Civil Food Resilience Report

Over the last year, through my role with the Shropshire Good Food Partnership (SGFP), I have been working with Sustain: The Alliance for Better food and Farming and Sustainable Food Places to coordinate a group of food partnerships across the UK that have been developing their own bespoke approaches to civil food resilience capacity building and planning.

As with SGFP, these local and county-level leaders have been working on this simply because it needs to be done and the government isn’t taking action, giving directives or support for proactive crisis planning. This is despite the fact that the food system is incredibly fragile and often impacted directly or indirectly in ways that impact food costs and availability, and crises are now compounding and accelerating - war, climate collapse, hacking, corporate consolidation of the food system and our own diminished skills (a central reason why we teach on the farm).

As an outcome of the work with this group of food partnerships, Sustainable Food Places has released this report, written by me and edited and pulled together by the team at Sustain/SFP. This provides some background to why this work is crucial, the roles of politicians and leaders, and case studies of how this work is being developed, bespoke to each unique place and responsive to local context.