Held at the prestigious Guildhall in the City of London on 11 March, the 23rd annual City Food & Drink Lecture heard from keynote speaker Simon Roberts, CEO of J Sainsbury plc, on the subject: ‘Good Food Needs a Great Food System’.
Tom joined Simon on the panel alongside Food Foundation Executive Director Anna Taylor, and Dan Aherne, Global CEO of New England Seafood International’s Sustainable Seafood Division.
In his lecture, Simon argued that the food and drinks sectors, worth £128 billion to the national economy, needed to use the power of collaboration, the potential of technology and the development of skills and capabilities within the industry to deliver a resilient food system which would be fit for the future.
Complex challenges
Responding to the speech Tom said: “We have some very complex challenges today, but what’s really interesting to me is that I agree with 95% of Simon’s speech.
“There’s a huge level of commonality about how we want to move the food system forward – but as we see with government policy, saying food production is now a priority is the easy part. Delivering the policy solutions that underpin that are far more challenging.
“If we’re serious about delivering a sustainable, profitable, thriving farming industry then let’s share the ambition of developing policy which stops our members being undermined within that food system.”
“Long-term thinking is really good, but short-term profitability gets us to the long term, and that is something that we can never forget when we’re thinking about agriculture.”
NFU President Tom Bradshaw
Simon said the industry needed to look at creating long-term partnerships to find solutions for a variety of issues, but Tom warned that it had been so difficult for producers to pass on the inflationary pressures they had faced over the last two years that investing for the future has become impossible for many.
He said: “Long-term thinking is really good, but short-term profitability gets us to the long term, and that is something that we can never forget when we’re thinking about agriculture.”
Tom said the importance of food production had been undervalued and underappreciated by policymakers with the risk of prioritising environmental protection over food production.
“We need to put food on the same footing as environmental protection. The two really do go hand-in-hand and there can’t be a poor relation – at the moment there is and that is food production.”
