"If food system resilience is a matter of national security, then the local partnerships already doing the work must be recognised, trusted and funded to do it well."

- Jenny Ekelund, CEO, Good Food Oxfordshire

Good Food Oxfordshire (GFO) and our network members are not used to thinking of ourselves as part of the national security conversation.

'Food insecurity? Yes, of course. Sustainable Food Places (SFP) members like us across the country work on tackling food poverty, diet related ill-health and access to affordable healthy, sustainable food every day. But national security? What we do is not usually framed in those terms.

Yet this was exactly the lens used at the country’s first food and national security conference last week. In the room was everyone from Defra officials to leaders from charities, farming, finance, food, defence, academia and industry. 

The case was made that the UK is woefully prepared for the food supply shocks that climate, geopolitical, nature depletion and cyber threats are likely to bring - and that the fragility of the UK’s highly centralised food system is itself a national security threat. 

Much of the conversation on the day was about supply - centralised distribution, our island nation’s reliance on imports, particularly fresh fruit and veg, and how to transform our food system into a more resilient, ‘hedgehog Britain’ that is less vulnerable to attack. I sat on a panel with Professor Tim Lang (professor of food policy at City University London's Centre for Food Policy), in conversation with Ark's Ffinlo Costain, and the point I was keen to make was that local food partnerships already hold the knowledge, connectivity and longstanding relationships that enable speedy, locally appropriate responses to food emergencies. What we lack is the multi-year funding that would allow food partnerships to work with local resilience forums, communities and local authorities to properly resource scenario planning for a crisis rather than relying on goodwill. 

(GFO's CEO Jenny Ekelund in conversation with Professor Tim Lang at Ark'sfood and national security conference)

Community food networks already know which households are at risk, which organisation has a van, which community kitchen has a working freezer with some spare capacity. These networks, and the strong relationships built over time that underpin them are critical. Tim calls this civil food resilience in his landmark report for the National Preparedness Commission. Real resilience is a set of relationships rather than a stockpile. (And stockpiling, by the way, is only a viable way to build resilience at a household level if you can afford to do it. Community planning and infrastructure support at a local level is essential, as Daphne Du Cros at the Shropshire Food Partnership so eloquently puts it in this post.) 

"The danger is that the government continues to rely on this local level resilience-building without properly recognising or resourcing it."

- Jenny Ekelund, CEO, Good Food Oxfordshire

Food system resilience in Oxfordshire

So what does resilience planning for longer term crises actually look like at a local level in Oxfordshire? Like elsewhere in the UK, our county is heavily reliant on imports for fresh fruit and vegetables especially, sourced from a handful of climate-vulnerable regions. If imports of fresh vegetables are disrupted for months, you can't mobilise your way out of it, you need capacity, storage, processing and local growers who are still in business. You need a much longer lead time. You can’t magic up infrastructure or train a grower mid-crisis. This is why we must invest in domestic horticulture now, and why we are working with agroecological growers in GFO’s hosted OxFarmToFork project to look for funding to train young people in these skills. OxFarmToFork’s work is also supporting agroecological producers in our network to share the risks and rewards of expanding their production, with £32,000 co-invested by institutional buyers in cold storage and polytunnels. 

The danger is that the government continues to rely on this local level resilience-building without properly recognising or resourcing it. Food partnerships are non-statutory and often funded year to year. Local resilience forums often lack food system expertise, and food is inconsistently incorporated into resilience planning. The result is what SFP calls ‘a postcode lottery of preparedness’. SFP’s recommendation is to build on the infrastructure that already exists - in Oxfordshire and elsewhere, to ensure food partnerships are supported by the treasury with multi-year funding and given a planning role alongside resilience bodies (with a new remit for food!) and local authorities. If food system resilience is a matter of national security, then the local partnerships already doing the work must be recognised, trusted and funded to do it well.

About Good Food Oxfordshire

Good Food Oxfordshire is a network of 230+ organisations working together to ensure a healthy, fair, and sustainable food system for the county. We operate as an independent non-profit, running regular campaigns and sharing resources on sustainable food. Learn more about us.

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