British farming needs a "180-degree, tyre-screeching reset" to help farmers produce "more from less" against a backdrop of increasing global uncertainty.
This is according to former science minister George Freeman MP, who is now chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture.
Speaking at Agri-TechE’s Challenge Convention event, he said this was now even more urgent with the impact of climate change, war in Ukraine and geopolitical instability.
He warned of mass migration and civil unrest if the world did meet the challenge of feeding a population of 10bn people by 2050, but on the same amount of land and using half as much water and energy.
The Tory MP told scientific and industry leaders: “When we are rapidly accelerating into a war-time economy, needing to find extra billions to fund defence, this is a massive reset moment, whether we wanted it or not."
He said he welcomed the fact that the Labour government had made clear that food security was national security.
“But when it comes to agriculture, the rest of the world is moving quicker than us, and our slow response is all the more noticeable," he added.
"UK wheat yields are continuing to flat-line, other countries’ agricultural productivity growth is outpacing ours, and our import reliance in key sectors such as veg, fruit and oils is at record highs.
"The indicators are going the wrong way, not the right way," the MP for Mid Norfolk said at the Cambridge event.
He noted that even the EU had cancelled its production-limiting Green Deal commitments, with a new Vision for Agriculture and Food recently launched.
This sets out to safeguard and strengthen the bloc’s productive capacity, underlining the heightened risks of Europe taking its food security for granted.
He also pointed to the US, which has set out its own high-level Agricultural Innovation Agenda, with a goal to increase food production by 40% by 2050, while halving its agriculture’s environmental footprint.
The UK must adopt a similar, long-term objective to increase food production sustainably, Mr Freeman said.
He warned that the orthodoxy being pursued by Defra, for example of de-intensifying agricultural production and re-wilding productive farmland, was "plain wrong".
“This is absolute madness, and it is up to us, the political class, the elected politicians, to set a new direction that is fit for the world we live in," Mr Freeman said.
"This is not about criticising individual officials at Defra, but about recognising that the structure we have created, of very remote, top-down Whitehall policymaking, is increasingly disconnected from the reality on the ground.
“If we really are serious about food security, about food affordability, about sustainability... then there is no sector more important than British agriculture,” he said.
Mr Freeman explained this was his All-Party Group was calling for a policy reset to increase the UK’s domestic food self-sufficiency from 60% to 75% over the next 25 years.
This will mean increasing food production by 30% by 2050 while reducing farming’s environmental footprint by 50% per unit of output, in terms of emissions, land use, water use and soil health, called the '30:50:50 vision'
“Our recommendations will be unveiled and presented to Ministers at an APPG Agri-Science Summit in the summer," he said.
