Food is always top of my agenda, personally and politically. But both the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have brought the importance of food into particularly sharp focus for us all.
We have a 25-year-old woman from Ukraine who has moved in with us at home.
Her grandparents are in occupied Kherson and the daily conversations we have about what they can find to eat are sobering.
Our Food Strategy sets out a plan to transform our food system to ensure it is fit for the future.
I want to see a sustainable food system, from farm to fork, that seizes all the opportunities before us.
I want this strategy to support farmers and all those working in the domestic food sector so they can face the future with confidence.
A priority for me is to encourage more people to buy British and experience the fantastic produce grown on our home soil.
Thanks to our farmers, we are very lucky as a nation to enjoy a high degree of domestic food security and self-sufficiency.
For example, we produce around 80 per cent of all the wheat we need here in the UK, are almost 100 per cent self-sufficient in poultry, liquid milk and certain vegetables and produce more lamb than we consume.
Other sectors like soft fruit are also increasingly becoming successful domestically, with an extended UK season greatly reducing the need for imports.
As countries around the world deal with the impacts of the war in Ukraine, including current high input costs in the agricultural sector, it is increasingly clear that domestic production gives us national resilience this is why food security sits at the very heart of our Food Strategy.
Commit
Through our Food Strategy, we are committing to broadly maintaining the current level of food that we produce domestically and to boost production in sectors where there are the biggest opportunities like horticulture.
The strategy will, for example, consult on an ambition to increase public sector expenditure on food produced locally or to higher standards.
It will also harness new technologies, such as sustainable and efficient glasshouses to help us extend domestic production in the fruit and vegetable sectors; explore innovative feed additives that can reduce methane emissions from livestock and offer incentives for the industry to use surplus heat and CO2 from industrial processes to increase our horticultural production.
Innovation technology such as these will be integral to making progress across our food sector, with 270 million to be invested across farming innovation funding programmes until 2029. We will not tell farmers what to invest in, we will support the investments that you judge to be right for your own businesses.
I understand the farming industry is facing more than its fair share of challenges.
Agricultural commodities have always been closely linked to global gas prices, so input costs for fertiliser, livestock feed, energy and fuel are currently running high.
Measures
We have already announced some measures to help with mitigating these challenges, but our Food Strategy goes further in tackling other difficulties facing the sector.
We are commissioning an independent review to tackle labour shortages in the food supply chain, we are extending the seasonal worker visa route to include poultry and we intend to use grant support to help farmers invest to improve their profitability and increase their agricultural output.
Our Food Strategy sets out a plan to transform our food system to ensure that it is fit for the future.
We want to see a sustainable food system seizing on all of the opportunities before us.
I want to make sure that everyone has access to nutritious and healthy food and that we are fostering an environment in which food businesses across the country can truly thrive and face the future with confidence.
