Food security is community security — and we're choosing sheds
We need to talk about the fact that the government's food security plan and its own national security assessment are pointing in opposite directions. The plan: grow the intensive poultry sector, and rewrite planning rules to make giant chicken farms easier to build. The assessment: animal farming at current levels is 'unsustainable without imports', with 18% of feed arriving as South American soy — some of it at the Amazon's expense.
Campaigners at Sustain and Communities Against Factory Farming are saying the obvious out loud: you cannot import your way to self-sufficiency, and you cannot pollute your way to resilience. Their alternative is almost embarrassingly wholesome — pulses, legumes, nuts and beans, grown here, feeding people directly.
And the vision writes itself: nature-friendly farms with healthy soils and clean rivers, reservoirs and polytunnels instead of ammonia clouds, borlotti beans climbing poles in Devon. The government's own roadmap admits nature-friendly farming can sustain production WHILE building resilience. The homework has been done. It's sitting right there.
Imagine, instead, a Britain fed by its own fields, where 'national security' means soil you could eat off. Sign the petition — it's printed on seed paper, plant it when you're done. There is always a petition.