Farmer protests betray a deeper crisis our politicians won’t confront

Protests are erupting all over Europe as farmers feel the squeeze of policies that on the one hand demand that they farm more sustainably and on the other continue to sell produce at prices that struggle to meet the cost of production.

At the same time, the last weekend of January saw the first hunger march in the South Wales valleys in a hundred years against a backdrop of spiralling food bank use and a shocking rise in cases of malnutrition.

In the past few weeks there has been a stream of headlines reporting alarming if all too predictable research pointing to the declining physical and mental health of our citizens, particularly children, as a result of poor diet. In short, if you need to see the evidence of a broken and dysfunctional food system, turn on the news.

Yet inexplicably in Wales we have a political contest for the role of next first minister that seems to fail to even acknowledge that these are the times we are now in.

Given all this is obvious to the person on the street, as evidenced by hunger marches, farmers’ rising anger and widespread alarm at the destruction of our natural capital it’s difficult not to despair at the refusal of those vying for power to engage with the very bread-and-butter issues that are likely to define politics for decades to come.

Food banks

Seasoned tropes continue to replace informed, real-world policy. Food banks proliferate within a context where the unchallenged thought-stopper that everybody simply wants cheap food leads to unchecked economic and social ruin in a food system that has many more losers than winners.

We currently have a situation where shoppers are gaslit by supermarkets into believing that they are buying chicken meat from a bucolic family farm when the reality is polluting intensive poultry units and industrial processing plants beset by regulatory breaches.

At least 30% of the now unmanageable NHS bill is specifically attributable to known, diet-related causes.

People on the street know full well that we are what we eat; but the system we are expected to inhabit coerces us to consume ‘food’ that we know serves no nutritional purpose.

At the same time, we have an independent hospitality economy that is more creative and energetic than ever, and plays an all-important multiplier role on our high streets yet is pitifully undervalued by government with seemingly little understanding of its connection either to the woes of farming, economic resilience or social wellbeing

In other words, the politics that both farmers and consumers are now living through is utterly removed from the well-meaning manifestos that both candidates for the Labour leadership have put forward.

Food is in there, just about, but when it is mentioned it is firmly in the back seat of other policy areas and there is nothing that recognises the urgent need to put it in the driving seat.

The political need of the current moment, as the erupting protests demonstrate, is for joined up policy making and for real convening.

Social connection

This should be much easier for a small nation with strong degrees of social connection and its own government than the task facing many more sprawling state entities.

That means bringing contending interest groups into the room and leading them to debate and problem solve in the national interest – the need for a strategic plan for food being something that pretty much all stakeholders agree upon.

To take the issue of the moment, farmers’ grievances are disparate and varied but they are rooted in a food system that benefits no-one in Wales. Despite empty rhetoric to the contrary, most people we encounter on the environmental side of these debates do not fit the stereotype of farmer-bashing, and similarly most in the farming community are not interested in characterizing concern for the planet as “Pontcanna veganism”.

It may be a cliché, but our experience is there really more that unites than divides on this issue but it’s increasingly hard to see amongst the social media swagger, soundbites and spite that is flourishing in the absence of meaningful leadership in government.

Deepening division

If this vacuum persists, we face the frightening prospect of deepening division and further loss of control over the very things that underpin our existence. This – namely a coherent approach to feeding the nation – has always been at the heart of the affairs of state:

• Firstly, geopolitical security – which in our day certainly doesn’t mean anything less than ensuring people are adequately fed.
• Secondly, a functioning economy – which in our day means the fundamentals of livelihoods, including farming, food production and hospitality that retain value within Wales.
• Thirdly, as widely aspired to in recent decades but little realised, Wellbeing – which simply cannot exist without good health, which in turn is entirely dependent on good food.

None of these functions of government can be carried out without a laser-sharp and intelligent focus on food. We have multiple ministers for health, social services and well-being but no minister for food. As far as the food system is concerned we have multiple ministries for mitigation but none for transformation.

Devolution was set up to allow precisely this sort of political agility. As has been widely acknowledged, this was never going to occur within a party-political tribalism.

Food unites people packing out town hall meetings and worried about how they will solve their own bread-and-butter issues. Nations and even empires have risen or fallen off the back of wise or ignorant food policy. Without political leadership of a sort as yet absent from this leadership contest, perhaps the greatest opportunity to be responsible and innovative as a nation will be missed – at significant cost to us all.

Simon Wright, broadcaster and restaurateur and Carwyn Graves, author