02/07/08: Shortly after becoming PM, Gordon Brown commissioned the No 10 Strategy Unit to review key food and farming issues. Delayed by disagreements between government departments, it has finally been published. Soil Association director, Patrick Holden comments:

'Don't waste food', Gordon Brown tells us commenting on the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit's just published 'analysis of issues in food and food policy'. Is that his 'big idea' for delivering the nation's food security as food and fuel prices soar, climate change accelerates and oil depletes?

Thankfully, there's more substance to the Strategy Unit's analysis. The first of the many reviews that Gordon Brown commissioned on becoming Prime Minister, this long overdue report should be the catalyst for the most radical shift in food and farming policy since World War Two. It might also provide Gordon Brown with the opportunity to regain his reputation for 'prudence', steal a march on the Tories' ownership of the green agenda, and fulfil his personal mission to benefit the health and well-being of people both in the UK and developing countries.

Food and farming are not Labour's natural territory, their record blighted by the mishandling of the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak with its mass slaughter and burning of livestock, and more recent debacle of late farming support payments, resulting in huge fines from the EU, and so cuts to vital services like sea defences. None of this makes agriculture an obvious area in which the Prime Minister to demonstrate statesman-like leadership and vision. When Brown commissioned the Strategy Unit's analysis, it's doubtful he realised how centre-stage the issues under scrutiny would become. In 2007 with oil costing just over $70 a barrel, concerns over a 'resource constrained future' seemed reassuringly distant, just one year on the price of crude oil has doubled to over $140 a barrel, and the unsustainability of the dominant model of industrial, oil-dependent food production is becoming alarmingly apparent.

In its initial summary put out in January, the Strategy Unit identified, in unusually forthright language, the twin-threats of "existing patterns of food production" not being "fit for a low-carbon, or resource-constrained future" and that "existing patterns of food consumption will result in our society being loaded with a heavy burden of obesity and diet-related ill health". A burden already costing the NHS, "in excess of £10 billion a year and growing" and society at large a further £20 billion annually. Improving the Nation's diet and health fits the former Chancellor's characteristic claim to deliver social welfare alongside economic savings. To achieve this would require not only the inevitable 'joined-up' thinking between the agriculture and health departments, so encouraging farmers to grow food that positively promotes health, but a revolution in our food culture. That restrained Whitehall phrase, 'not fit for a low-carbon, more resource constrained future' contains the dynamite dawning political recognition that agriculture like every other sector of the economy, must cut its considerable greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% - yet somehow sustain the productivity driven by vast inputs of no longer 'cheap' oil.

Initially intended for publication in 'the Spring', the Strategy Unit's final report was delayed by deep disagreements between different departments – confirming that government policies on farming, food, climate change, diet and health are confused and contradictory. For the past 30 years or so, it has been considered regressive in government circles to talk about national food security, certainly in any sense of maintaining a strategic capability in the form of available land and skilled people for producing a designated proportion of the UK's food. The line from ministers has been, as here from Lord Whitty addressing the Smithfield Show back in 2001, '…the government does not believe Britain should be self-sufficient in food. Britain is part of the global economy and farmers should compete on the world market. A [self-sufficiency] target is not what drives policy. Being competitive drives policy".

That mantra emanates from the Treasury, still fixated on the 'Reaganomics' of free trade above all else, and the older 'comparative advantage' theory of 18th century economist Ricardo. Better, that doctrine holds, that UK specialise in banking and mortgages (not terribly reassuring!), buying its food from wherever it can be produced most cheaply. The malign influence of the Treasury is still evident in the Strategy Unit's report, which talks of the UK as 'a high income nation well connected to the global trade system' and being 'in a strong position to access supplies from other international markets'. Granted this is a toned down version of the only other government report on national food security produced in 2006, which dismissed the issue as 'hugely more relevant for developing countries than the rich countries of western Europe'.

The Soil Association is not anti-trade, nor seeking to turn the UK into an isolated island fortress where we are forced to eat only the foodstuffs that temperate climate and topography can produce. We want Government to wake up to and make contingency plans for the very different conditions and challenges climate change and scarcer, more costly oil are bringing for food production in the UK and globally. Climate change and the gathering consensus that global oil reserves are peaking present far greater and enduring challenges than the U-boat's torpedoes did during our last food emergency of World War Two. Faith that the global food market will provide, is misplaced as major exporting countries turn more to domestic needs, however perverse. Criminally, the world's largest grain exporter, the US, has diverted nearly 20% of its grain harvest into 'feeding' cars, rather than people. The US Department of Agriculture estimated that of the extra twenty million tons of wheat grown globally in 2006; fourteen million tons went into making biofuel.

Ironically, strengthening food security might be harder for developed countries like the UK than what are generally regarded as the technologically-backward, poverty and hunger oppressed nations in the South. The UK's short-sighted pursuit of comparative advantage and international competitiveness over the past 60 years has stripped away the resilient local lattice-work of diverse mixed farms, processors, markets and people that was available to feed the Nation during the last war. Fewer, specialised farms, reliant on machinery and off-farm inputs rather than rotations and labour to build fertility have left us with a superficially 'super-efficient' food-producing sector – but one dangerously dependent on fossil-fuels. Fossil fuels, like oil and gas, which are the feedstock for non-organic farming's lynch-pin, nitrogen fertiliser. With oil at over $140 a barrel and gas prices rising in parallel, the fertiliser industry (the biggest single user of natural gas in Europe) has doubled its prices. Many pesticides are also oil-based. Only last month agrochemical giants Syngenta and Dow Chemicals announced price increases of 10-20%. Even stalwart defenders of chemical agriculture, such as the NFU's President, Peter Kendall, are questioning farming's dependence on these inputs, "We are facing new opportunities and new challenges, with changes in the historical decline in commodity prices but also with high production costs. Conventional farmers will have to think harder about rotations as ways of reducing fertiliser and pesticide input".

Fertilisers and pesticides were already largely unaffordable to the millions of poor, small farmers in the South before the recent price hikes. Compared to northern nitrogen-junkie farmers, small-scale African could be better placed to adapt and increase their productivity, using available resources of labour and the power of the sun and legumes to fix Nitrogen, as well as through improved crop rotations and composting. That's the conclusion of another influential report just published that Brown and his close advisors would do well to digest. Especially as his chief scientist at Defra, Bob Watson chaired this 400-scientist strong international assessment of agricultural science and technology for development which stated 'business as usual' for global food production is not an option, proposing a shift to lower-input 'agroecological' farming North and South. As one of the world's leading climate change experts, Watson knows only too well that farming like all human activities must dramatically cut its addiction to oil. He is supported by the government's new chief scientist Professor John Beddington, who recently warned that a food shortage would create a worldwide crisis before climate change. He said the issues of food security and the rapid rise in food prices - caused by the world rush to grow biofuels and increasing fuel costs - constituted "the elephant in the room" that politicians had to wake up to fast.

These nationally and globally crucial issues are embedded in the Strategy Unit's analysis – leavened by less weighty discussions on the increase in people eating out and the rise of the TV celebrity chef. Its core conclusions are unavoidable, current systems of farming and food production are 'not fit for purpose' either for contending with climate change or for tackling the national obesity crisis and consequent huge costs to the NHS. It will take more than asking people not to waste food to address these issues – what is needed is a national plan for people and planet-sustaining food security. Does Gordon have one?