As the global shockwaves of the Middle East conflict continue to amplify, urgent questions on food security are coming to the fore. From geopolitical instability to the increase in extreme weather events, it’s become increasingly clear that our approach to food security in the UK is not fit for purpose.

Here, the SFT’s Head of Policy, Megan Perry, and Senior Researcher, Robert Barbour, share their thoughts on the current situation and imagine what a future food system that’s more resilient to global shocks and price volatility might look like.

Fears about how the Iran war is impacting food production has now been widely raised by farmers and in the media. The main focus has been the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil and gas and about one third of global seaborne trade in fertilisers passes. Yet there is far more at play, and the lessons and solutions we should be drawing from this seem to be going unrecognised.

Disruption to the gas supply (a critical component of fertiliser manufacture) has further led to fertiliser plants shutting down in countries such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Around a quarter of the world’s rice exports come from India which will be impacted by a prolonged war. Brazil, which imports over 60% of its fertilisers, mostly via the Strait of Hormuz, is one of the world’s biggest exporters of agricultural commodities. Australia’s stock of fertiliser is expected to run out mid-April. US stocks of fertiliser are already 25% lower than usual. The Philippines has declared a national emergency.

It is not just the availability of food that is the issue, but people’s ability to buy it. With the disruption to fuel, many countries are experiencing a shut down in their industries, forcing people out of work. In the Philippines, the widespread Jeepney drivers are facing 50-60% pay cuts. In Gujarat, India, a shortage of gas has led the ceramics industry to close leaving the 400,000 employees without work. In Mumbai, a fifth of hotels and restaurants have been partially closed since the start of March.

This is all set within the backdrop of another major crisis. The United Nations warned last week that the earth’s climate is in a state of emergency and is “more out of balance than at any time in observed history”. Yet the environmental impact of the Iran war is catastrophic. It is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined, with 5 million tonnes of GHG emissions released within the first 14 days alone.

Patrick Bigger, a research director at the Climate and Community Institute, was quoted in the Guardian, “Every missile strike is another down payment on a hotter, more unstable planet, and none of it makes anyone safer… Every refinery fire and tanker strike is a reminder that fossil‑fuelled geopolitics is incompatible with a liveable planet. This war shows, yet again, that the fastest way to supercharge the climate crisis is to let fossil fuel interests dictate foreign policy.”

There are also concerns the war will be leveraged to benefit big business or to remove environmental standards and regulation. An article from Greenpeace has said, “Expect the term ‘food security’ to be hollowed out and weaponised. Large-scale industrial players are already positioning themselves as the only thing standing between the public and empty shelves. In truth, it is this highly consolidated, chemical-dependent model of industrial farming that is making our global food system so fragile in the first place.”

How is the situation being addressed in the UK? The UK imports 60% of its fertiliser and close to 50% of its food, often from countries which in turn import significant amounts of fertiliser and rely on input-heavy production systems. The UK’s system is also heavily centralised and consolidated, nine big retailers account for more than 94% of all retail food.

The recently launched Land Use Framework gives an insight to the government’s thinking, namely we will need to produce more food from less land, with a drive to growth and efficiency in sectors such as poultry. George Monbiot does not mince his words on this approach, calling it “nothing short of moronic” given the poultry sector’s dependence on imported livestock feed.

The term ‘resilience’ is also being bandied around by the government and farming sector, but what does this mean? It does not appear to mean a big shift away from input-heavy approaches that dominate today, given the aforementioned focus on continuing to achieve current levels of production. Business as usual and tweaking rather than transforming appears to be the current thinking. But we need much more radical policies.

“The UK imports 60% of its fertiliser and close to 50% of its food, often from countries which in turn import significant amounts of fertiliser and rely on input-heavy production systems. The UK’s system is also heavily centralised and consolidated, 9 big retailers account for more than 94% of all retail food.”

As Professor Tim Benton says in this recent interview, it will likely take a crisis before change really happens. Yet we have the knowledge, resources and ability to transform our food system into one that is both resilient and does not degrade our environment.

If the government created support that took a whole farm approach, integrating nature and food production through agroecological farming methods, and promoted healthier diets aligned with what the UK can sustainably produce, we could move away from input-heavy agriculture, reducing our reliance on imports and increasing the resilience of domestic production to extreme weather. A decentralised supply chain is also critical for true resilience, embedding smaller-scale localised infrastructure across the country would be more flexible, able to pivot in a crisis and be less of a target from a security point of view. Empowering communities to produce food should also be taken seriously, supporting community growing, improving access to growing spaces and embedding practical food growing skills within the curriculum for young people. And we need to address our huge reliance on imported fruit and veg by creating market gardens and horticulture enterprises across the UK, accompanied by localised processing facilities.

In some ways, this is a vision that mirrors the shift that is needed in our energy system – a wholesale transformation to alternative forms of production that will allow us to wean ourselves off fossil fuels, and in so doing improve our resilience to future shocks like the one being experienced today. Unlike the energy transformation, however, a similarly radical shift in the food system is not only failing to happen but is barely recognised as being necessary outside a fairly small circle.

“If the government created support that took a whole farm approach, integrating nature and food production through agroecological farming methods, and promoted healthier diets aligned with what the UK can sustainably produce, we could move away from input-heavy agriculture, reducing our reliance on imports and increasing the resilience of domestic production to extreme weather.”

Much of the media’s commentary on the Iran war has, quite rightly, noted the major impacts it will have on food prices and production, thanks primarily to the effects on nitrogen fertiliser supplies. There has, though, been vanishingly little reporting on how and why a major reduction in our reliance on energy-intensive agrochemical inputs, like nitrogen fertiliser, could tackle this issue moving forwards. Instead, prominent voices have effectively positioned fertiliser supplies, and the maintenance of current levels of food production, as proxies for food security. But this is a dangerous oversimplification, that ignores the various other equally important dimensions of food security and fails to acknowledge the enormous potential that exists to wean ourselves off agrochemicals, and in so doing generate a much deeper degree of resilience in our food system.

None of this will be easy to achieve, of course. But the threats our food system face are potentially catastrophic, and demand urgent and radical action. If we fail to do so, the consequences will be dire. If, however, we rise to meet the challenge – by implementing genuinely regenerative farming practices, adopting healthy diets and putting in place the various enabling policies and infrastructure needed to make this a reality – then we can create a better future for people and the planet alike.

 

To understand more about how these global dynamics are already playing out on the ground, and what they mean for countries directly impacted by the current conflict, read Zeead Yaghi’s analysis of Lebanon’s growing food crisis.

To hear more from Megan, listen to our most recent episode of the Sustainable Food Trust Podcast, where she joins Patrick and Stuart to talk about food security.

 

Featured image by Suphanat Khumsap (Getty Images).

Lebanon is facing a food security crisis. An over reliance on imports at the expense of investment in local food networks and sustainable domestic agriculture, has left the country vulnerable in the face of acute shocks. As conflict and climate change cause increasing turmoil and food security rises up the global agenda, Zeead Yaghi – scholar, writer and editor – explores why Lebanon is at such severe risk of food shortages and the lessons that can be learned.

Three weeks into the latest Israeli war on Lebanon, the second in as many years, its bombing campaign has unleashed a devastating humanitarian crisis. Over one million people from south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut have been displaced, and roughly 20% of the entire population have been pushed into emergency refugee centers.

Some refugees with enough means have opted to find housing on the private rental market, but the price shock driven by increased demand and sectarian anxiety over the displaced has left many unable to afford such alternatives. This has left tens of thousands of displaced people without any shelter and no recourse but to sleep rough on the available public spaces in the capital: the seaside corniche in Ras Beirut facing the Mediterranean, large sidewalks in downtown and the small scattered few parks across the city.

“Prior to the start of this war, Lebanon was already undergoing a severe food security crisis. Recent assessments by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimate that around 1.26 million individuals are facing crisis-level food insecurity (Phase 3), including approximately 85,000 in emergency conditions (Phase 4)…”.

Emergency relief efforts by the Lebanese government, local mutual aid networks and international organisations provide the displaced with shelter, medicine and especially food. This is occurring within the backdrop of Lebanon, which has undergone a series of economic and political crises that have undermined its already fragile and precarious food sovereignty and security systems.

Prior to the start of this war, Lebanon was already undergoing a severe food security crisis. Recent assessments by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) estimate that around 1.26 million individuals are facing crisis-level food insecurity (Phase 3), including approximately 85,000 in emergency conditions (Phase 4), highlighting the urgent need for humanitarian intervention. Refugee populations are particularly vulnerable, with significant proportions of Syrian and Palestinian refugees experiencing acute levels of food insecurity. In response to worsening economic conditions, displacement and conflict, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Program (WFP) have identified Lebanon as a major hotspot of concern globally.

This brings us back to the current moment.

Lebanon depends on imports to provide roughly 80% of its food needs. This model works as long as the global supply chain that provides the transport of food resources to the country, stays intact. Currently, the Israeli government has refrained from bombing the Lebanese International Airport and the Port of Beirut, the main arteries for food supply into the country. Should Israel strike these two sites, as it did in the early days of the 2006 war, rendering them inoperable, the country could stand to face a major food catastrophe.

Other geopolitical circumstances also threaten this fragile food system. The Israeli war on Lebanon is partly an extension of the current American/Israeli war on Iran that has shut down the Strait of Hormuz, all but blocking the transfer of oil, natural gas and fertiliser out of Persian Gulf states to the rest of the world. This has had the immediate cost of increasing the prices of these commodities across the world, and countries dependent on the oil from the region have begun to ration resources in anticipation of price shocks and further delays. The cascading effect of the blockade on the supply chain is the gradual increase in cost of transportations of material, not only oil and gas, but all supplies transported across the globe to astronomical prices, whose costs will be borne by the poorest nations and people across the globe.

“Currently, the Israeli government has refrained from bombing the Lebanese International Airport and the Port of Beirut, the main arteries for food supply into the country. Should Israel strike these two sites, as it did in the early days of the 2006 war, rendering them inoperable, the country could stand to face a major food catastrophe.”

Lebanon is already seven years into a large-scale financial crisis, engineered by its oligarchic elites, which liquidated the savings of the majority of the country and decimated the value of its national currency. The crisis pushed 44% of the current population into poverty according to a 2024 report by the World Bank, as well as driving the costs of everyday necessities into hyperinflation. Since the resumption of the fighting in Lebanon, food prices have gone up quickly in a matter of weeks, with foods like bananas jumping 41%, while the price of lamb has increased by 21%.

One week into the war, the Lebanese Minister of the Economy and Trade, Amer Bisat, reassured the residents that the country had high-level storage of basic commodities in flour, food and gas, insisting that food security was “safe for several months”. But that was early into the war and the situation, both in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf, have escalated quickly with no end in sight.

“Since the resumption of the fighting in Lebanon, food prices have gone up quickly in a matter of weeks, with foods like bananas jumping 41%, while the price of lamb has increased by 21%.”

Hani Bohsali, the head of an all-powerful food import syndicate, told local television on March 23rd that although fuel costs have risen by 40%, it has only so far been reflected in a minimal raise in local food prices, nothing “above 5%”. There are, however, no guarantees that food importers will not use the opportunity to price gouge local consumers and drive an already anxious and destitute population into further poverty. The government has, so far, only paid lip service to a monitoring role to prevent importers from abusing their leverage, yet we have not seen any significant action towards that role.

Meanwhile, the Israeli onslaught continues to devastate the country’s natural resources. The Israeli bombing campaigns of 2024 and 2026, the use of white phosphorus, and targeting of agricultural fields in both southern and eastern Lebanon have destroyed and polluted precious important agrarian land which will take years to recover. Last February, Israeli drones sprayed pesticides over agricultural fields in southern Lebanon, and tests reveal the substance was glyphosate which destroys vegetation and poisons the soil. The purpose of Israel’s ecocide in these parts of the country is to both unravel the local economy and ecology of the region making it uninhabitable to its residents. Israel seeks to create a depopulated buffer 15 km into Lebanon up until the Litani river. By rendering the land unlivable this objective becomes easier. On March 15th an Israeli strike on the border of Chebaa in southern Lebanon killed two shepherds.

The immediate and historical circumstances of war, financial collapse and political deadlock, paint a dire picture for Lebanon’s food sovereignty and future food security. Unless there is an immediate cessation of hostilities which allows displaced people back to their homes and the implementation of a massive humanitarian relief campaign, the civilian population stands to lose most. Once, and if, the fighting is over, unless Lebanese officials implement structural changes to agricultural and economic policies that shift the country’s food regime away from import dependence towards resilient agroecological and sustainable systems, we are bound to find ourselves in similar predicaments many more times in the future whenever a geopolitical crisis erupts.

 

Featured image by Diana Salloum.

The following extract is His Royal Highness King Charles III’s (Patron of the SFT) foreword from The Harmony Debates: Exploring a Practical Philosophy for a Sustainable Future – also delivered by HRH as a speech at the Sustainable Food Trust’s ‘Harmony in Food and Farming’ conference at Llandovery College in July 2017.

 

 

I feel tremendously humbled by your creating an entire conference out of a desire to understand what I have been trying to point out for so long. For what has seemed rather an eternity, I found people have tended to think – or have been encouraged to think – that I was just concerned to pursue some sort of pet, ‘New Age’, niche farming project for food fads in this country, or just concerned about efforts to preserve the heritage of the past for some sort of ridiculous nostalgic reason, or that I wanted to see a kind of housing development that harked back to some long lost, golden age of building with everything covered in classical columns. What never seemed to be reported was that my concern has always been focused not on the past, but on the future and how best to address the critical environmental, economic and social issues of our day. In the end, I felt I simply had to produce a book that explained my proposition in a bit more detail, and that book was of course Harmony. [1] And it was my attempt to set out how we might approach the way we do things by looking at how nature herself operates, and it endeavoured to explain the simple tenets of the ancient philosophical standpoint that lay behind all of my efforts to put its tireless, perennial wisdom into action, not least when it comes to food and farming.

Now I must say it is particularly appropriate that here in Wales (which, of course, is renowned as the land of song), you should be exploring why I chose that important word as the title of my book. What you may not know is that the concept of harmony also lies at the very heart of traditional Welsh poetry. Some years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting the poet and former Archdruid of Wales, Dic Jones, who, as well as being a farmer in Ceredigion, was a master of cynghanedd, which is the ancient system of poetic meters in Welsh poetry. Dic’s poetry followed the same system – with its meters, precise syllable counts and rhymes – so brilliantly that his work was compared with that of Dafydd ap Gwilym who was a contemporary of Chaucer and one of the chief glories of Welsh literature. The system is actually far older than Chaucer’s day. It goes back over a thousand years and, thankfully, is still thriving today.

Crucially, the word cynghanedd may be translated as ‘harmony’ and embodies an approach that seeks to embody the principles of symmetry, proportion and beauty, not just in every poem, but, literally, within every line. Dic Jones actually wrote one of his englyns about cynghanedd itself:

 

Yn enaid yr awenydd – ei geiriau

Fel dau gariad newydd

Drwy ei sain a’u hystyr sydd

Yn galw ar ei gilydd.

 

In the soul of the author – harmony’s words, [2]

like lover and lover,

through music and meaning are

calling to one another.

 

As I say, Dic was a farmer as well as a poet, and that is a rare combination, so I am very pleased to see that the arts also have a place at your conference. It is more commonly the view that things like beauty and harmony, a reverence for the sacred, putting nature at the heart of our thinking and so on, have no place at all in agricultural matters, in the design process, the way we do business, our approach to engineering and, certainly, to the way we might gear our entire economy. It is argued that in a world where resources are scarce, where populations are ballooning, where all that matters is the bottom line and where computers and digital technology can supposedly do the job much more efficiently and dispassionately, to consider a notion like beauty or harmony is to divert attention away from what matters most. Well, I would just say, be very careful. It is worth taking a step back and considering the consequences; what happens when we separate what we are from what we do.

That is what I believe has happened. We are struggling with the deep-rooted consequences of an immense separation. As I try to explain in the book, it has a long history that goes back beyond the dawning of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century.

The first hint of a shift occurs during the course of the twelfth century when the very notion of the divine started to change. For all sorts of reasons, ‘God’ began to be seen as a separate entity – ‘out there,’ beyond creation, separate from nature. And with that came the idea that nature was an unpredictable force without inherent order. Humanity was seen as the instrument of the will of God, rather than a ‘participant’ in creation. And so, as God became separate from His Creation, so humanity became separate from nature, and thus, what I might call ‘the organic unity of reality’ began to fragment. It put paid to thousands of years of understanding of our place in the world and so put the teachings of all the great sacred traditions at odds with the way Western thinking was starting to go.

Now it is important to note that the ancient, but perennial philosophical principles lay at the root of every one of the world’s great traditions, including the Western tradition founded by the ancient Greeks. To put Plato very simply – it was the philosophy of wholeness. It was a perception of the world that lasted right up to the thirteenth century in Christian philosophy too, and it taught that everything is interconnected and therefore interdependent, so that we inhabit a world where no one part of the whole can grow well or true without it serving the well being of the whole. What is more, there is an underlying geometry at work, a constantly moving pattern of life that is proportioned and remarkably balanced.

Sadly, as I charted in the book, that idea of humanity existing within ‘a living whole’ was abandoned by those who led the mechanistic revolution that found its feet in the seventeenth century. We kept the words but tended to forget their meaning. What has happened is that the sense of an animate nature in which we live and move and have our being, has been replaced more or less wholesale by a rather more artificial idea that nature is some kind of autonomous machine with no purpose and no self-organising principles. And for me, that is a very damaging consequence of separating what we are from what we do. You only have to look at the precise and detailed scientific observations we now have to realise how uncomfortably close to the brink it has taken us, particularly when it comes to the appalling risks we are running with climate change.

Nowhere is this separation more starkly apparent than in agriculture. Food production in its rich variety of forms effectively covers some seventy per cent of the land in the United Kingdom, yet in my lifetime I have watched the industrialisation of food production turn the living organism of an individual farm into little more than a factory, where finite raw materials are fed in at one end, and food of varying quality comes out the other.

My great hope is that your conference might strengthen the common understanding of why this approach has to change – why we have to find ways of bringing about a widespread transition to farming, where farms become more balanced and harmonious entities – within nature, within their communities, and certainly within the capacity of the planet.

If you think about it, there is no technical reason why farms cannot become more diverse, nor why they cannot care more for the soil they depend upon; nor why farm animals can’t be treated more humanely. Restoring harmony to farming means having to put back as much as you take out and thus working with the grain of nature – there is no reason why food cannot be produced in ways that enhance biodiversity rather than destroy it, and why, ultimately, the vital connection between the food producer and the food consumer can’t also be restored. Re-forging that critical relationship would, I suspect, improve the chances of us making progress in all these other areas I’ve just mentioned.

What is encouraging, though, is that attitudes do seem to be changing. When once there would have been a discordant chorus of outraged abuse for talking about there being a comprehensive systemic relationship between all things, now eminent bodies in science and learning acknowledge there is truth in this. In many scientific fields, for instance, there is a growing realisation that we are, indeed, utterly embedded within nature’s self-organising living web. To the extent that we are not simply a part of that web; we are the web ourselves. We are nature – her patterns are our patterns. We live and move and have our being within Nature’s benevolent complexity and it is this living system that makes us – and which, incidentally, we are doing our utmost to test to destruction.

This is why, ladies and gentlemen, I find it so unbelievable when people ask why should we bother with the conservation and protection of the Earth’s dwindling biodiversity, or why we should strive to make the terrifying environmental issues we now face such a priority. It is, of course, the diversity of life on Earth which actually enables us ‘to have our being’. Deplete it, reduce it, erode and destroy it and we will succeed in causing such disorder that we risk de-railing humanity’s place on Earth for good.

This is why I have been trying to say for so long that we have to look urgently at what will restore nature’s balance before it is finally too late – and that moment, I hate to say, is upon us. We have to restore that perception of the world as a joined up, integrated unity. We have to reconcile the voices of both sides of our being, the intuitive and the rational; between, if you like, the East and the West in our consciousness.

So I am immensely encouraged by what is going on here in Wales, particularly at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. And I cannot thank enough the Venerable Master Chin Kung for his decision to invest so much of his time and resources in supporting the university’s Harmony Programme which is striving to teach the importance and process of interfaith dialogue and peace, but moreover – and this, for me, is immensely significant – to explore ways in which Harmony itself can be developed as a proper discipline; one which takes a much more integrative view of things, in that farming is as related to the way we build things, as are the ways we approach, say, healthcare or business.

Work is already being done, on the ground, in education, and I gather you will be hearing in a little while how this all works from a head teacher, Richard Dunne who, for some unaccountable reason, as he’s explained, was seemingly inspired by my explanation of the principles of harmony and went on to apply them in the classrooms of his own state primary school in Surrey. Now, as you will hear, enquiries of learning are carried out across the entire curriculum from the viewpoint of the principles of harmony. Which is to say that, rather than separating out the different subjects, as others have preferred, individually studying maths or chemistry, geography or economics, a subject like climate change becomes the subject of an enquiry of learning, which involves the application of all of those key disciplines, and others too.

This then is one very good example of how we might change our view of the world. And perhaps it might be a good start to this conference as you take a look at what can be gained from a study of the systemic web of life we call nature and how so many processes and patterns work so coherently to keep the whole of nature going. If we can apply ourselves to this, my hope is that we might begin to mimic that approach in so many fields of our endeavour. This leads me to my final point, which is to put this question to you – how might these patterns of behaviour, this ‘grammar of harmony’, better serve a more sustainable approach to food production and farming? And to that end, what can we learn from things like traditional architecture, traditional crafts, music, education and engineering, that might enable us to establish a much more sure-footed response to the enormous problems we face by forging a more circular form of economy, as Dame Ellen MacArthur has articulated so brilliantly.

Ladies and gentlemen, I began my own efforts to understand such questions with self-doubt. Now I have no doubt. We simply cannot solve the problems we have caused by responding with a ‘business as usual’ approach, trying to bounce back from every knock we take using the conventional approach, which only compounds the problem. What we have to do is bounce forward by learning from the past. We have to look again very seriously at the philosophy of wholeness that held sway for so long in all of the world’s great sacred traditions. The clues are to be found in the arts of the past, in the music of the past, in the methods and approach of the traditional crafts, in the way we once revered the Earth and spoke openly of our inherent sense of the sacred, but above all in the inherent genius of nature herself. There lie the seeds of the answers, I promise you. This is not backward-looking and anti-science; it is reinstating the discarded baby that was rashly removed with the bathwater. So, the fact that you are about to do just that over these next two very full days is more encouraging to me than you can ever imagine and I much look forward to hearing if you can resuscitate the baby – harmoniously!

 

Notes

1. HRH The Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at our World (London: Harper Collins, 2010).

2. Literally ‘its words’.

 

Special thanks to Nicholas Campion for allowing us to reshare this extract from The Harmony Debates: Exploring a Practical Philosophy for a Sustainable Future – available to buy here.

In the 1970s there were 2,500 abattoirs in the UK – today there are only 203. Wicked Leeks’s Anna Zuurmond takes a closer look at the ways in which farmers have been affected by the loss of their local abattoir, as well as what this means for consumers and access to higher-welfare, organic meat.

This article was originally published in Wicked Leeks magazine.

The number of abattoirs in the UK has diminished from 2,500 in the 1970s to just 203 today, meaning animals are travelling further and longer to slaughter and fewer farmers are able to sell quality meat direct to consumers.

A recent survey of over 850 farmers by the Sustainable Food Trust (SFT) found that many small farmers would struggle to sell direct to consumers if their local abattoir were to close – smaller abattoirs offer services like private kill, where farmers’ own meat is returned to them by the abattoir for them to sell.

In the absence of this service, many farmers would be forced to sell their meat directly into wholesale markets, which over 58 per cent of farmers in the SFT’s survey deemed to be unprofitable for their business; the knock-on effect then being that consumers have less access to quality local meat.

The survey found that, as a direct result of small abattoir closure forcing them to use larger facilities, 18 per cent of farmers have already been forced to sell off their livestock, and almost a fifth of organically certified respondents (19%) said they have had to stop selling their meat as organic due to lack of access to organic abattoir services.

Challacombe farm, based on Duchy of Cornwall land on Dartmoor, Devon, has 20 Welsh Black Bullock cows and 200 Shetland X Icelandic sheep, a small, hardy and non-commercial rare breed which they keep mainly to manage their land.

They use local abattoir Gages, just nine miles down the road in Buckfastleigh, for all of their private kill, and then send on the skins to Devonia Sheepskins tannery, a further two miles down the road and the oldest tannery in Britain, to be made into rugs.

“The only journey the animals take off the farm is to the abattoir, and we know exactly what happens to them,” said farm co-owner Mark Owen, who runs the farm with his wife, Naomi Oakley.

Meanwhile, 10 per cent of the 850 farmers surveyed travelled more than 60 miles with their livestock, and many voiced concerns about how, if animal travel time to abattoir increased, it would undermine high on-farm welfare standards, which consumers also want and are willing to pay more for.

“The local abattoir is essential. We take the sheep in the morning, in the afternoon the skins are ready to pick up. You go down there and you see how hard everyone is working, the care that is taken, nothing is hanging around for too long, it’s very quiet in the holding pens – no banging and crashing,” said Owen.

Challacombe Farm’s livestock is organic and 100% grass-fed, with welfare approved by ‘A Greener World’, a strict certification only given when livestock have all-year-round access to fields.

As a result of their local abattoir, which they travel to most weeks, and the tannery next door, Challacombe is able to sell skins and meat direct to people “who understand how we produce [our meat], the impact on the environment, and animal welfare”.

The Lang family, who have run Gages abattoir alongside Dartmoor Butchers for more than 80 years through multiple generations, explained how they offer a mixture of private kill to local farmers, particularly rare breeds, as well as selling local farm meat at their Butchers, and to Riverford.

“Obviously we have complete control in what we’re getting”, said the Lang family, “we didn’t want to start just buying in stuff. We’ve always done our own thing.”

Succession issues

One of the greatest challenges to both their abattoir and Butchers is staffing, particularly with finding young people who are interested, and the Langs said this is something that is “unlikely to improve”.

The average age of abattoir owners in the UK is between 60-70, and getting young people into the industry and succession planning has been a key issue for many small abattoirs, and a factor in the closure of some.

Everything from the lairage, where livestock are held in pens before slaughter, to moving animals and carcasses, makes working in an abattoir a very physically demanding role, particularly with an ageing workforce, even with mechanisation of certain elements.

There are specialised government-funded meat apprenticeships for roles such as butchers, meat processors and abattoir technicians, however between 2019-2025 only 22 abattoir apprentices completed their apprenticeships (just five a year) despite the fact that 82 per cent of abattoirs and butchers said they would welcome an apprentice according to a 2023 National Craft Butchers survey.

A big part of the battle, perhaps unsurprisingly, is making the meat sector an attractive place for young people to want to work, despite the fact it’s a highly skilled job.

Sarah Dyke, Lib Dem MP for Glastonbury and Somerton, who is responsible for securing a debate in parliament for small abattoirs, said: “There should be more on the curriculum on food and farming – all that connection with food, but with rearing animals as well.”

Perhaps abattoir trips for school children would be a step too far, but some kind of secondary school education on how meat is produced is integral to an understanding of food provenance as well as forming a surer route into the meat industry and its potential career paths.

Sheepskins for sale

The falling price that abattoirs get for sheepskins and hides has also been a key driver in small abattoir collapse. The Lang family told me that 15 years ago, you would get £6-8 for a sheepskin, whereas now you have to pay £1.60 per skin to have them taken away, whilst cow hides have reduced from around £45-50 per hide to £4-5 in the last 15 years.

Over this short period of time, skins and hides have gone from a valuable byproduct, that many farmers say covered the operational costs of slaughter, to an additional cost-to-bear for farmers, particularly as collectors and renderers charge small abattoirs more to carry out small scale collections of skins and hides.

The Langs commented on how this is largely a result of the Chinese and Turkish markets which account for 84 per cent of the value of all worldwide sheepskin exports, adding that, “There’s no UK market for it now.”

As a result of this cost, only around 1 per cent of UK sheepskins are believed to be used, with over 15 million discarded every year, and some abattoirs even paying for hide shredders to effectively dispose of it themselves.

Owen told me how people “absolutely love” their organic sheepskin rugs, produced at Devonia Sheepskins, one of few remaining of 21 UK tanneries; a small-scale example which shows how skins and hides could be viewed as a valuable and beautiful byproduct once again and help the meat industry close that loop.

This is before we factor in the other costs that consumers don’t see – all the waste, such as entrails, that gets sent to renderers to be processed into biofuel and pet food, as well as the compulsory staining and later incineration of certain parts of the animals for disease prevention.

Whilst it’s not the loveliest conversation to have over your Sunday roast, it’s another reason, along with how an animal is reared, that a consumer may consider paying a bit more for your small-scale butcher-bought lamb that was killed in a small abattoir, rather than something that was both industrially produced and killed.

Support for local abattoirs

A huge win for abattoirs this year was the retention of the FSA (Food Standards Agency) 90 per cent discount on veterinary charges for small abattoirs – a massive relief when the hourly rate of on-site vets, who must oversee the abattoir at all times, increased by 17.7 per cent in 2025 alone.

Now the Abattoir Sector Group (ASG) are calling for more ring-fenced funding support for this sector.

This could include the reopening of the Small Abattoir Fund, a £4m budget opened under the conservatives, of which just over a 1m has ever been allocated, and has now been discontinued.

This is particularly important in keeping small famers in business, but also in keeping prices of quality meat accessible for consumers, with one third of farmers surveyed by the SFT saying they will have to push meat price hikes onto consumers if slaughtering charges by the FSA continue to rise.

Sarah Dyke MP has said that the whole relationship with the FSA must go further:

“I want to see a marked change in the FSA’s relationship with these businesses. Yes, of course food safety is paramount but we’ve got to look at it differently. Small abattoirs do a different job to high output abattoirs. They deal with rare breeds, organic, bespoke slaughtering – that job needs to be recognised.”

She criticised the punitive nature of surprise arbitrary inspections by the FSA, and the lack of administrative co-operation in working with smaller businesses.

“You need big abattoirs for supermarkets and small abattoirs for small producers”, says Mark Owen from Challacombe, as a larger facility is not designed to take the 2-3 animals that he’ll bring to slaughter.

This debate becomes paramount as we see an influx of international trade deals on meat, including a trade deal with the US that will lift tariffs and open up the UK market to US beef, whilst ASDA has proudly started stocking Uruguayan beef.

These threaten to undercut the prices of UK meat, just as milk and butter imports did in late autumn last year, causing a tumbling farmgate price, and many consumers unknowingly buying US butter and milk from supermarkets.

It’s therefore all the more integral that we support our local infrastructure – from farm to abattoir, to butcher, to tannery – and ensure that the small businesses working together to provide consumers with high-welfare British meat will not become a figment of the past.

 

To find out more about the SFT’s work with local abattoirs, click here.

Featured image by Christian Kay.

Can the UK feed itself in the face of ecosystem collapse? Our Head of Policy & Campaigns, Megan Perry, takes a closer look at the UK Government’s recently published security report – following a Freedom of Information Request by the Green Alliance – highlighting how the government’s ‘just in time’ approach to food supply jeopardises the UK’s food security, and the transformation in food and farming production that is needed to address this.

A new report has given one of the starkest warnings yet for UK food security. If current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse. This will mean the UK cannot feed itself.

These warnings were so stark, in fact, the UK Government attempted to bury its own report. ‘Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security’ was written by the joint intelligence committee (which comprises the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and senior officials from the Cabinet Office, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Ministry of Defence, Home Office and HM Treasury) and was initially blocked by Downing Street. It only came out following a Freedom of Information Request by the Green Alliance.

Why was it blocked? According to The Times, Downing Street felt the report was too negative and would draw attention to the Government’s failure to act. The published document is reported to have been cut down, with some of the most alarming parts left out.

As the Government tries to keep us in the dark, it is even more important we sit up and take notice. The report warns that, “Without significant increases in UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food. The UK relies on imports for a proportion of both food and fertiliser and cannot currently produce enough food to feed its population based on current diets.”

Across the world, ecosystems are collapsing. According to the report, the rate of extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years. It suggests that a sixth mass extinction may be underway. There is a realistic possibility some critical ecosystems, such as coral reefs in Southeast Asia and boreal forests will start to collapse by 2030 or sooner, and rainforests and mangroves from 2050. This is a direct result of biodiversity loss from land use change, pollution, climate change and other drivers.

As the report clearly states, “nature is a foundation of national security”. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse threaten the fundamental existence of human life – access to water, food, clean air and critical resources.

As these become scarce, the report warns there will be conflict within and between states along with mass migration and increased risk of pandemics. According to the report, a one percentage increase in food insecurity in a population compels 1.9 percent more people to migrate. Political instability and rising poverty will provide more opportunities for terrorism and organised crime. Global economic collapse will become more likely. As the report says, “Nature is a finite asset which underpins the global economy. It would take resources of 1.6 Earths to sustain the world’s current levels of consumption.”

The report is upfront about how this impacts UK food security. Biodiversity loss, alongside climate change, is one of the biggest threats to domestic food production – through depleted soils, the loss of pollinators, and drought and flood conditions.

It details how ecosystem collapse would place the UK’s agriculture system under great stress, leaving it struggling to pivot to the new approaches and technologies that would be required to maintain food supply. Impacts on major food producing regions around the world will have a direct impact on the UK which relies on global markets for food (40% is imported), animal feed (18% comes from South American soy) and fertiliser.

But food is not just affected by biodiversity loss, it is a direct contributor, with food production named as the most significant cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss.

A shift to sustainable farming systems has therefore never been more critical, playing a key role in reversing ecosystem collapse and mitigating food insecurity. Carrying on as we are and pursuing extractive agricultural practices is not an option. Yet the UK Government seems determined to ignore the immense and imminent risks.

“As the report clearly states, “nature is a foundation of national security”. Biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse threaten the fundamental existence of human life – access to water, food, clean air and critical resources.”

It is notable that the UK has so far failed to change its approach to supply chain resilience and security, unlike countries such as Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany who are building up their food stocks and reserves. The UK, meanwhile, continues to rely on a ‘just in time’ approach to food supply, requiring consistent and rapid delivery to keep shelves stocked. Any disruption to this supply chain could have an enormous impact on the availability of food in the UK.

Global threats are looming, and while the UK now reports separately on food security, it lacks any coherent action plan and fails to integrate food with wider security strategy. The UK Risk Register – which flags up the main threats to the UK and covers everything from terrorism to disease outbreak – fails to make food and water a clearly defined risk in its own right. The UK National Security Strategy published last year gave a passing mention of food four times and without any detail about how the UK plans to address threats to food supply. The 2022 Government Resilience Framework said nothing at all about food.

What can be done?

Protecting and restoring ecosystems is clearly a priority. But our current trajectory does not look good, and plans need to be put in place now to deal with the potential impacts.

We agree with many of the report’s conclusions, including that self-sufficiency requires a wholesale change in consumer diets and improvements in efficiency, waste reduction and resilience across the food system, including agricultural production, food processing, distribution and consumption. These echo the conclusions of the Sustainable Food Trust’s Feeding Britain report which showed the UK can transition to fully regenerative farming practices and maintain or improve current levels of self-sufficiency, but that dietary change would be needed.

We welcome the mention of regenerative agriculture as a solution and feel there is a wider point to be made – climate change and geopolitical shocks change the equation around agroecological vs ‘conventional’ food systems and their (perceived) practicality. Arguments that agroecology is unfeasible due to its lower yields and a requirement for very difficult dietary change, are somewhat overshadowed by the reality that a food system with heavy use of imports, fossil fuels and agrichemical inputs could become unviable in the face of ecosystem collapse and geopolitical turmoil. Not to mention that these intensive input-heavy systems are the biggest contributors to ecosystem collapse. There is no choice but to seriously consider agroecology as the main alternative.

We therefore caution against placing too much emphasis on new technology to provide the answers (plant-breeding, AI, lab grown protein and insect protein are all mentioned). That’s not to say that technology has no role to play – far from it. But systemic change, from farm to fork, is what is ultimately required.

Any shortages in food will inevitably impact hardest on those who are already facing food poverty. The report says substantial price increases for consumers would be required for self-sufficiency. Yet prices now do not reflect the real cost of production, with the most damaging foods often being the ‘cheapest’ yet costing far more in environmental damage and impacts on our health. A transformation of our food system is needed to right these skewed economics and government intervention must be a core part of that.

The report also says the UK does not have enough land to feed its population and rear livestock. We agree that a complete shift is needed away from grain-fed livestock, particularly intensively produced poultry and pork. But integrating pasture-fed livestock, such as cattle and sheep, into regenerative systems is critical to rebuild soil fertility and move away from our reliance on fossil fuel- and energy-intensive fertilisers and pesticides.

Grazing livestock produce nutrient-dense foods that complement, rather than compete with, the crops produced from our finite and increasingly degraded arable area. In fact, in a regeneratively farmed UK, predominantly grass-fed animals could supply a significant proportion of the nation’s nutrient requirements – including around 34% of recommended protein intake, 37% of fat intake and 98% of vitamin B12 intake.

“We caution against placing too much emphasis on new technology to provide the answers (plant-breeding, AI, lab grown protein and insect protein are all mentioned). That’s not to say that technology has no role to play – far from it. But systemic change, from farm to fork, is what is ultimately required.”

Livestock also provide a level of resilience to environmental shocks that crops do not – they can be moved and, in worst cases slaughtered, should resources such as water become scarce or fields flooded.

So, a major transformation in livestock production is needed, as is the case for crop production. And this will require many people to eat less meat and dairy, overall. It’s critical, though, that this transformation doesn’t overlook the massively positive role that livestock can play in fostering a more resilient, environmentally and socially sustainable food system.

The report says countries best placed to adapt are those that invest in ecosystem protection and restoration, and resilient and efficient food systems. Yet support for sustainable food production has been inadequate and shambolic, with record closures of farming businesses. The UK also appears to have given up on the 30×30 target (30% of our land and sea protected for biodiversity by 2030) and is on track to miss targets established in the 2021 Environment Act for protecting and restoring wildlife.

While we must pressure Government to act with urgency, communities can also take things into their own hands. Tim Lang’s excellent report on civil food resilience highlights the different ways people can build resilience themselves, whether by growing food in allotments, gardens and community farms, forming co-operatives, building community food stocks, or by sharing skills.

Ultimately a major mindset shift is needed to address the root causes of ecosystem destruction and to embrace an integrated approach to food production and nature restoration. There is no time to lose.

 

Featured image courtesy of Christian Kay.

In February 2026, a new Prison Food Policy framework comes into force for all prisons across England and Wales. SFT’s Senior Research Officer, Imogen Crossland, takes a closer look at the framework and explores what it could mean for the quality and procurement of the food served in prisons.

For years, prison inspections have painted a bleak picture of the food served behind bars, with serious and wide-ranging consequences for those who eat it. Unlike schools or hospitals, prisons are responsible for providing virtually all the food that people eat, often for months or years at a time. What ends up on the plate, therefore, matters enormously.

However, for the past 16 years, the guidance available to prison governors and their catering teams has been shockingly minimal. A four-page document published in 2010 set out plenty of food safety regulations, but as far as the meals themselves were concerned, the advice was lifted from the ‘Prison Rules’ legislation written in 1999: 

“The food provided shall be wholesome, nutritious, well prepared and served, reasonably varied and sufficient in quantity.”

Unsurprisingly, this did little to guarantee a healthy, balanced and enjoyable diet for people in prison.

That may now be about to change. In July 2025, the Government published an updated Food in Prisons Policy Framework, due to take effect in February 2026. The new document is ten pages long, accompanied by a 106-page guidance manual. While the document’s length does not guarantee better food on the plate, clearly a little more thought has gone into it this time around.

Bonnie Welch, Head of Projects, and Megan Perry, Head of Policy and Campaigns, reflect on this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference. Attending alongside colleagues from the Sustainable Food Trust and Global Farm Metric teams, they capture the energy, ideas and practical insights that emerged from sessions, workshops and conversations across ORFC.

What’s really in our food these days and how might it be affecting our health? In this conversation on the Sustainable Food Trust podcast, Patrick Holden, founder and CEO of the SFT, and Stuart Oates, founder of the Fossil Free Farm project, discuss what chemical residues and ultra-processed foods might mean for our health, and consider possible solutions.

Patrick:
Let’s discuss the influence of what we eat on our health. I’ve recently come across a couple of reports: the first was a retraction by a well-known journal that published a report, I think about 15–20 years ago, saying Roundup was safe. Last week, they retracted it because they realised that a lot of Monsanto employees had intervened and influenced the research, making it unsound. I think that’s big because Monsanto, and more recently Bayer, have been relying on that report.

Roundup is widely used all over the UK and the world – on arable farms for weed control and as a pre-harvest desiccant, which is how it mainly gets into our food. Even if it breaks down quickly in the soil, it’s still on the crop at harvest. The first thing we should fix is that pre-harvest desiccant – that’s the biggest problem.

Stuart:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. That pre-harvest desiccant is the biggest concern.

Patrick:
It ties into the broader conversation about chemicals in our food…and, as well as what’s applied to our food on the farm, there are also other kinds of chemicals in what we’re eating: the additives, the flavourings, all that stuff that’s put into food after it leaves the farm – particularly ultra-processed food.

There was a report in The Lancet recently looking at ultra-processed foods and other additives and the effect on the human microbiome. It sounds incredibly worrying. Basically, a lot of these additives are things our microbiome can’t cope with, and that’s almost certainly behind the exponential increase in previously uncommon diseases.

You have to ask why it is that one in two of us are now getting cancer. Surely that’s partly due to what we eat – and what we wouldn’t want to be in our food. I think The Lancet is drawing attention to that.

Stuart:
Yeah, absolutely. I think we’re only at the very beginning of that kind of research. For some reason, food has been completely unlinked from health for so long. I have lots of friends who are doctors, and not a single day of their course is spent on healthy eating and diet. That’s crazy.

That should be a big part of their training, because that’s preventative medicine – that’s what helps us live healthier lives along the way. Did you see the Panorama programme?

Patrick:
Yes.

Stuart:
That’s the next level. It’s looking at these forever chemicals.

Patrick:
That is quite scary.

Stuart:
Forever chemicals are going to be a big topic over the next decade. They’re only just being talked about in the mainstream, but they’ve been around for a very long time.

They’re deliberately designed not to break down. They have incredibly strong bonds, so they’re used for things like Teflon coatings on frying pans or waterproofing on jackets.

What shocked me in the Panorama programme was learning that there are forever chemicals in the sprays used on our food – pesticides and fungicides. They’re designed to stick to the surface of leaves and stay there. And that then gets into our food, our bloodstream, our bodies.

They’ve found forever chemicals in every single person they test. Every single one. You can’t understand how anyone thought that they were a good idea in the first place. Can you imagine, Patrick?

Patrick:
One chilling bit in that programme was when the presenter was offered a glass of red wine. Before asking if she wanted to drink it, the researcher explained that forever chemicals – which are active ingredients in pesticides – are sprayed onto grapes.

They explained that these chemicals are in the wine. Then they asked her if she still wanted to drink it. There was a grimace, and she said no. That was powerful.

I wonder whether red wine sales will drop this week – and whether organic red wine sales might rise. Because these issues really haven’t been brought to the public’s attention.

I don’t think the organic movement ever adequately described the extent to which unwanted chemicals get into our food and affect our health.

Stuart:
I think this is the big opportunity for organic. And we’re bound to say that, Patrick, as organic farmers and proponents of organic agriculture. But organic farming doesn’t allow forever chemicals – never has. That was part of the standards, even if we weren’t talking about forever chemicals when organic began.

If people really knew how their food was grown, things would change. I don’t want to attack other forms of agriculture – everyone is doing their best – but people need to know the truth so that standards and regulations can be higher.

In the UK, we’ll never compete globally on volume. But we could be the source of good, healthy, high-end food that’s environmentally responsible and careful about agricultural chemicals. We could be world leaders in that – if we choose to take the opportunity.

This extract is from an episode of the SFT podcast and has been lightly edited for readability. To hear the full conversation, click here. You can find all our episodes on the main podcast page.

Ultra-processed foods are everywhere – and now some of the world’s biggest food companies are being called to account. Victoria Halliday, the Sustainable Food Trust’s Communications Manager, looks at the evidence behind the health risks, cultural impacts and rising scrutiny of these products.

Recently, the city of San Francisco sued 10 leading food makers over their ultra-processed products. The accusation is that these companies are knowingly selling foods that have been linked to a rise in serious diseases, with comparisons being made to the tobacco industry. These ultra-processed foods (UPFs) make up an ever-increasing proportion of our diets – now accounting for over half of the food we’re eating in the UK and 60% in the US. Given that the latest research shows UPFs are associated with rising ill-health across the globe – from heart disease to depression – this raises urgent questions.

While our appetite for highly processed products is seemingly growing, it’s encouraging that the subject of better food and farming is breaking into both mainstream and fringe cultural discourse, from prime-time TV to post-punk poetry. Confrontational ‘no-wave’ poet and musician, Lydia Lunch (pictured), speaks of how heavily processed foods mean “we end up consuming so much poison”, while Happy Mondays’ lead singer, Bez, talks about replacing processed juices with fresh oranges, “preferably organic so there’s no pesticide sh*t in them”. And the issue is being covered through more mainstream channels too – from Joe Wicks’ Licensed to Kill on Channel 4, to Tim Spector’s popular science work on gut health and diet.

These voices can be incredibly powerful in helping to shape opinions and behaviours – most of us are much more likely to pay attention to a cultural figure whose work or opinions resonate with us, than to the earnest words of NGOs, politicians or policy experts. But whoever might be delivering the message, the facts on UPFs are becoming hard to ignore. As San Francisco’s case makes its way through the courts, it highlights three core claims that sit at the heart of the growing challenge to ultra-processed foods.

1. They’re engineered to be addictive

UPFs are designed to reel us in and keep us hooked. Food companies pour vast sums into engineering foods – or “food-like substances” as author Michael Pollan refers to them – that light up our brains’ reward centres due to their ‘hyper-palatability’. Combinations of high levels of sugar, salt and fat, as well as softer textures and artificially intense flavours, lead to cravings and a desire to eat more – so we end up eating too many calories but not enough nutrients.

The corporations behind these ‘foods’ are using increasingly aggressive tactics to drive consumption, influence research and prevent regulation. Although these companies put a lot of resources into advertising, seeking to persuade us that we have endless choice and novelty, the proliferation of UPFs means that we are, in fact, finding ourselves with fewer and fewer real options – just picture a supermarket shelf stocked with 20 different brands of ultra-processed, plastic-wrapped bread.

While addiction and craving are baked into the UPF business model, we’re encouraged to push blame onto each other (and ourselves) for not making better food choices as individuals. Our personal choices are powerful, and we can advocate for the type of food system we want by directing our spending accordingly – but the reality is that ultra-processed foods make up an ever-increasing proportion of what is available to buy in many supermarkets, especially in lower-income areas. The finger-pointing narrative serves as a smokescreen, diverting our frustration away from those making vast profits at the expense of public health and wellbeing.

2. They’re harming our bodies – and more

UPFs have been linked to harm in all our major body organs. The Lancet recently published major new research showing that the more UPFs we eat, the more likely that we will suffer from obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, Crohn’s disease, kidney disease, depression and many more conditions that result in ill-health and mortality. Professor Carlos Monteiro, one of the Lancet series authors, says this latest evidence “strongly suggests that humans are not biologically adapted to consume [UPFs]”.

Of key importance is the impact that UPFs have upon our gut microbiome – an intricate community of around 100 trillion microbes that live in our intestines. This microbiome is a major modifiable factor in our health and wellbeing, as explained by Tim Spector on the SFT Podcast: “A lot of the chemicals in your brain that transmit mood – and other states like fullness and hunger – are produced as chemicals, as your microbes digest plants. [These chemicals] go up into the bloodstream, into your brain, into the vagus nerve and can make the difference between you feeling happy or sad.” As well as mood, our gut microbiome influences many other aspects of health, including immunity, metabolic health and disease prevention.

While consumption of gut-damaging UPFs is on the up, the amount of fresh produce we consume is falling – a big problem for the health of our gut microbiome which depends upon a wide diversity of fresh foods. Fresh foods that have been grown in healthy soils and without agrichemicals provide us with unique fibres, polyphenols, and nutrients that feed different beneficial gut microbes. Which leads us to…

3. They’re crowding real foods off our plates

UPFs are pushing whole foods off our plates. This is a pattern being repeated across the globe – with the UK and US leading the charge. The impact on our health alone should be reason enough to resist this trend, yet the effects extend beyond this.

Food processing used to be mainly concerned with preservation of whole foods, as well as making them easier to use in the kitchen. Processing techniques varied from place to place – from fermenting cabbage to produce kimchi in Korea, to jellying eels in London’s East End. Now, industrial food processing is increasingly aimed at creating food-derived substances that take the place of whole foods entirely.

Long-established methods like freezing, drying, canning, pasteurisation and salting, largely preserve the natural composition of foods, whereas UPF technologies significantly alter them, mixing in industrial additives like plant protein isolates, mechanically separated meat, modified starches and oils, artificial colours, flavour enhancers, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers.

As UPFs become ever more ubiquitous, they flatten regional food cultures, replacing distinctive local cuisines with the same globally standardised products. Food that once reflected place, season and tradition is reduced to a uniform commodity – weakening local food economies, eroding cooking skills and severing the connection between people and the land that feeds them.

Will 2026 dish up a moment of reckoning for UPFs?

So, as the evidence mounts against UPFs, what comes next? Putting limits on the influence and reach of UPF manufacturers through regulation and taxation is essential; the ban on pre-9pm junk food adverts, which came into effect this week, is a small but significant step forward.

The costs of the harm caused by these foods – or, at least, a significant proportion of those costs – needs to be borne by those who profit from them, not by the public, an approach that the SFT advocates through its True Cost Accounting work. We as citizens also need to be educated, encouraged and supported to make healthier food choices – and those healthy choices must become the easier, more affordable option.

While the outcome is yet to be decided, the San Francisco lawsuit marks a significant escalation in how local governments are challenging food industry practices on public health grounds and could be the beginning of serious change. With mounting evidence, stronger regulation and growing public awareness, UPF manufacturers may finally be facing a crunch point.

Interested to learn more about what’s in our food? We recommend this episode of the SFT Podcast where Patrick Holden and Stuart Oates discuss UPFs, chemicals in food and what we can do about it.

Image credits: Image 1 (Lydia Lunch): Creative Commons; Image 3 (serving food at market): Mike Swigunski

With Christmas approaching – a time for stories and renewed hope – Robert Barbour, Senior Research Manager at the Sustainable Food Trust, reflects on the six months since the launch of Grazing Livestock: It’s not the cow but the how. He examines why we urgently need the ability to imagine a different future for food and farming, and how a research-backed vision for such a future has drawn both praise and pushback.

Earlier this year, the SFT published a report looking at the debate surrounding grazing livestock. It was a labour of love (amongst other emotions) started by our late colleague and friend Richard Young, that set out to make the case that cattle and sheep actually have a hugely positive role to play in a future UK food system – one where farming practices and diets are based on the land’s ecological carrying capacity.

Since its publication, we’ve had some really engaging conversations on the issues the report covered. But with lengthening nights and the dismal advent of Christmas hyper-consumption having soured my mood this week, I’ve decided to instead tap into my inner Scrooge and reflect on some of the criticisms the report has received.

The critiques: Tough questions to consider

Most of these have posed some interesting challenges. Wouldn’t, for instance, a future that involves smaller amounts of sustainably produced meat and dairy send food prices soaring? By talking about the positives that grazing systems can deliver, or by arguing that ruminant methane is a nuanced topic, aren’t we just pushing ‘Big Livestock’ talking points? And even if our arguments do have some validity, they only apply to a fraction of the animals reared today, and therefore surely only serve to justify continued, unsustainable patterns of meat consumption?

These are important questions, which I don’t have the space to do justice to here. One key point to make, though, is that these critiques are not universally applicable in every context. Yes, arguments for nuance around methane, for instance, are abused by parts of the livestock sector – but this doesn’t mean they constitute industry denial in every instance. And yes, the pasture-based, low input ruminant systems the report argues for only supply a small percentage of the meat and dairy we consume today – but that doesn’t mean that this need always be the case.

Is it all just “romantic cottagecore”?

If we’re going to emerge from our current siloes, we need to be much more open-minded and imaginative when it comes to the arguments presented by different sides in this debate, and in our ability to imagine food systems that are very different to today’s. And this leads on to the main criticism I’ve come across of our position, which is that the less intensive, generally lower yielding approach to livestock and food production that the SFT supports is disconnected from reality – “romantic cottagecore” as George Monbiot dismissively put it.

It’s true that the vision we set out will be challenging to realise. A wholesale transition to agroecological farming practices, where livestock production is centred on pasture-based systems of mainly cattle and sheep, is not going to happen overnight. Achieving this whilst also aligning our diets to what we can sustainably produce, and in so doing reducing the amount of meat and dairy most of us consume, will be even trickier.

Taking a more strategic view

I completely disagree, however, that campaigning for a move towards this vision is naïve or detached from reality. For a start, making the case for a more agroecological future isn’t just about fostering better lives for the people, livestock and wildlife that live in our farmed landscapes (though these things are clearly worth fighting for in and of themselves). There are big strategic reasons for supporting this transition, too. Take the reintegration of grazed temporary grass and clover ‘leys’ into arable rotations. We know that this can bring all sorts of environmental benefits. But what’s probably less often considered is how valuable a role this transition could play in improving the long-term viability of arable production, by making it more resilient to climate-related shocks, and much less reliant on the energy- and fossil fuel-intensive inputs we are going to have to wean ourselves off moving forwards, whether we like it or not.

This strategic value also applies to the nutritional contribution of grazing animals. Contrary to what is often argued, this could be really significant, not just because of the quantity of key nutrients that could be produced, but also, crucially, because this would be a supply of nutrients from a feed source – forage – that humans can’t consume. And this means we’re talking here about animals which complement, rather than compete with, the crops produced from our finite and degraded arable area, unlike animals reared in heavily grain-fed, industrial systems. Again, this is a service that is only likely to become more valuable as climate change and its associated shocks increase the probability of major disruptions to domestic crop production and global agrifood trade.

Some would say that that’s all well and good, but that it doesn’t change the fact that realising this approach to livestock production and the smaller amounts of high-quality meat and dairy it would necessitate is wishful thinking. They have a point – getting people to change their diets requires overcoming all sorts of deeply embedded institutional and cultural barriers. But this is the case with any sufficiently transformative vision of a sustainable future food system! Take a future where all animal-sourced foods are replaced with analogues created through precision fermentation or other cultured techniques. It’s sometimes argued that this represents a much more plausible route to getting people to change their diets because, in effect, they’d still be eating the same foods – it’s just that they’d come from a vat rather than an animal. But is that really the case? As far as I can see, this represents a dietary shift every bit as radical and difficult to sell as the sort we support – in fact, arguably more so.

What about ‘sustainable intensification’?

The immense difficulty of the diet challenge is partly why others argue that making industrial livestock systems ever more ‘efficient’, to sate the planet’s growing demand for meat as ‘sustainably’ as possible, is the only plausible solution here. But even if we set aside the massive environmental and ethical challenges this poses, this vision also comes with big question marks over its future viability. Climate change and its associated geopolitical shocks are already having major impacts on the food system, and as these worsen, the input- and import-heavy intensive cropping systems which industrial livestock production relies on are only going to become more vulnerable – perhaps even untenable. We also know that we need to get fossil fuels out of the food system fast, and this will have massive implications for the production, and potentially availability, of the synthetic fertilisers and pesticides that form the lifeblood of industrial agriculture. It’s safe to say that the potential ramifications of this have not yet been widely enough grasped.

A realistic agroecological future – and what’s needed to get there

In short, I don’t think an agroecological future, where grazing animals play a central role, is any more implausible than the other more commonly supported visions of a sustainable food system. Neither is it a ‘fairytale’ – grazing animals can help improve the resilience of a UK food system that faces all sorts of major threats to its food security, in various ways.

There is a hugely positive story to tell here, in some ways more positive, I’d argue, than the livestock-free narrative, certainly when it comes to speaking to the farming community. And that matters, given we very obviously need farmers to be a key part of any transition. I think a lot of people and organisations realise this – it’s hugely encouraging, for instance, to see an increasing number of conservation groups showcasing pasture-based and organic livestock farms as examples of what sustainable meat and dairy production looks like in practice. All too often, though, there still seems to be a disconnect between the positioning of pasture-based livestock systems – and indeed, agroecological farming practices more generally – as case studies of sustainability on the one hand; but then, on the other, the promotion of policies or recommendations that actively work against the adoption of these systems at scale. The EAT-Lancet commission’s latest report is a recent example of this. It contains a lot of really good stuff, including positive words around the need for a shift towards agroecology. Frustratingly, though, some of its agricultural modelling assumptions (e.g. increased yields in regions where these are already high) and dietary recommendations (e.g. greater levels of chicken in the diet than red meat) are just not consistent with what a shift towards agroecology would look like in reality.

This criticism is perhaps a bit nit-picky, especially when most livestock production – irrespective of species – still has so many problems. The point, however, is that if we do want to support agroecology at scale, as many organisations say they do, then there needs to be much more clarity and joined-up thinking across all food system actors than is the case today, including of course, around the need to support a transition to low input, pasture-based grazing systems.

How do we do this? There are obviously lots of things to say here, but I’ll finish by focussing on the critical importance of measurement. Sustainability is still so often understood largely, or even solely, through the narrow lens of carbon and land use intensity metrics, that don’t just overlook a wide range of key public goods but also provide a very incomplete picture of actual climate and land use impact. Unless we develop and adopt more holistic measures of sustainability, we will find it impossible to create a food system that truly delivers for people, the planet and the landscapes that we rely upon.

You can learn more about the role of livestock in a sustainable food system by downloading our Grazing Livestock report.