Oxford Real Farming Conference part 2 - Food Policy

Citizen’s Assembly: Emergency Plan for Agriculture and Wildlife

In our previous blog we reported on some of the discussions which RSPB was involved in at the Oxford Real Farming Conference. One of our aims for attending the conference was to crowdsource ideas to contribute to an Emergency Plan for Agriculture and Wildlife through a Citizens’ Assembly. In this blog we highlight some of the ideas which were championed at these sessions. Our Assembly was held in the beautiful space of St Aldates Church. There were four tables each with a different theme: local food policy and food networks; agroecology; farming and net zero; and a just transition for farmers.

Food policy and local food networks - Lucy Bjorck, RSPB senior policy officer

The first theme was local food policy and food networks. We asked the participants how we can use these mechanisms to help address the climate and nature crises, whilst delivering other benefits from food like public health.

Embedding practical approaches

At first the conversation focused on a range of fantastic practical examples which are already underway, but which would benefit from being scaled up or adopted more widely. These included: 

• Community freezers to reduce food waste – all food waste is also a waste of the environmental resources which were used to produce it and a missed opportunity to reduce our impact on nature.
• Food hubs to provide infrastructure connecting local producers with customers – these improve transparency in the food chain and help reconnect people with where their food is produced and how it shapes the environment.
• Access to land – allowing people to grow their own in a nature friendly way by providing more allotments, or linking those with unmanaged land with those who want to grow but lack the space as some Transition Towns do.
• Providing affordable/free cooking courses for parents – helping people understand food and make the most of seasonal and local produce and generating a market for local nature friendly produce.

The group felt strongly that such schemes can have a real impact, but often lack resources and capacity to engage people or publicise and communicate their work effectively. By building support for these approaches in national and local policies the group felt they could help make our food and farming system much more nature and climate friendly from the ground up by helping people make more nature friendly choices. One participant ‘DanthePlan’ has even written a template Supplementary Planning documents for councils who have declared a climate and ecological emergency which includes provisions for forest gardens!

Changing the narrative

In addition to the bottom-up ideas, the group were also keen to change the popular narrative around food. They were keen to see more storylines included in popular media like soap operas and Netflix series to reconnect people with how their food is produced and how they can influence it. They felt that labelling should be clearer and more transparent to empower people to make better choices.

System change

Finally, the group’s big idea in terms of system change was to expand the concept of a Citizens’ Assembly into a citizens’ conversation with retailers. The group recognised how hard it is for businesses to ‘go it alone’ in the current market. They felt that through dialogue, shared targets could be developed to better support sustainable, nature friendly food for which they could then be held to account, perhaps by a National Food Commission. In England, the National Food Strategy process could provide a space to do this. Look out for the events that they will be convening this year – we will certainly be engaging.

Look out for our next Citizen's Assembly blog focusing on agroecology.