It should stand to reason, but doesn’t. That Our Future starts with Food and Food starts with Farming..

Some of us are already unable to eat healthy meals, because heavily processes foods are all that we can access.

Others miss meals so they can feed other members of their families, whilst increasing numbers don’t eat because food is simply a luxury that they cannot afford.

It’s easy to dismiss the realities of other’s life experience when we’ve never had to go without a good healthy meal at any time in our life. But that doesn’t mean that any of us are safe or protected from the questions surrounding Food Security in the UK today. Questions that left unanswered may mean that we all have massive problems in store – potentially any day.

Politicians are treating UK Farming and Food Production as a political inconvenience; as if they will always be able to source the food that the UK needs from Europe or from other Countries abroad – Because politicians assume that imports will always be safe.

Meanwhile, the elites look upon the stories of food being grown in warehouses, created from ground up insects, from fungi or from processes that are even worse, and are very happy with the idea that this is how the masses will soon be fed. Because the true realities that underpin manufactured, processed and synthesized foods are not a problem that they believe could ever affect them.

Food is a basic essential of life.

Food is therefore a public good.

Yet generations of politicians have allowed commercial interests to take over almost every part of food production and supply across the UK.

Small numbers of very wealthy people and the companies they own make more and more money from addicting as many of us as possible to foods that taste nice and look good. And many genuinely believe that they are good for us, for no better reason than these highly attractive and fashionable foods appear to be a luxury that most people can afford.

What the companies don’t tell any of us, as they sell us as much of everything that they can, is that the price we pay at the till might seem comparatively low. But the true cost to our health and to our future could be very high indeed.

The politicians and the narratives that the money behind this avoidable direction of UK Food Supply buys, deliberately tells us that Climate Change, the needs of Net Zero and with too many people to feed, the food of the future does not lie with farming or food production of any traditional kind.

But this is a constructed story that simply isn’t true and benefits only those who want continually growing profits and the control over everything that maintain it.

The narrative is all about destroying the ability that the UK currently has to feed our own population and creating a situation where the same people who are responsible for so many of our problems – just so they can make money, will be able to make even more. Because in time, their actions will make democratic forms of government redundant and will be able to assume absolute control.

This is no conspiracy. This is what the systematic destruction of UK Farming and the ability of UK Farmers and Food Producers to run viable businesses has been and is all about.

It is time to wake up to the reality that the future the establishment proposes for us all, because they know better, isn’t the healthy future that any of us need. Nor is it one that is necessary or inevitable for us to have.

However, without change, we will soon no longer have any choice.

The world has many problems. But it is the abuse and manipulation of money and how that affects every part of our lives that is the real problem underpinning them all.

Those who care only about money, don’t care about people.

That means they are not worried about what any one else eats. Especially if there are public health systems in place that will continue to address the problems they cause and that their friends with pharmaceutical companies can also continue to make profits from, by providing many different expensive treatments for.

Funny that they never create any cures.

Politicians will not address the issues that the World faces. Because it is not in the interests of their ‘careers’ and whatever they believe they have to gain in the future, by not going against these ‘interests’ and by otherwise not making decisions that are in the best interests of the people who elected them instead.

This is why when asked, politicians appear to understand the problem and talk about solutions. But nothing ever happens that addresses the real issues that they have facilitated and therefore caused.

Food is our Freedom. As long as the Food we eat remains under our control

What we eat is the foundation of everything that we do. It is the foundation of our future. It is the foundation of our lives.

If we surrender what is left of our ability to choose what we eat and where our food comes from, we will no longer be able to make choices about our health or the health of the people we care about.

The only way that we can maintain the little control we have over food and then increase it to where that control should be, is to ensure that the UK Produces all of its own food.

We must ensure that the food the UK Produces always comes from natural processes, growing and animal husbandry that takes place on local UK Farms.

It is no understatement to say that the food we eat, that makes other people very wealthy, is actively destroying our health. In growing numbers of cases, it is slowly killing us too.

We need to put Food Production and Supply back into the hands of people and business that we know and can trust.

Whilst we continue to be without politicians who will stand up for us and legislate for us all as they should, the best way that we can help to instigate the changes that we all so desperately need, is to buy as much basic or essential food that isn’t processed, from local farms or from small shops and businesses that source everything they sell from local farmers and suppliers.

Basic or essential food is food or food products that we buy in a form that is recognisable for being in its original form, or has undergone basic processing such as milling, pasteurisation, breadmaking or cheesemaking etc., that doesn’t involve the addition of manufactured ingredients or additives and could or traditionally would have been processed or prepared by hand.

The more we use small businesses, independent retailers who are committed to local food production, and farm shops and box schemes that are from identifiable sources too, the more accessible and affordable the food we should all be able to eat every day will become.

It’s a lot of responsibility for every one of us. But the people we elected to take that responsibility on our behalf are effectively refusing to do so.

It’s the actions of our politicians that we all need to watch, rather than just accepting their words.

Instead of leading us, it is the Politicians who need to be led.

The best way to lead our politicians is to demonstrate how change works without them. So that joining the growing momentum the People create will feel right to them, rather than making a choice which they currently  believe would make them look like they are wrong.

UK Farming and food production is in crisis.

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.

This is 3FG.

To some, Food Security would be the radio tags that supermarkets now attach to high value or vulnerable food items in stores where they are regularly taken without payment.

That it has become normal to focus on the overtly criminal act of theft, rather than the realities of a cost-of-living crisis where many people cannot afford to eat well, today, is bad enough.

But to overlook the reality that Food Security is the biggest, most pressing and bizarrely unspoken question that surrounds the UK’s dwindling self-sufficiency is in a different league all together.

The travesty doesn’t stop there. The farmers see it and are doing what they believe they need to.

But like everyone who believes that change happens when you convince the government and politicians that your argument is right, the farming industry is failing to reflect on experiences that make it clear that we have all been here with the political classes before.

Food security is the UKs ability to feed itself. It’s the condition, the reliability and the robustness of our own circular supply chain at local and national level that includes the foods that we grow, process, prepare and provide for ourselves or our own people.

Food Security represents the food-supply that the UK provides itself with, without any other country, international supply chain or other third party being involved. And what the reader may not realise is that current figures suggest that the amount of the food we eat in this country that is produced in this way through our own UK supply chains may now be as low as 50%.

All well and good, and there’s nothing to worry about if you can rely on the food that comes not only from Europe, but from across the world always being available and arriving on our supermarket shelves and at our doorsteps just in time.

But we can’t.

The fragility of global supply chains was laid bare for all to see by the government response to the Covid Pandemic and the paradoxical situation where politicians shut everyone up in their houses and still expected everything else to work as normal.

Those who are so heavily invested in globalisation and the monetary and economic system that they have profited from, are literally throwing everything they have at keeping the economic wheels turning to the point where the catastrophic damage that decades of financial mismanagement have caused is now plain to see, but everything appears to keep running while fuelling the expectation that they always will.

The explosively excessive printing of money should have imploded our economic system long before now. Anyone prepared to take a closer look at what is really going on, will soon see that economic and monetary stability is already hanging by a thread.

Those printing the cash could easily continue to keep flooding the economy with more and more monopoly money, until the hyperinflation that we can now expect kicks in.

However, the whole demise of this crooked way of managing and interfering with every part of our lives so that the few can continue to get rich may be about to hear the final bell called. If, as expected, the BRICS Nations launch their own gold-backed currency in just under two weeks’ time and FIAT Money such as the US Dollar, The Euro and our very own British Pound go into freefall, making the cost of everything – IF we can even get it – go into orbit.

Like the majority of us, Farmers do not have the true depth of our political talent weighed up for what it genuinely is. Just as they don’t understand how the public sector and everything that the tentacles of public policy and government touches, actually works.

Indeed, the ideas or expectations Farmers have of what politicians and public servants are in office for is quite correct in terms of what they should do. The now critical problem for us all, is that the Politicians, and those who would enthusiastically replace them, do not do as they should.

For now, that’s as much as it is worth saying on how we got here, and where ‘here’ really is.

Calling our Food Security or our Food Supply situation a ticking time bomb sounds dramatic. But it may well turn out to be far worse than it already sounds.

The stark reality we face is that even with the UK producing as much as 60% of our food – with much of that production currently geared to supplying large-scale food production and processing, rather than the production and supply of the daily essentials that each and every one of us need to live – the fragility of our food supply should be red faced and screaming at any politician who is genuinely there to represent the public good, telling them all they need to know about what will happen if an event should occur that effectively pulls the international food supply chain plug – or rather the rug, from under us.

Either way, on the current trajectory, we will reach this unspeakable destination, just through the progress that accompanies time.

Because we don’t have politicians who see any of this, accept this, and are prepared to act to deal with this, the UK is now dangerously exposed and vulnerable to critical food shortages.

With these same people in charge, as we have experienced with their response to the covid pandemic before, it is a safe bet that when the food crisis reaches our front doors, our decision makers will be primed to make a potentially catastrophic situation exponentially worse.

Today’s politicians don’t solve problems with the right solutions. They hide them with the easy ones.

If the UK’s external food supply collapses, the SPADS, advisors and civil servants in Westminster will take one look at the threat of hungry people taking to the streets and will conclude that UK self-sufficiency isn’t viable because nothing is in place. That it would take too long, will be too hard and will therefore be too risky to trust farmers and people to grow food for themselves, and that they will just have to pay someone else and prostitute the UK to outside interests. Rather than dig in and get everyone to start doing their bit for home production – just as our grandparents and great grandparents did without getting in a flap, when everyone had to before.

Farmers are some of the most creative and successful entrepreneurs that exist. There is no reason to doubt that if they were minded to do so, farmers, growers, fisheries and all their allied sectors across the UK could quickly reach and then go beyond a subsistence supply level for the whole Country, based on very local and highly transparent supply chains.

However, farmers are also some of the most damaged victims of the mind games, propaganda and deliberate measures taken to destroy the UKs self-sufficiency and industrial output that was forced upon us through the offshoot of globalisation that we have come to know as the EU.

Decades of subsidies, quotas and micromanagement rules ruined hundreds if not thousands of viable farming and growing businesses. They have conditioned today’s up and coming farming generations to believe that hand-outs accompanied by specific directives are ‘normal’ and are all that they can expect.

However we look at it, the Farming industry and its representatives still believe that the government and our politicians will eventually respond to the Food Security crisis that lies in front of us, in the way that they themselves see it. And that Westminster will come running with the public chequebook when they do.

But they wont.

And that isn’t going to change whilst we have the politicians that we have and know as the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats or indeed any of the pretenders who are outside of Parliament awaiting their chance – but think and behave just like all the rest.

The solution isn’t going to come from any politician.

The solution to the UK Food Supply and Food Security problem must come from within.

It’s our farmers that have to break through the perceptual barriers that currently encage them. They must do what they are best at, get on with the job that already waiting to go, and let the political classes catch up probably long after they begin.