Tim Bonner: Food security in an uncertain world

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a humanitarian disaster with appalling consequences for people across that country but it has also put food security back on the agenda. In a more uncertain world, the question of where our food comes from, how much of it we produce ourselves and whether we can afford to take agricultural land out of production has risen up the political agenda.

That is not in any way an excuse for reverting to unsustainable farming and food production systems, any more than going back to a reliance on fossil fuels is the correct response to the accompanying energy crisis. It is, however, very important that food security is a significant part of the discussion about the future of farming alongside the urgent need to address biodiversity decline and global warming. Put simply, no system is sustainable if we cannot feed ourselves.

The EU has acted urgently to replace lost Ukrainian agricultural production by opening up as much as four million hectares of fallow land for production. Food security, however, is about much more than replacing the crops that will not be grown in Ukraine this year, it is about having a robust food supply system that can resist whatever storms might arise. That, in turn, means a countryside that produces food but does so in a way that tackles all the challenges facing us, not just some of them.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has forced us all to think a bit harder about where the wheat is grown to make our daily bread and whether the push to separate land management from food production is wise. Taking significant areas of agricultural land completely out of production and managing it solely for biodiversity, or planting trees on it to capture carbon, is certainly not the only (or often best) way to tackle biodiversity decline or climate change and when you factor in the loss of food production such proposals start to look positively dangerous.

Rewilding and forestry might look like the radical response to pressing concerns, but in reality they are often not the best answer to the questions they are trying to answer, let alone to issues like food security which they are not.

Not farming is not the answer, farming a lot better is. Regenerative farming systems can capture carbon, promote biodiversity and produce food, answering all of the challenges facing us, not just some of them, and can also maintain rural communities that rely on farming and land management. The Government would argue that that is the thrust of its agricultural reforms which are intended to encourage exactly this, but there is a significant part of it which is not. The Landscape Recovery scheme is one of the three new environmental land management schemes for landowners who "want to take a more radical and large-scale approach to producing environmental and climate goods on their land". Food production is not one of the criteria for the scheme and indeed the Government contrasts it with other schemes which will support action for nature "alongside food production".

If nothing else positive comes out of the dreadful events in Ukraine, an acceptance in the UK and across the world that the three pillars of farming and countryside policy - food, nature and carbon - must always be considered together, rather than separately, would be something.