SFT CEO, Patrick Holden, recently wrote to the Secretary of State for Defra, The Rt Hon Steve Reed, to express the critical need for finance to accelerate the regenerative farming transition and the use of common metrics to measure and report on progress towards meeting our climate, nature and social goals.
I am writing to congratulate you on your historic victory and the energy and optimism you have brought to the challenges we face as a country.
I am both a farmer in Wales and the CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, so have a bird’s and worm’s eye view of food and farming. From that perspective it feels to me that food and farming could be a potentially defining issue for this Labour Government and for you as Secretary of State. The last time this was the case was at the end of the Second World War, during the Attlee Government, when food security and health were centre stage and seen as central to our nation’s future. With your personal leadership, it could be again.
Food and farming go to the heart of your Government’s preventative health agenda, Green Growth agenda, action on climate change, nature and rivers and are core national security issues, as Ukraine has proved. I believe it is something the public are desperately looking for leadership on. Britain could be a world leader on regenerative food and farming, pioneering a new approach that combats climate change, protects nature, builds food security and fights ill health and poverty. But to achieve this, we need an interconnected strategy that goes beyond any one ministry, linked to a big and bold vision.
To drive this integrated approach forward, a first step could be convening a ‘Food and Farming Council’, to bring together the Chancellor, Secretaries of State and Ministers from across departments, alongside a diverse set of voices across the food system from business to farmers. This forum could then shape and drive the integrated approach we need.
Linked to this, I wanted to suggest two key practical actions to take progress forward:
1. An at scale pilot of a new approach to financing regenerative agriculture developed and run with farmers, business and government. We are working through the Sustainable Markets Initiative, initiated by His Majesty the King, with a group of CEOs from some of the UK’s most influential companies, including McDonald’s, McCain, Pepsi, Waitrose, Lloyds Banking Group and Lloyds of London, to put this in place. It would be brilliant to bring Defra into this process to help design and implement a blended finance approach which complements the ELM scheme.
2. Impact measurement for environmental schemes such as ELMs: the SFT welcomes your continued commitment to schemes that support farmers to undertake environmental action. However, the major question underpinning these schemes, and public investment in them, is do they deliver? The SFT believes that common, holistic metrics are needed to underpin these schemes and determine what they can achieve. The SFT would welcome the opportunity to discuss with Defra and other relevant departments, the potential to develop a core framework and assessment that would enable the Government and farmers alike to measure and potentially value, environmental and social gains – and to identify major risks such as pollution. The SFT has incubated the Global Farm Metric, co-created across the food and farming sector. It is now being deployed through Defra trials, by major assessment organisations and adapted to be trialled across the world through the international collaboration with Regen 10. If Government were to mandate the use of this common framework as part of ELMs, it would help unlock a more joined up approach to finance and transparency.
The SFT would welcome the opportunity to discuss these ideas further with you. We are ready to enable ambitious change to accelerate the shift to regenerative food and farming.
