The government urgently needs to come up with a joined-up food strategy across health, environment and education to tackle the UK’s “unhealthy and environmentally damaging food system”.

That was the verdict of a cross-party committee of MPs in a wide-ranging report on food security, health and sustainability.

The MPs also called for stricter rules to protect children from junk food advertising, mandatory lessons on food skills in schools and a labelling system to help consumers identify sustainably produced foods.

There was clear evidence that government intervention was needed to “fix” the UK’s food system, the committee’s chairwoman, Joan Walley, said.

“Obesity and diet-related illness is on the increase, fewer young people are being taught how to cook or grow food and advertisers are targeting kids with junk food ads on the internet,” she said.

“At the same time the world faces growing fears about food security as the global population increases, more people eat meat and dairy and the climate destabilises as a result of forest destruction and fossil fuel use.”

The government lacked a cohesive strategy to address these issues, with Defra’s Green Food Project too narrowly focused on “sustainable intensification”, which risked ignoring the wider social and health implications of how food was grown, traded and consumed in the UK, the MPs reported.

They put forward six main recommendations for government:

  • extend advertising rules on marketing junk food to children to all media, including the internet;
  • incorporate cooking and gardening lessons into the curriculum in all schools;
  • issue new planning guidance to local authorities to ensure communities have access to land to grow their own produce;
  • improve government buying standards on meat and dairy, while extending them to hospitals, prisons and schools;
  • examine the scope for a “simple and consistent” sustainability labelling system for food products; and
  • change the Office of Fair Trading’s remit to allow supermarkets to cooperate on sustainability without fear of competition law breaches.

The MPs also urged the UK government to take a cautious approach on genetic modification and not license any GM crops for commercial use in the UK – or promote their use overseas – until there was clear public acceptance of GM and its benefits had been established.

 To this end, the government should set up an independent body to research the potential environmental impact of GM crops as well as their impact on farming and on the global food system, the MPs said. “An initial focus of such research should be on the scope for, and risks of, the co-existence of GM crops with conventional and organic farming regimes.”

They added that although the committee had received some evidence that GM crops could contribute to helping create a sustainable food system, there was evidence that “food shortage problems could be better addressed through other means – for example, by tackling the 30% of all food grown worldwide that is lost or wasted before and after it reaches the consumer”.

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