This is a short account of the
2018 Oxford Real Farming Conference. My
offer to run a session on how the land use planning system could help in
providing access to land (and housing) and in the regeneration of local food
systems was not accepted so I can only report on other impressions, not all
apparently relevant to land use planners.
Firstly it is important to know
that there were 800 delegates and 300 unable to be offered a place! If Donald
Trump’s very first concern as POTUS45 was how many people were at the
inauguration, fellow politician Michael Gove MP and Sec of State for Defra
should have been impressed by the youthful crowd of well connected activists
packed into the Town Hall, many of whom seemed to be similarly impressed by the
minister’s intentions (or rhetoric?). He had lunch with representatives from
the Landworkers’ Alliance who are arranging meetings at Whitehall that will
hopefully take place whoever is SoS. It
was interesting to hear the man who disparaged the views of experts, with whom
he happened to disagree in the lead up the EU referendum, now rely on experts
when looking at pesticides etc. It seems
that he is taking the science on climate change seriously in looking towards a
zero carbon economy by 2050 or even earlier.
There was a session on ‘Why
access to land is vital for sustainable, healthy and fair food systems’ the
publication of which can be found through a Web search and includes a number of
ideas that can be found in my food related posts. This coincided with The People’s Food Policy
(also on the Web) that does not.
However, in future, food related posts (some as responses to Government
consultations) will be copied to them.
In response to my claim that land use planners were not engaged in
agroecology, access to land, forest gardens etc I was pointed to the AESOP
conference at Coventry Uni in Nov 2017 on sustainable food and planning. Hopefully that event attracted members of the
planning establishment who can put ideas into practice?
Finally, it was interesting to learn about the readily available
kit(s) that could measure the nutritional density of food products and the carbon
content of soils. Readers will know that
this Blog concentrates on the planning law as is and expressing opinions on how
policy can be influenced and applied.
However, a case has been made for addressing the question of whether
different forms of agriculture have materially different impacts ‘in the public
interest’. Claims were made that there
were no statutory controls over the production of food. There are of course regulations applying to
animal welfare and seeds but nothing, it was being claimed, to distinguish
between industrial scale agriculture and agroecology and ‘organics’. Land use planning is a creature of statute
and there are controls (eg conditions under s.70 and obligations s106) that could
ensure that developments are carried out in the public interest which could
include securing access to affordable land and buildings. However, the law does not allow for ‘good’
agricultural practices to be distinguished from unsustainable and damaging
regimes. The ability for these
distinctions to be measured (including scales of biodiversity?) is a necessary precursor
to arguing for a change in the law that would allow planners to privilege the good and
disadvantage the bad.