Rising input costs. Cheap food culture. Climate change – these are just a few of the pressures facing UK farmers. Set against this backdrop, the drive to restore nature to this island is often seen as the straw that will break the camel’s back. “You can’t eat trees!” has become a rallying cry for those who fear losing their businesses or, worse, being driven from the land to make way for woodland and wildlife.
So, will ecological restoration force farmers out of business and increase the UK’s reliance on imported food? Is rewilding really a threat to food security?
40% of our most productive land grows crops to feed farm animals rather than people.
To answer these questions, we must first tease apart another: what does food security actually mean? Let’s take the World Food Bank’s definition: a food-secure nation is one where ‘all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient safe and nutritious food’. By this measure, the UK, where so many people rely on food banks, already fails the test.1 Nor are we self-sufficient in terms of production: 48% of the total food we consume is imported.2
To further complicate matters, we waste 12.8 million tonnes of food annually,3 while 40% of our most productive land grows crops to feed farm animals rather than people.4
The implications of this skewed system are clear. At a time when people are increasingly struggling to afford food, millions of tonnes of edible produce are wasted and millions of acres of arable land are growing non-essential crops. How much more food secure might we be if the system wasn’t so profoundly broken? I’ve often put this question to those who promote the ‘rewilding threatens food security’ argument; I’ve yet to receive a coherent answer.
Just 1% of our land is being rewilded, while 69% is farmed.
It’s true that elements of ecological restoration – species reintroductions, for example – can affect the livelihoods of individual farmers. If we want land managers to coexist with resurgent populations of beavers, sea eagles and wild boar, the public must support them in doing so. And yes, the landholdings of the so-called ‘green lairds’ can be large. But as a proportion of the UK as a whole, they amount to very little. Just 1% of our land is being actively rewilded5. By way of comparison, 69% is farmed6.
Could rewilding really endanger national food security? The stats suggest not. When one considers the range of threats that farmers really do face, why has rewilding come to draw so much flak?
As a farmer, there is little that can be done about many of the variables that affect profitability. Who does one challenge about the weather, international trade deals or rural depopulation? These issues are systemic and, as such, faceless. A rewilder, however, may live in your community. Your children may attend the same school; they may have moved in from another area and hold very different worldviews from your own. It is tempting to attack those we don’t fully understand – and who, in turn, don’t appear to understand us.
Farmers have done what was asked of them – produce food.
My take, however, is that the fault-line runs even deeper than that. Rewilding poses existential questions for farmers, challenging perceptions of who they are, where they fit in and what their purpose in life is.
With an average age of 59, UK farmers are the children of the post-war era of agricultural intensification. For their entire working lives, food production has been prized above all else – and for good reason. After the war, the government vowed that the people would not starve again. Farmers have done what was asked of them: produce food.
But now the environmental crisis is upon us. The ecosystems that sustain farming, so that it can sustain all of us, are threatened as never before. If we are to turn the tide, agriculture, as the dominant land use on this island, will have to bear much of the load.
To ask someone who has spent nearly six decades taming nature to suddenly relinquish control and allow the wild back is to demand an impressive feat of mental gymnastics. How many people willingly take up gymnastics in their late fifties?
There are many issues to contend with. The question is: how do we find solutions?
It begins, I think, with a conversation. People on both sides of the farming-versus-rewilding debate must step out from their camps, meet in the middle, openly share their concerns and listen to those of others. Here, then, is my attempt to open such a conversation.
I do not believe that rewilding can credibly be called a threat to national food security, however we define that hazy term. In truth, I believe that this entire debate is a smokescreen, preventing us from seeing the very real and present dangers facing our food production system – chief among them may just be the system itself.
No, we cannot eat trees. But nor can we expect ecologically denuded landscapes to feed us indefinitely.
What ought we to produce, and where? How much wild nature are we prepared to live alongside? How do we support land managers to adapt to sweeping change?
In this most heated of debates, there are valid issues to resolve. But those who question whether we can remain food secure and restore functional ecosystems have missed the point entirely.
We cannot remain food secure without restoring them.
REFERENCES
- Source: House of Commons Library ↩︎
- Source: Global Food Security Programme foodsecurity.ac.uk/ ↩︎
- Source: WWF Hidden Waste Report wwwf.org.uk ↩︎
- Source: wwwf.org.uk ↩︎
- Source: Rewilding Britain rewildingbritain.org.uk ↩︎
- Source: UK Government www.gov.uk ↩︎