognition that the problems aren’t about the subjects themselves, but rather how politics, the political system and the establishment itself works?
The only way to win against politicians who are incompetent, self-interested and only listening to advisers and so-called experts (with their own agendas), because when it comes to their real responsibilities they are massively out of their depth, is to play the political game even better than they and the people who support them can.
That doesn’t begin with any kind of strategy that relies on the politicians, their advisors or the establishment being the ones who are going to change.
Whilst it continues to be in some kind of ascendency, No Farmers No Food could very quickly win what appear to be concessions from the Sunak government and from whatever will follow. But the realities that underpin that and the direction that this entire political class are committed to taking UK Food Production will soon again begin to show – after Farmers and everyone who supports them will have been misled again into wasting what is now becoming invaluable time.
The reason that the many organisations that include big names such as the NFU and Food, Farming and Countryside Commission – who are covering so much of the ground that the wish list published yesterday mentioned already, aren’t achieving the results we all know they should be, is they are either too big, too London-centric, or like so many of us still believe that there is some kind of gentlemanly set of rules at work within the establishment that guarantee that as long as you do things the right way, the right things will end up being done in return for you.
Sadly, those days are long gone.
The power that farmers have to change much more than the destiny of farming itself, isn’t something that anyone can waste time waiting for permission to use.
Everyone is looking for solutions and answers from people who really don’t care about UK Farming.
People who are certain that they are right and farmers are wrong, because they genuinely believe that food will never be a problem, as it will always be available from elsewhere.
Please don’t continue to make the same mistakes. Boxing clever is the only way UK Farming can now succeed.
Latest figures suggest that the UK only produces around 52% of the food that we consume. Yet we are increasingly reliant on trading relationships threatened by war and the collapse of global supply chains, making the supply of imported food increasingly vulnerable and insecure.
Despite the risk to UK food security, Politicians and big business keep pushing UK Farms and Food Production towards profit making systems. This approach increases consumer reliance on unhealthy and highly processed foods and manufacturing, is quickly leading to the destruction of Agriculture and our ability to grow food naturally in the UK, and it uses organisations and standards like the Red Tractor scheme to exert ever more influence and control, knowing that significant change can be achieved without question, if the guidance comes from organisations that farmers and growers trust.
The short-, medium- and long-term future of UK farming and food production now hangs in the balance.
If UK Farmers don’t begin to take risks to save their own industry today; there will no longer be anything left of UK Farming worth taking a risk on in just a few tomorrows.
However, the risk taken to secure the future of UK Farming needs to be measured and considerate of all the ingredients necessary to secure permanent change, putting locally grown, healthy and nutritious food back at the centre of consumer and community life.
This cannot be achieved through populist protests and civil disruption that will damage the relationships that we now need to cement.
The creation of a new Food Chain Assurance Standard, led by Farmers, with the help of consumers and everyone who genuinely believes in and champions UK Food Production, offers the opportunity to achieve change that will not be possible in any other way.
Just before Christmas, I published an e-book called ‘One Rule Changes Everything’. Within it, I identified the common theme of all the problems that society faces being built on the reality that the value of money is the benchmark that we use for everything in life and that the cultural selfishness that is now prevalent across mankind has become the greatest obstacle to us moving forward into a much healthier and happier way of living. Not least of all, because to do so would allow us to address all of the problems we have at their root cause.
The fact that we exist within a money-based paradigm today and have lost sight of values and what being human really means isn’t an easy idea for anyone to grapple with. After all, even those who can see and fully appreciate how ‘The System’ works, cannot escape living within it and being touched by the impact of it at each and every turn.
For the whole of humanity to reach this point without even realising it means that there has been a process at work that we have not seen or have been unconscious of.
Because so few are able to recognise that process, it is safe to assume that we have been steadily conditioned, in ways that could have been as simple as each of us accepting changes and leaps in money-related technologies, how we buy things, what products are available to us and what we have to do to get access to them. All without ever taking the time or making the effort to question any of these things and what they mean.
Experience changes our expectations. So, the true impact of technology like the internet has been far more significant than the ease of shopping or borrowing money. It has actually changed our values set, and how we think about our relationship with other human beings too.
But where did this process of unacknowledged change really begin? What were the building blocks that really started to make it that ‘life is all about money’, and nothing else?
The Human Condition
A reality that we all need to face is that a default setting of being human without being self-aware, is that we behave as an individual and as if we are separate to anyone and everything else. Therefore, we consider every interaction that we have in terms of how it will affect us, whether it will ultimately be a benefit or a cost to us.
Few will consciously place themselves in any situation where they believe that the costs of doing so will outweigh the advantages. Even when they are fully conscious of all the facts and consequences of what they have the choice to do.
This is how selfishness works at its basic level, and there is an argument to be made that it is certainly a healthy way to be, IF you cannot be sure that anyone or everyone else can take a fully altruistic approach to every interaction in life. Which there are many arguments available to suggest that they cannot.
If humankind were able to police itself and ‘keep itself honest’ by being content that everyone should always be aware of the facts before they are expected to make any decision that could have a negative impact upon them in any way, the world would already be a much happier, much healthier, much more equitable and much more human place.
But for some, the basic ingredients of life have and never will be enough.
Ideologies and Hidden Truths
As soon as a process of any kind is invented or introduced to ‘create value’, whether that’s income, efficiency or anything else that can be considered to be advantageous at any level to the end user or to the recipient, without that end user or recipient being aware of the process that’s involved or why it’s really being carried out, the doors are immediately opened up to breaches of trust and for the confidence of anyone without full knowledge of what’s happening to be abused.
Historically, that abuse of trust could be based upon something as simple as the distribution of power and how certain people found themselves in control whilst others did not.
More recently, and particularly into the 20th century, that abuse has been based more upon the accumulation, distribution and creation of money and wealth. Manifested through wealth inequality or the wealth divide, which paints those who have much as being special, when those have less or very little, are most certainly not.
The most frightening thing about the way that ‘The System’ works and how it creates the myth that only those with wealth and power are special, is just how simple the ingredients or technical aspects that allow such stories and lies to exist, really are. So simple, that for anyone questioning how money and finance works for the first time, the simplicity itself makes the truth very hard to believe.
The most effective of all those ingredients is the framework of measurements that put figures against everything that ‘The System’ values, and gives the lie that ownership and direction of those measurements is what constitutes the real power over everything, therefore surrendering our control, because it’s what we believe.
GDP: The Tool of Measurement for a corrupt, self-serving and dehumanising ideal
It’s easy to think that the problems facing the Country have been caused by and are the sole responsibility of whoever is in government at the time. Attributing blame in that way plays no small part of the way that our broken political system actually works and its why so many of us believe that the choices of political parties that we are given will result in change, whenever the next General Election comes.
What Politicians (from any side), The Media and all the public figures sprawled across social media don’t tell us, as they whinge and make out they are the only ones who really understand the injustice and pain that everyone faces, is that everything collapsing around us today has come from an accumulative effect of policy after policy and decision after decision, that has been taken by multiple generations of politicians – from all sides, pretty much since just after the end of the Second World War.
Built on an economic idea or theory called Neoliberalism, there has been push after push to deregulate everything that was once regulated by government – on our behalf in some way, and for trust in the markets to be allowed to work beneficially on behalf of everyone and for the idea of ‘Free Markets’ to be embraced in its place.
Regulations that were once there to restrict , encourage and maintain certain behaviours of those private or commercial interests with the power to affect others lives have been steadily removed. Measurements relating to productivity, output and ‘growth’ have been inserted in their place, with little or no attention being paid to the way that the driving interests have increasingly used civil and corporate law to create their own system of checks and balances, regulated or enforced by expensive lawyers across what should still be an open or ‘free space’.
Every bit of the economy, or rather every product made, grown, produced, transported and every service carried out is measured by the financial value of each and every transaction that follows it through supply chains.
Meanwhile, this system of measuring everything in terms of the outputs generated has perverted just about every part of the public sphere. So that measurement, rather than the experience of the end user, has become what everything in business, not-for-profits and worst of all, the public sector is all about.
Measurement drives behaviour because behaviour is driven by measurement
What few have realised is that measurement offers or rather appears to offer something concrete outside of ourselves that just knowing we have done the right thing or done the best job that we could do does not.
The ability to measure, record and document also gives poor leaders, who do not trust the people who they lead, the opportunity to control those people and to increase the ways that they do so. Right up to the point where politicians and the establishment believe it right to police the way that other people think.
Yes, it seems hard to believe. But GDP and the Neoliberal obsession with measurement to ensure performance, productivity and therefore growth has actually influenced and conditioned workplace behaviours and service to the public is not what public service is now actually about.
Removing value from real life
Measurement of everything that can be measured has created and encouraged a process where people have increasingly forgotten to trust each other. In turn, ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ rely on figures that can be illustrated, and more often than not manipulated in whatever form they can then be laid out and presented on a page.
Real life and human interaction cannot be measured in any kind of quantitative form.
We have unwittingly and therefore foolishly allowed an economic system, derived not for the benefit of the people, but so the selfish could become even more selfish, to use measurement to blame us for the flaws in ‘The System’ the few manage and the mistakes they keep making. Bringing us ever nearer to a situation where we, the guilty masses can only be saved by surrendering the few freedoms that we have left, so that we can be saved from ourselves from this ever more greedy few.
Growth
For those needing evidence or a way to understand that we are today welcoming in a form of totalitarianism that once across the threshold of daily life will then be very quickly imposed, you only need listen out to the obsession that so many of the politicians and media bods we are forced to listen to by the ‘credible’ mainstream media has with growing the economy and specifically the word ‘growth’.
In whatever context it comes at us, the fact is that the ‘growth’ people made credible by their position and platform talk about, always relates to growth of GDP or ‘Gross Domestic Product’.
GDP is the Neoliberal ethos of continually growing the amount of money in circulation, so that public debt and all the other damage that the proponents of this twisted ideology create that keeps hurting us, can be covered up and hidden from view. Until the time that it is impossible to hide it from view any more.
Our politicians, many of whom are either too greedy, too stupid or too ignorant to understand how the mechanics of ‘The System’ they are supposed to be there to legislate upon even works, only know and understand what their advisers and the people who control them tell them.
This is likely to be something along the lines that politicians can only keep spending money for as long as everything they do with the power we gave them keeps on allowing big money, big business and big everything else to grow, through a process that is steadily breaking us all.
If it cannot be measured, it doesn’t exist
The harm that having lunatics in control who have placed a financial or monetary value on so many aspects of human life, is that is has genuinely affected the way that every one of us thinks.
It has progressed to the point where the unhuman aspects of ‘The System’ we are being led under has now corrupted just about every part of life.
The fact is that deep down, we all know that the work we do, the food we grow, the products we make, the services that we provide are all about providing the things that each and every one of us need for life. And that’s what many of us still unconsciously think.
However, the hard reality we face is that a life based on values – which is where every function we carry out is about people, communities and the world we live in, is no longer what life is really about.
Life has been changed, manipulated, reformed and redirected so that money, wealth and influence is all that matters.
Anything that cannot be measured has no financial value to those who want to measure and control it.
So it becomes worthless. Because what anything is worth is what everything is now all about.
Adam Tugwell 