The Labour party in the UK wants to make the Environmental Land Management (ELM) scheme easier to manage for land owners while better understanding its impacts, according to a minister.

ELM could be “simplified and improved” to achieve benefits for the environment, nature, and food security, said Daniel Zeichner, the Labour shadow minister for environment, food and rural affairs, during a Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum webinar last week.

The scheme is a key UK programme for supporting the rural economy in transitioning away from its historical EU subsidy model towards rewarding farmers for land-based actions that support nature.

The government’s rollout of the ELM scheme has been criticised for its complexity, creating uncertainty amongst farmers over the last couple of years, according to a report by the House of Lords published in January.

The plans of UK opposition party Labour are significant as it has been leading in the polls for two years with a general election due to be held before next January.

“One of my major criticisms of the ELM is that the government appears to have no way of knowing whether the overall impact is improving, or degrading, or doing nothing to our environment, they’ve got no way of measuring it,” Zeichner said.

“They don’t know the impact on food production. And that has led to this kind of curious position where it appears that some producers may end up turning over very good quality agricultural land producing flowers, which may have nature benefits … rather than producing flour.”

Labour will develop a national land use framework to deal with some of the complicated issues faced by the country on food, like securing more local produce, Zeichner said. The government committed to publishing such a framework for England by the end of 2023, but it has not yet appeared.

The UK’s lack of a single mechanism framework for resolving its complex demands on land use was “astonishing”, the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge said in January.

Other active schemes for UK farmers looking to transition towards more environmentally conscious practices through managing land include the Sustainable Farming Incentive, Countryside Stewardship, and Landscape Recovery.

“While the food system is economically efficient, it is inadvertently causing environmental damage, and it is unintentionally damaging our health,” said Zeichner, citing a National Food Strategy report published in 2022.

Sustainable finance support for farmers in England needs to expand further, beyond its welcome early structure, to address other areas of the food system, a panel of experts said during the Westminster Food & Nutrition Forum webinar.

FOOD BATTLE ZONES

Tim Lang, a professor of food policy at City University London, said there was “no overall explicit UK food policy”, during the Westminster webinar.

Instead, the country has “fragments” spread over “battle zones” of health, welfare, trade, safety, prices, and poverty.

There is no central structure to align policy around food across the four UK nations, he said. Each country has its own agricultural policy, meaning English farmers will have different schemes to Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish ones.

“The post-Brexit agriculture and environment acts have ignored food almost completely. And so now you’ve got this extraordinary, idiotic debate about food versus the environment – as though we don’t need both. That’s been set up by the failure of politics of the last 15, 10 years,” Lang said.

Over the last two decades attempts to create coherent food policy have not succeeded, he added.

“The good news is there is this positive push coming from below – the cities, civil society, the professions, science, and beyond [around food policy].”

Around 100 tractors driven by farmers converged on Westminster on Monday evening to protest against “substandard imports and dishonest labelling” that threaten the UK’s food security, according to the campaign groups Save British Farming and Fairness for Farmers, which assembled the convoy.

The campaigners were calling for better protection of UK food security, a ban on substandard food imports, and an outlaw on what they call dishonest food labelling, in a reflection of discontent among some UK farmers with regards to the government’s food strategy and trade deals.

By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com

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