While reflecting on Defra’s view that national security is food security, what became increasingly clear throughout the days in Oxford was the need for water security within that equation.
At the Oxford Farming Conference last month, Steve Reed, Secretary of State for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, stated that we are standing on the edge of unprecedented global transition. He was referring to food production, which continued as a key theme during the conference.
Farming Roadmap
The Farming Roadmap, launched at the end of last year, has food production at its core and Steve Reed reiterated that the government will put food production at the centre of its agenda.
Nature restoration is a vital element of food production and it is becoming increasingly evident that nature recovery is not a competitor to the production of food, in terms of land use, but an enabler. Simply put, high yields require a good source of water and good soils.
Anna Taylor OBE, of the Food Foundation, spoke at the conference about the need to unlock the potential of British produce in order to nourish the nation. The Savills Spotlight, Water: building resilience reports that the UK is 54% self-sufficient in vegetables and only 17% in fruit, meaning we have a real opportunity to explore further production in these areas subject to the challenge of water security. A Cranfield study predicts that within agriculture, by 2050, the demand for water will be 71% - 150% higher than today.
Too little water?
2024 was the hottest year on record. Gaia Vince, environmental strategist and author, sent shock waves through the conference delegates with her discussion of how we are now in a post climate change world, which is already forcing us to change where and how we live. Over the coming decades, parts of the globe will become increasingly unliveable because of droughts and water shortages, while much of the world faces the opposite problem of too much water.
Or too much?
The UK’s already low levels of self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetable production are worsening. We saw a 13% decrease in domestic vegetable production between 2021 and 2023, while fruit production dropped by 12% between 2022 and 2023. Both falls were caused by increasingly wet springs.
The government has pledged to put £2.4bn into flood defences and £50m into improved drainage systems and has set up the Floods Resilience Taskforce to champion the delivery of drainage systems, flood defences and natural flood management schemes.
The prize: food, nature and people
A 12-week consultation on the Land Use Framework was launched last week, with the pre-cursor of a “race for space on earth” and an intention that the framework will provide a toolkit to take better decisions on how land in the UK should be used and managed.
We hope the framework, which should be published in summer 2025, will protect and reform food security with a new Food Strategy. However, this can only work if it is underpinned by an integrated approach to water resources, which requires long-term planning, behaviour change and collaboration.
The ultimate prize is for the rural landscape to provide for food, nature and people in equal measure, thus enabling a healthy economy, resilient businesses, beautiful countryside and sustainable food production.
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