The UK Government has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 87% by 2040 as part of its seventh carbon budget. Yet comprehensive plans to decarbonise agriculture and land use remain conspicuously absent from policy papers, with food production on track to become the UK’s largest source of emissions by 2050. In this week’s episode, Ruth Westcott from the charity Sustain joins Nick to discuss why food and farming has failed to receive the same level of policy attention as the energy and transport sectors, and why farmers need greater support to produce food that is good for health and the environment. Ruth also reflects on why ministers are so scared to talk about the need for dietary change to meet emissions targets, and the kind of levers that should be pulled to get us eating less meat and dairy, and more fruit, vegetables and pulses.
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Further reading
Progress stalls on meat reduction
People are eating a little less meat than a decade ago but enabling dietary change at scale remains a major challenge
IGD says dietary change needed to meet climate goals
A shift away from meat-heavy diets is essential if the UK food system is to achieve net-zero, according to a major new decarbonisation plan for the food and drink sector
Transcript
Nick Hughes: Hello and welcome to the Small Print, a podcast by Footprint Media Group. I’m Nick Hughes, Footprint’s Editorial Director. Each week we delve beneath the headlines of an issue impacting the hospitality and food service sector through our unique lens of environmental and social affairs. The UK government has pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 87% by 2040 as part of its seventh carbon budget. Yet comprehensive plans to decarbonise agriculture and land use remain conspicuously absent from policy papers, with food production on track to become the UK’s largest source of emissions by 2050. In this week’s episode, Ruth Westcott from the charity Sustain joins me to discuss why food and farming has failed to receive the same level of policy attention as the energy and transport sectors, and why farmers need greater support to produce food that is good for health and the environment. Ruth also reflects on why ministers are so scared to talk about the need for dietary change to meet emissions targets and the kind of levers that should be pulled to get us eating less meat and dairy and more fruit and veg. Ruth, thanks for joining us on the Small print. Firstly, how are you?
Ruth Westcott: Hi. I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. How are you doing?
Nick Hughes: Yes, I’m very well, thank you. Off the back of another rainy weekend, which was much needed down here in the southeast, where water is very scarce at the moment and my vegetables needed a good dose of rainwater. So that was very welcome indeed. So, which links somewhat tenuously to our conversation today, which is we’re going to talk about the latest carbon budget, which was confirmed by the UK government last week, and about where food and farming sits within it. And I know your view at Sustain is that current policies are not necessarily sufficient to drive the kind of green transition we need to see in the land use and agriculture sector, both on the supply and the demand side. So we’ll get into that shortly. But before we do so, just for those listeners who might not be familiar with sustainability, remind us, Ruth, who you are and what is the nature of the work that you do?
Ruth Westcott: Well, hey, Nick, you’re always welcome up north, where there’s a little bit more rain if your vegetables aren’t doing so. Yes, so I’m from Sustain, the alliance for Better Food and Farming, and we’re an alliance of about 100 organizations that work across environmental conservation, health and sustainability, and then social justice and workers rights in anything but related to food. So we run some exciting campaigns like the Children’s Food Campaign. We try to, to encourage and support government policy that’s better for making healthy and sustainable food more available and more affordable for everyone. So that’s us. And I work mostly on trying to reduce the environmental impact of our diets and food system in the uk.
Nick Hughes: Great. So we’re talking today about decarbonization, essentially. And the government has confirmed its proposed level for the seventh carbon budget. So it set a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 87% in the period 2038 to 2042. And that’s compared with 1990 levels. And that’s in line with the advice that the government’s independent advisor, the Climate Change Committee, published last year. So when we’re talking about carbon budgets, we’re starting to get into sort of greenhouse gas emission jargon. So perhaps it’d be useful just to remind us what a carbon budget is and why is it so important.
Ruth Westcott: Yes, it sort of quite quickly starts to become incredibly technical and tedious. But the carbon budget is basically the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that the UK says it’s going to emit or like reduce our emissions by, in order to come in line with the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement set targets for all countries to reduce their emissions to avoid or to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. So the carbon budget should be the maximum that we can emit to limit emissions to 1.5 degrees. 1.5 degrees is incredibly important because it’s considered that anything above 1.5 starts to get us into the kind of dangerous and runaway climate change which will have the kind of consequences for humanity which are considered to be unacceptable and devastating. So 1.5 is considered to be this cutoff point which keeps climate change within relatively safe limits for humans and the environment. And of course, in the context of this podcast, into safe levels for producing food.
Nick Hughes: And when you look at what the Climate Change Committee published last year, it sort of sets out what it calls a balanced pathway to hitting these reduction targets over different periods of time. A lot of the heavy lifting is done by electrification and the shift to a low carbon electricity supply. I think it makes up about 60% of the total reduction. But what’s also clear and is very relevant when we’re talking about this seventh carbon budget, is that the closer you get towards 2050, the greater the contribution that needs to come from other sectors, including agriculture and land use, which frankly, as a sector has not really made a meaningful dent in emissions reductions to date, has it? So why do you think progress in decarbonizing this sector has lagged behind other industry sectors so far?
Ruth Westcott: Yeah, It’s sad to see, to be honest, somebody working in the food and farming sector, which is the progress, has been really encouraging on decarbonisation of energy and transport to some degree. I mean, my colleagues who work in those sectors might say there’s much more that we need to do and I’m sure they would. But in food, yeah, our emissions have barely reduced since 1990. They’re sort of flatlined. And we also offshore lots of our emissions from food. For example, most of the grain that we feed to animals in the UK is imported from overseas. So our footprint is actually significantly impacting overseas communities and climate change and environmental issues overseas. But of course, as far as climate change goes, it doesn’t matter where you release the emissions, whether it’s here or overseas, it’s contributing to climate change. So we need to reduce the footprint of our diets here and overseas. So, yeah, we’ve had this extraordinary progress, but for some reason we’ve really struggled for the, for the kind of investment that energy and transport systems have had in the food sector. So for example, if you’re a farmer right now, the most profitable way to farm is becoming more intensive, consolidating, industrializing and moving to things like industrially farmed chicken and pigs. And those are a disaster for the climate. We don’t have anywhere near enough investment in producing the kind of food that is going to get us through the climate emergency and make our diets more sustainable. So more pulses, legumes, fruit and veg, and the kind of high protein plant based crops that are the solution to the climate emergency and will make us healthier as well. So for farmers, you know, they’re struggling and they’re stuck in these fragile supply chains, barely making ends meet and we’re losing farmers and we need to start seeing them as the climate solution. We need to start seeing farmers as the people that have the skills and the knowledge, the understanding of the soil, the understanding of how nature works and how food can be produced sustainably to be able to see us through this crisis and into a healthier and more sustainable food system. But at the moment that, that, that investment’s just not there. You know, the, with the carbon budget gave some really encouraging investment promises for energy and transport, which is brilliant to see, you know, about 400,000 jobs in clean energy. Fantastic. We just need that kind of ambition for the food system. So. And we could be, we could be more self sufficient, we could be healthier and we could rejuvenate our rural communities with more and better jobs. I just don’t understand why we’re not seeing it. I. Yeah, seems like a real missed opportunity.
Nick Hughes: Yes. So it’s worth stating, isn’t it, that what we’re expecting to come out in due course is a delivery plan setting out how the seventh carbon budget will be met. What we do have is this sort of hundred plus page impact assessment which essentially sets out what investment is needed to deliver it. And as you alluded to, wasn’t necessarily a huge deal for food and farming within that, what were your overarching views on that document? Was there anything good from a climate and nature perspective where food and farming is concerned?
Ruth Westcott: Yeah, it was. We. I was looking for it. I don’t know if you, if you. I was kind of. I kept search. I kept sort of searching through that document thinking I’d missed my pages got stuck together or something. There really wasn’t much in it about food, considering that, as you say, it’s a third of our emissions and it’s. We’re just not seeing the reductions in emissions that we need to see to reach the Paris Agreement. But no, so there was. What was positive was that it really recognized the risk to farming from climate change. So we’ve seen yields reducing. Our main grain yields were reduced by 20% last year due to extreme weather and that’s likely to be even worse this year because we’ve got a particularly strong El Nino. So it’s likely that this summer yields are going to struggle again and we’ve had the fertilizer crisis because of the straight of moose. So it’s likely that we’re going to be seeing ongoing difficulties with our own yields this year. And the report recognized that climate change is a factor in that and climate change is threatening our food system. What it didn’t do is go the next step and say that the solution to climate change can also be the solution to the struggling yields of farmers and the struggling incomes of farmers. And by investing in one, we can help to address the climate emergency as well. So it sort of set out the problem. It was a scary read, but it didn’t, it just didn’t come up with those solutions. It’s not, it’s not not giving the farmers the support that they need right now.
Nick Hughes: Yeah. And like you say, it comes at a time when this, the lack of resilience within our food system is very much front of mind for a lot of, certainly for a lot of businesses, a lot of NGOs, hopefully for politicians linked to the crisis in the Middle east, of course, and which has exposed this heavy reliance we have within our food system on fossil fuels. Yet the response seems to have been to date very much what you might call short term sticking plaster policies. So temporary reliefs for tariffs on certain imported goods, temporary reductions in vat, this proposal towards supermarkets that they freeze the price on essential oil items that received pretty short shrift, but very little about more structural changes that can grow support for more resilient nature based farming systems. So. Well, two questions here. Firstly, why do you feel we continue to not see that kind of deeper systemic thinking coming out of government? I. And also, what support is needed for farmers to embrace more agroecological approaches?
Ruth Westcott: Well, I think you get into the crook. These are the big questions, right? Like why it seems so obvious that we would be investing in things like horticulture, pulses, legumes, nuts, the kind of, the kind of like sustainable proteins that are going to be the solution. And yet the government instead announced a poultry growth strategy which will just increase our reliance on imports, grow more high emissions intensive food. Yeah, I mean, well, I think one of the clues might lie in the people that the government are talking to. The National Food Strategy Advisory Group is stuffed with industry and with meat lobby representatives. So it’s kind of no wonder that we’re getting policy which reflects corporate profit rather than at the actual long term benefit of our farming industry and our health. We need, the government needs to start talking to farmers that have got the solutions, like talking directly to our horticulture industry, the sector that is growing more healthy and sustainable food, and asking them what solutions they need to see the most. Probably the most beneficial is the government’s announced a horticulture strategy. Brilliant. But that needs to be ambitious enough that it’s going to help shift the market for non meat proteins as well as increasing production. So we heard that in March, the government have announced that that will be coming this year and that needs to come quickly and it needs to be ambitious and include proper investment in growing and shifting supply chains towards more plant based proteins. Government have also promised that public sector food will support sustainable and local farming and we haven’t seen those standards come forward. It’s been a couple of years now since the government had that in their manifesto. We need to fast track. Brilliant. Strong, legally binding standards for public sector food to make sure it’s supporting local and sustainable producers.
Nick Hughes: There’s a couple, couple of things that will pick up on there in a little bit. Just on the, the farming support for farmers. If a government minister were to join us for today’s podcast. Unlikely, it has to be said, but if they were, they might point to investment in the environmental land management schemes that are now supporting, I guess what you might call public goods, rather than simply directing subsidies towards farmers based on the area that they farm. Have those made a positive impact, would you say? And if not, where are the gaps in those public schemes that aim to support farmers to farm in a more sustainable way?
Ruth Westcott: Yes, now. So Elms is still relatively new because it’s the funding scheme which was designed to replace the farmer subsidies that came before Brexit when we were in the common agricultural policy. And broadly it’s a good scheme because it’s changed. The new philosophy behind Elms is that public money will be spent on public goods. So it’s supposed to support nature conservation and the restoration of degraded landscapes. Brilliant. However, the scheme itself, if you speak to many farmers, has been too short sighted, too difficult to understand where the money’s going to be coming from year on year on year. So the kind of long term forward planning that you need to do as a farmer has been very difficult to achieve without having these kind of, the kind of security of the funding streams long term. So that’s one of the problems. The second is it doesn’t guarantee that farmers are going to be able to make a decent living from producing food because yeah, you can and introduce, set aside like areas of nature conservation within your land and get paid for it. But if you’re trapped into a exploitative supply chain with a supermarket, then it doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get decent prices for growing food. So we’re creating, we’re, we’re rightly contributing to encourage farmers to conserve nature, but we also need to be supporting farmers to grow the kind of food that we need for our food security. So we need more investment in growing the kind of food that’s going to, that’s going to benefit us. And right now, Elms isn’t designed to support things like horticulture or growing more pulses and legumes and thus encourage and thus improve our own food security. But we do need investment not just in nature conservation, but also in growing healthy and sustainable food. And at the moment Eldons is missing that a bit. It’s missing that kind of food security.
Nick Hughes: Yeah, and that’s interesting. That’s, that’s a critique that I hear across the stakeholder spectrum. Actually, I was listening to a podcast, the radical podcast that Andy Cato was a guest on recently from, from Wild Farms and he made a very similar critique that, you know, if you’re farming and doing a bit for nature on the margins, then you can benefit from else elm schemes more than if you are integrating nature friendly farming with food production. And it does feel as though that’s potentially a bit of a bit of a gap that needs to be addressed. This year sees the launch of the first ever Footprint Festival, a two day experiential and immersive sustainability festival set on a working farm in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. Created for senior leaders across food service and hospitality, this one of a kind annual event takes place on September 17th and 18th. We’ll blend sensory experiences, transformative content, powerful networking and unforgettable food, drink and entertainment. Tickets are now on sale. Visit footprintfestival.com for more details. Let’s move on to talking about diets and consumption. Roof the Climate Change Committee references the need for both supply and demand side interventions in order to achieve net zero and on the demand side. Although it says switching to an electric vehicle or installing a heat pump are the most impactful decisions that households can make from an emissions perspective, it has consistently stressed the importance of some degree of dietary change and specifically a reduction in meat and dairy. Yet governments of all colors have consistently refused to engage with questions of diet and consumption. Why do you think that is?
Ruth Westcott: You’re absolutely right. When you go out to buy a car, you feel like you’re being incentivized to some degree to make good decisions. Because even though electric vehicles are expensive, they’re subsidized by the government. Because it’s pretty clear from government policy what the right thing to do is for the environment when it comes to food. If you’re eating out on the high street or even in a supermarket, the easiest choices to make are often the ones that are unhealthy and unsustainable. Meat is cheaper if you if you go to eating on the high street, often the healthy and sustainable options are more difficult to find. There’s hardly any of them, or they’re more expensive. And so everything in your life is telling you to the the good choices aren’t made easy, even though we know that the majority of people do want to eat healthier and more sustainable diets. And there’s some great Polling from the Eating Better alliance, which shows that people are really keen to change their diets, including reducing meat consumption. And many people are trying to do it, but it’s being made very difficult for them. I’m not in those conversations that the government’s having with industry about food policy, but what I know is that what’s coming out is a complete gap in terms of leadership from government about dietary change. And there’s loads that they could do to make that easier. The large companies should have targets to reduce their Scope three emissions. And Scope three is basically everything that they sell to us. They need to report on their emissions and they need to be given targets to reduce their emissions. And then how they do that is up to them. Whether it’s making sustainable low meat, ready meals more available, whether it’s blending meat and non meat within ready meals and burgers and so on, whichever innovations these the companies want to come up with, go for it. But set clear targets companies to make sure that there’s a level playing field there and the good choices are being made easier and easier for consumers. And as I said before, like start with public sector food. That’s a. We’re all that’s taxpayers money and it should be being spent on the kind of food system which is sustainable.
Nick Hughes: It sounds like what you’re advocating for here is essentially taking this healthy food standard that the government has said it plans to introduce and building environmental targets into that. So that not only are businesses incentivized or required even to make a proportion of their portfolio healthy, they’re also having to demonstrate emissions reduction within that as well.
Ruth Westcott: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let’s let businesses do what they do well. Innovate, come up with good solutions, set them clear targets and let them. Let businesses have the space to innovate and make healthy and sustainable food delicious and affordable and accessible to more people. Yeah. So the healthy food standard that’s being developed by government and the industry right now could be extended to include environmental criteria. Absolutely. It’s an easy win and a no brainer.
Nick Hughes: You mentioned the policy proposal for 50% of public sector food to be produced locally or to higher environmental standards. We’re still waiting for that policy to be formalised. My understanding is that DEFRA is still in the data collection phase to create a baseline for that policy. We consistently talk about public sector as a lever for more sustainable diets. It feels as though year after year we pass up that opportunity. Why is the public sector such a potentially key lever? Do you feel for getting more vegetables, pulses, other health Healthy, sustainable ingredients onto people’s plates.
Ruth Westcott: I’ve been campaigning on public sector food for over a decade and yet we’ve barely seen any progress. You get some great examples of brilliant food in the public sector on very tight budgets, but overall they’re kind of islands of brilliance in a kind of sea of mediocrity. It’s so important. Firstly, we’re feeding some of the most vulnerable people in society in public sector food and they deserve to have great food. They deserve to have food that’s going to nourish them, make them better if they’re sick, and support their kind of mental and physical health. So fundamentally, from a sort of rights based perspective, people in the most vulnerable position there to have good food and that I believe that very strongly. Secondly, it’s taxpayers money and it, we, I want we, our money, money that’s the public purse, should be spent on the public good, just as the environmental land management scheme for farmers is. We need to extend that philosophy to the food that we buy in the public sector. Thirdly, when you have a captive audience, you’ve got the opportunity to change people’s perspective about sustainable food being delicious and nourishing and tasty and change people’s perception about what a healthy and sustainable diet looks like and allow them to enjoy meals which are lower in meat, higher in veg, higher in pulses, and try out new things. And so the public sector is a gateway to encouraging people to give things a try that they might not otherwise. And then you can start to gradually change people’s view about things that they might be more encouraged to buy at home.
Nick Hughes: And is your view that we should rely more so on standards, public sector procurement standards, on targets, as you alluded to, regarding emissions reduction, Scope three, emissions reduction, perhaps education, behavioral change techniques to deliver this shift from animal protein to plant protein? Or do you feel that fiscal levers should be used? And this is a really sensitive one, isn’t it? Because as we were chatting about just prior to recording, there have been some more headlines surfaced recently around the government’s planning to tax our meat. There’s no basis for these stories because, you know, this advice is coming from the Climate Change Committee, which is not the government, it’s an independent advisor to the government. But politicians seem to be, you know, scared of inserting themselves into this debate around meat and dietary change. What is your view on fiscal levers like taxation? Do they have a role to play? Or would you rather use the other suite of tools in our weaponry to try and drive dietary change?
Ruth Westcott: Yeah, great question. I mean, I think we sort of. Yeah, there’s a lot of kind of fear mongering around taxes and around fiscal measures. We sort of forget that every day our food choices are decided by a combination of different fiscal measures and taxes and subsidies. And the way that the food that we have access to and the food that’s produced is, is all decided by a combination of taxation and, and subsidies to the degree that it’s. We’re not in a, we’re not in a fair kind of market right now. Our choices are being manipulated by big business and by government decisions. So we’re already in a situation where that’s happening for us. We just need to change things slightly so that the things, the products that are affordable and accessible are better, more sustainable and more healthy. So we don’t need to like tax. Yeah, I mean it’s almost like clockwork. Every time there’s a new carbon budget, somebody, a headline will pop up about and the bacon sandwich picture of Ed Miliband will be resurfaced and they’ll talk about taxing meat and. No, there is absolutely no suggestions in the carbon budget about taxing meat. But the meat industry is always already massively subsidized by the public first. So there are definitely ways that we could change the way that subsidies work to make sure that the food that is healthier and more sustainable is more affordable and more accessible to everybody. It just doesn’t need to be taxing meat. But I’m very in favor, I’m very in favor of fiscal measures. They happen already. Let’s make sure that things like the school fruit and veg scheme, a voucher scheme for people on low incomes, better funded so there’s more access to healthy food for people on low incomes, universal free school meals. Then you start to look at the subsidy system to make sure that unsustainable industries aren’t being subsidised and sustainable ones are so that you’re providing proper incentives to farmers to produce healthy and sustainable food.
Nick Hughes: Yes. And it always strikes me there’s a question when we’re talking about meat. There’s a question here around aligning supply with demand. So the Climate Change Committee believes that we need to reduce UK livestock numbers. If we pursue policies that do that, serve that purpose, but consumption doesn’t drop, then you could argue that gap will simply be filled by imported meat which is potentially produced to lower standards and even with higher emissions, which is job done from a net zero perspective because we only measure domestic emissions within carbon budgets. But it doesn’t move the dial in terms of climate change, does it? And it could potentially have a major impact on UK farmer livelihoods. So is it important that we align supply side measures with demand side measures and don’t sort of put all our eggs in one basket if you like?
Ruth Westcott: Yes, all our brown, brown eggs.
Nick Hughes: Brown or white eggs?
Ruth Westcott: Yes, yes. What we need to recognize is one of the reasons that we’re seeing this change in consumption towards, particularly towards more chicken is that the industry is plowing money into marketing, advertising and pushing up, manipulating the demand side of the food food system so that we see more meat, we want to eat more meat, there’s more advertising, there’s more marketing and everything in our, in our, on social media, on, in society is encouraging us for to have a high meat diet. Protein maxing. You know, there’s so much about gender and so much about health that’s driving us towards high meat diet which is unhealthy. So each new chicken shed, the more that we produce, the more power goes into the hands of the same corporations that are investing in driving demand. So we’re sending ourselves into this kind of loop of increased supply, increased demand, increased supply, increased demand and more and more power to the large corporations that are funding the advertising and the marketing and sending us more in that direction of industrialization and consolidation, especially around chicken and pork. So we need to tackle that shift towards the power being placed in the hands of fewer and fewer businesses with lots of power over our consumption choices. Yeah, demand and supply are not separate from each other. One is feeding the other. So yeah, absolutely. We need to increase both production and the consumption drivers of more healthier, more sustainable food and cut off that vicious cycle of increasing demand, increasing supply, increasing demand, increasing supply.
Nick Hughes: Ruth loads of great ideas there for listeners and perhaps even for ministers to take away and consider as they think about producing the report to show how they’re going to deliver against this seventh carbon budget. We live in hope that we might get some ambitious progressive policies regarding food and farming. We need them at some point, don’t we? So look, thanks again very much for joining us on the Small print.
Ruth Westcott: Thanks for having me. It’s been a, it’s been a treat.
Nick Hughes: We’ll be back next week with another episode of the Small Print. If you like what you’ve heard, please take a moment to rate, share and subscribe.
