The North Remembers

N8 AgriFood is a a collaborative effort between 8 universities in England’s North with an aim to address local and global food sustainability issues. Each year representatives from the 8 universities come together to discuss the past year’s achievements and to plan future activities. The conference also includes representatives from other relevant organizations and universities to make it a collaborative effort. This year the conference took place for two days on the 22nd and the 23rd of October in the Medieval town of York in England. This blog post describes some of the interesting presentations, discussions and proposals made during the conference.

Winter is Coming

The conference proceedings began in earnest in the morning of the 22nd of October. Armed with their laptops and coffee mugs the attendees joined the plenary speakers for a series of Welcome addresses. First to speak were the hosts i.e. Professors Charlie Jeffrey CBE and Professor Deborah Smith of the University of York who emphasized the need for collaboration for ensuring food sustainability in the face of local and global uncertainties such as Climate Change and Socio-economic shifts. They were followed by Dr Riaz Bhunoo, the Director at M/s Global Food Security who presented findings from his recent publication in the journal Lancet that mainly described the wide gaps between recommendations and actual practices related to a healthy diet. Any remaining doubts regarding the urgency to address food sustainability challenges were put to rest by the Keynote speech by Dr. Jonathan Brooks who currently heads the Agro-Food Trade and Markets Division at OECD. Dr. Brooks presented findings from years of research by the OECD that basically reinforced issues highlighted in the earlier talks and presentations. In a nutshell, with dietary patterns shifting rapidly in countries such as China and India the food sustainability challenges will only go in one direction i.e. up!

Hold the Door

The keynote address was followed by a plenary session involving academics and businesses such as Nestlé. The speakers discussed sustainability issues with regard to input resources such as water, specific commodities such as Vanilla & palm oil and how businesses should be concerned about these challenges keeping in view the supply chain vulnerabilities. Most of these talks synthesized recent research publications by the speakers and as such they were quite timely and relevant to the present and future food sustainability issues. All speakers emphasized the need to adapt to and mitigate these challenges through pro-active and holistic policy making. This was summed up quite nicely by Ms Anna Turrell of Nestlé who said that “Business as usual is not an option” and “Business needs to be purpose-driven to successfully meet the current and coming challenges”.

What is dead may never die

Echoing the need for resilient and sustainable food systems were three parallel sessions in the afternoon under the themes of Embedding soil stewardship in agri-food systems, The role of social enterprise hybrids in delivering inclusive resilient supply chains for small holders and Voluntary food standards: opportunities and implications for the global food system. I had the good fortune of attending the first session on soil stewardship. I chose this session as my previous research experience deals with catchment management schemes in England and I wanted to understand how organizations such as DEFRA and Natural England plan to implement Environmental Land Management Schemes in the UK. From the talks I sensed that even though DEFRA plans to implement a form of “public money for public goods” scheme the actual modalities (implementation, monitoring & evaluation systems) remain unclear. In a similar vein, Dr. Beth Bockett of Natural England suggested closer cooperation between academics and policy makers however limitations of such cooperation were also highlighted. Despite these constraints it was clear from the talks that the need to rejuvenate the existing food system through greater partnership between the academia and the government is greater than ever.

The Old Gods and the New

The evening sessions focused on three parallel themes of Food justice, food insecurity and hunger, Linking urban agriculture with food system research and practice and Land use, ecosystem services and natural capital. Once again, I was relatively more interested in the session on ecosystem services and natural capital. While the afternoon session had involved policy makers, this session brought together members from the business community by including partners from Nestle and 3Keel. Representatives from these companies described the importance of resource conservation and pollution prevention to maintain a healthy food supply chain and hence net positive bottom line profitability. This session was also interesting because the speakers emphasized new ways of thinking about the food sustainability problems. Thus, while actions on the ground are indeed important, the philosophical underpinnings of a sustainable food supply chain also need to be revisited. This was emphasized during the talk by Dr. Ioan Fazey of University of York who used the metaphor of the sorcerer and his apprentice to describe the current challenges in sustainability research. While parts of his talk seemed more like a call to action, the need for creative ways of thinking about sustainability and especially urban food sustainability cannot be denied.

Beyond the Wall

Day 2 also had three parallel sessions in the morning including the themes of Sustainable food cities, Brexit Dividend?:Reimagining UK agri-food policy after CAP and Smart agriculture and new technologies: Industry 4.0. I attended the session on post-Brexit agri-food policy. There were three talks planned for this session however, one of the speakers couldn’t show up for some reason. The remaining speakers included Ms. Sue Davies MBE of Which? andDr Sofia Vasilopoulou of University of York. These talks were interesting as they presented the consumers’ points of view regarding sustainable food supply chains. These talks showed that while the consumers viewed the concept of Global Britannia (and by proxy globalization) they were generally more in favour of indigenously sourced food. However, the consumers were pragmatic enough to understand that the UK cannot substitute imports in all food categories. Similarly, their research showed that while there was variation in the level of opposition to international trade, generally all political parties in Britain favoured international trade.

Now our watch begins

N8 conference came to an end in the afternoon of the second day with an awards ceremony. Overall this conference acted as a networking event as well as a synthesizer of different views regarding food sustainability from academia, government and the industry. I think it would be safe to say that perhaps all attendees realize that the magnitude of food sustainability challenges is significant and needs to be addresses sooner rather than later.

In the end I would conclude this blog by relating the following lines from Robert Frost as it neatly summarises the current situation in UK (not just Brexit) and the need for certainty in pro-active rather than reactive decision making.

Two roads diverged in yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller long I stood

And looked one down as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth

and

I shall be telling with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood and I

I took one I don’t know why

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