Food Sustainability Index shows UK is playing catch-up

Britain likes to think of itself as a world leader on many fronts, not least when it comes to things like the environment and our food industry. Just last month, the government announced it would was establishing a Food and Drink Council to “secure the UK’s position as a global leader in sustainable, affordable, safe and high-quality food and drink”.

But, it turns out, we don’t have that position to protect in the first place.

The UK just about scraped into the top 10 for this year’s 2017 Food Sustainability Index, coming in 10th out of 34 countries behind France, Japan, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Portugal, Italy, South Korea and Hungary.

But when it comes to sustainable agriculture – one of the three areas that made up the FSI – the UK ranked a miserable 20th out of 34 countries, behind countries like Ethiopia, Russia, Greece and Mexico.

We scored relatively well on water issues, such as the environmental impact of agriculture and the sustainability of fisheries. However, we ranked 32nd out of 34 on net imports of virtual blue water from crop and animal products – suggesting our diets are putting a big drain on global water resources.

What’s more, for all the government’s talk of leadership on environmental issues, the UK has no national agriculture policy that deals with climate change. It doesn’t even have a government department dedicated to climate change any more. So when it comes to climate change mitigation, we scored a big fat zero.

Adult obesity

And we aren’t just lagging behind on environmental issues. According to the index, the UK was also the worst-performing European country for adult obesity, ranking 24th out of 34 – as well as being one of the lowest scorers on childhood obesity.

So as Dan Crossley of the Food Ethics Council pointed out, the UK is quite clearly not a global leader on food, farming and the environment. It’s not even in the leading pack.

Which is an uneasy place to be as we prepare to cut ourselves free of Europe. Because for all of Gove’s talk about how Brexit will give the UK the chance to take back control of environmental policy for the greater good, the rest of Europe is doing better on these issues.

Of the 10 European countries in the FSI, the UK came in eighth – ahead only of Russia and Greece.

So if the government really wants to forge a future where the UK is a global leader on these issues, it had better think carefully about its next steps. Brexit does give us a historic opportunity to review our policies on things like agriculture, land use, biodiversity, woodlands, marine conservation, fisheries, animal welfare, waste and air quality.

Let’s just make sure we get it right this time.