Oxford Real Farming Conference part 4 - a Just Transition

Citizen’s Assembly: Emergency Plan for Agriculture and Wildlife

A Just Transition - by Mair Floyd-Bosley (RSPB policy assistant) and Sorcha Lewis (high-nature value farmer in Wales)

This discussion was geared around building a fair and equitable shift for everyone, especially farmers, who are the most directly affected by an ambitious change in our food system. Moving towards payments for public goods has the potential to create positive ways for farmers to manage our land, but a removing significant Direct Payments also carries financial risk. This group decided on a range of key topics that we must focus on to ensure that farmers are a core part of a just transition.

Connecting networks and building relationships

The group decided that a transition must be well-connected in order to be just. This means combating the separation between many farmers and nature, farmers and each other, and the separation that consumers feel from their food.

• Create a community network of shared interests – connecting people with their food system socially, financially and educationally.
• Communication between farmers – to share challenges and solutions, giving the potential to build new initiatives and work together.
• Advisory support for farmers – ensuring face-to-face conversations and demonstrations are easily accessible.
• Encourage diversity on farms, taking a landscape scale approach (for example by involving a number of farms to create a mosaic of habitats and food production).

Promotion and education for nature and climate-friendly food

While we transition, it’s important to consider how best to spread the message of sustainable food systems accessibly, giving producers and consumers exciting and novel opportunities to engage with the transition in their local area.

• Create markets for high quality food – for example through clear labelling.
• Re-connect people with farms and their food – through school visits, community education and workshops on local farms.
• Encourage new markets to promote and sell nature and climate-friendly produce, including innovative places like schools and hospitals.
• Change education in agricultural colleges to facilitate better knowledge and communication in the farming sector.
• Change consumer awareness about sustainable food, as this will drive demand.

Policy support

As always, it is important that national and local policy decisions allow these ideas to happen. The group focused on the transition away from the current model of payments and ensuring that farmers were supported to move to a sustainable system. Farmers need sufficient cash in the transition away from Basic Payments, and in the long run, the group considered that money should still be provided for active farmers, as food production is still vital. Government policy must ultimately change to encourage good quality food with a healthy environment at its core.

Overall, to enable a just transition, supporting farmers on practical and financial levels must go alongside building networks between farmers and their local communities. With the support of Government and local people, farmers will then be freed up to provide a host of diverse options that include food production as well as public goods.