The Soil Association, the charity that campaigns for organic food and farming, has set out its vision for a sustainable future for British farming and food, in which innovation will play a key role, it said.
The
Soil Association has outlined how it aims to address the twin challenges of rising
food prices and a
changing planet in its new corporate strategy, '
Road to 2020’, released this week. Sticking to the 'organic principles’ of health, ecology, care and fairness, the manifesto promises to focus on
innovation and contains two major themes – 'facing the future’ and 'good food for all’.
"We want to find the right balance between setting organic standards and other ways of improving the performance of our farming, food and land use systems. Across the organisation there will be a new emphasis on innovation," Helen Browning, director of the Soil Association, said.
Agriculture accounts for eight per cent of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, while the level of consumption in the UK is the equivalent of three planet’s worth of resources were it to be replicated across the world. To address these challenges, the Soil Association advocates a
food and farming system that is diverse and characterised by low inputs and more jobs.
Sector in trouble
However, the organic industry is facing a fall in sales and farmers using its practices are reducing in numbers. In 2010, organic sales fell 5.9 per cent in the UK, according to the Soil Association. That continued a decline from record sales of £2.1 billion in 2008, and came amid rising food prices. The amount of land being converted to organic cultivation across the UK, meanwhile, has dropped by two-thirds since 2007, according to statistics released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Measures for change
In a bid to reverse these trends, the Soil Association’s corporate strategy sets out a number of ways it is advancing sustainable farming, food and land use in the UK. As well as animal welfare, these include influencing farming and food research agendas through projects such as the organisation’s low carbon farming and climate change programmes. It also says it could do more, including establishing an
innovation and best practice group to determine innovation, research and development solutions and developing a soils programme to assist research and knowledge transfer on increasing the organic matter and carbon content of soils.
"There is no room for complacency. We must ensure that the solutions we advocate will genuinely meet the needs of the predicted population of nine billion people by 2050. We need to innovate, to encourage and support new models, to test novel technologies against our values, and demonstrate that we really can deliver optimal production of food, timber and textiles," the report said.
The Soil Association said it hoped the new corporate strategy would directly influence businesses to enable change.
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