Food and farming policies for the new Government

At Sustain we believe the new Government has an opportunity, and a responsibility, to fix a food and farming system which is increasingly unfit for purpose. Whilst the food and farming system globally is the single largest contributor of Greenhouse Gas emissions and diet related diseases are set to be one of the single largest cost to our health care system, to name but a couple of the negative consequences of our current system, it is within the power of the new Government to start to fix this.

A decisive Government has, through a relatively small set of changes, the opportunity to make a huge difference. The policy asks below bring together recommendations from Sustain projects and alliances we are actively part of and any Sustain member election manifesto asks that have already been published.* We have tried to make these policy ‘asks’ brief, but each has much more detail to support them than we can provide here, making the case for why they are important and what impact we believe they would have. As and when more Sustain members come forward with their policy asks for the new government, we intend to link to them in these lists. We have structured them around a selection of short term wins, longer term aims, and a thematic split of the full list of policy asks. We have not ordered any sections in terms of priority, but where possible from production through to consumption/consumer issues.

* Please note being a Sustain alliance member does not constitute agreement with every policy listed.