Today we're exploring civil society's efforts to shape the food system and land use in the United Kingdom. Our guest today is Sue Pritchard, Chief Executive of the Food, Farming, and Countryside Commission (FFCC). The deeply grassroots work of the commission brings people together to find practical solutions to climate, nature, and health challenges. The goal is to shape fairer and more sustainable food systems and a just transition for rural communities and the countryside.

Interview Summary

Well, Sue, I am really interested to start off learning a little bit more about you. Can you tell us why are you interested in food and farming and the countryside?

So, I'm talking to you from Wales, from my farm in Wales. I live and work on a small, organic, conservation orientated farm that produces native breed cattle and sheep. It's so authentic. I have a duck in my office with me at the moment. So, if any of your listeners hear any odd sounds, I promise you that's her, not me. I come from a family in Wales, which either went down the mines or farmed and had small holdings. My father went down the mines, but we always, as a family longed to get back to our deeply felt roots. And it was about 27 years ago that my parents and I, my family, were able to buy our farm here in Wales, which is, I suppose, the culmination of a dream. And although we were not naive about farming, when you're deeply embedded in the everyday life of the farmer and operating in the farming system (the food and farming system) you learn some different things pretty quickly. And so, for a fair few years, I was working out how to make the farm work economically. But also, how the farm could make a really good contribution to tackling the climate crisis and the nature crisis. How we could sequester more carbon on the farm. How we could build more natural infrastructure on the farm to help nature thrive here again.

You will recall, the UK had its own political, should we call it a little, a minor apocalypse back in 2016, when the UK voted to exit the European Union. And, the implications of that vote were pretty, pretty, extraordinary for farming and for food systems and the environment. As a result, civil society, business organizations got together and were able to get some philanthropic funding to set up a commission (Food, Farming, and Countryside Commission) to shape a different future for food and farming and the countryside outside of the European Union. And when that job was advertised, it was my dream job, bringing together, as it did, the future of farming, the future of food systems, and being able to impact and influence policy at a really, really critical time.

I want to make sure I understand a little bit more about what's happening. Because of Brexit, that means the UK is no longer part of the common agricultural policy and is now needing to reconstruct its agricultural policy structure. It sounds like the commission was brought in to do some of this work. I would like to understand what in particular challenges are facing the food and agriculture scene in the UK post Brexit.

I think that the first thing that we were able to do in the work of the commission was to start talking about food as a system. That was relatively unusual in the UK. One of our leading thinkers, Professor Tim Lang, used to say that the UK's food policy was basically leave it to Tesco, which is one of our big supermarkets. It was essentially left to private markets to determine the kind of food that we had on our plates. It was clear that that strategy was not working anymore. And given the really quite startling system changing implications of that particular vote, we were able to take a different perspective on food systems and start thinking about food as a system. We talked about, as it says on the tin, food and farming and the countryside, but we also talked about food and farming's relationship with climate, with nature, with health and wellbeing, and with equity and justice.

In bringing that more, if you like, systemic view into people's consciousnesses, we were able to demonstrate really how central food policy is to UK's economy, health and wellbeing of UK citizens. Perhaps in a way that had not been done with quite the same heft as before. Lots of people have been trying but hadn't quite landed center stage in policy terms. And we were able to show through our work and then our reports, the relationship between food and farming and diet-related ill health. Farming systems and the climate crisis. Farming systems and biodiversity loss and the nature crisis. And also, starting to reveal the inequities, the inequalities embedded in the food system when we start looking not just within our own borders in the UK, but beyond our borders to how the UK trades with the rest of the world.

Because countryside is one of the major themes, it's in the title of Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, and I've spent a little time in England and the countryside. And I'm from a rural area and the United States, and I'm interested to understand how you all are thinking about the needs or the challenges, or even the opportunities that the countryside faces in the UK.

One of the things that I realized when I started this job back in 2017 was that for many people in London, the countryside is just the gap on the map between the cities. They had very little understanding of the contribution of the rural economy, the importance of the rural economy, particularly the countryside's importance, criticality, even for tackling the climate crisis, tackling the nature crisis. It's there where a lot of the problems occur, but also where a lot of the solutions can be found too. And so, talking about the countryside, not as a kind of poor relation to the rest of the economy, but actually central to a version of the future that was able to be more resilient, more adaptive to whatever kind of scenarios might unfold. That felt like a pretty important thing for us to be doing. And when we were conducting our work in those early days, we did all the usual things that a commission might do. We did a literature review, we held workshops, we held all sorts of kind of formal research processes. But we also set out around the country, around the UK on a bicycle. My researchers set out around the UK on a bicycle. Because we wanted to do something pretty iconic to show the richness, the diversity, the variety, the political salience and the economic salience of the countryside to policy discussions in Westminster. I think one of our successes has been to bring those voices into policy decisions. And to give them much more gravity, I think, in policy considerations that often feel very distant in London.

How have they shaped the way you all have done the work at the FFCC? Are they altering or informing the work in different ways?

Yes. Absolutely. We work with citizens in a number of different ways. So that first moment, the kind of bicycle tour around the UK was if you like, a symbolic moment of connecting with people in their communities. Going out to where people are, letting them tell us in their terms, what mattered to them, what they cared about, what they were concerned about. But in a really kind of barefoot ethnographic way, I think, being able to hear directly from folk. But we also built long term relationships in three, if you like, sentinel parts of the country: in Devon, in Cambridgeshire, and in Cumbria. Different parts of the UK reflecting different kinds of priorities and different pressures in the countryside. Devon is a grassland community, it's very touristy. Cambridgeshire is one of the bread baskets of the country, but with huge pressures on housing and infrastructure. And Cumbria is the uplands, the high mountainous uplands that people understand as a holiday hotspot. But working in those places in depth over for five years now, we have been able to both test out policy ideas in, in real places, in real time. Our land use framework project is a case in point. In thinking about how we make better decisions about land, we worked with people for whom those decisions are incredibly material. It's about what happens in their communities, what happens around them. We were able to develop policy contributions based on testing different options, different possibilities with people in places. And of course, we were able then to bring forward their ideas, their thoughts, and their really practical activities to the view of government, to the view of policy makers and to businesses. It was a kind of reciprocal relationship, testing out ideas in communities, but also bringing community ideas into government, into policy makers. You know, demonstrating how people are already doing things, already doing really interesting and radical and progressive things, whether or not government is supporting them or not.

More recently, we've embarked on a very, very substantial project. It's called the Food Conversation and the Food Conversation is a project that was designed to really test out the answer to the question, so what do people really want from food? I wonder if you have the same experience in the United States, Norbert, but certainly in the UK, we hear over and over and over again, particularly from lobbyists, but often from government, that people don't really care about food. People just want cheap food. They just want convenient food. Nobody wants to be told what to eat. Nobody wants a nanny state. And those kind of toxic narratives, those devices were being used over and over again to limit government's appetite for policy intervention. And after this happened, again ...