Place: Northern Ireland

Citizens were put at the heart of the inquiry from the outset in Northern Ireland. Views from a wide variety of backgrounds were heard: farmers, shoppers, urban and rural community groups, environmentalists, growers, chefs, traders, young and old. What emerged was a graphic picture of what is wrong with the system, but also the positive steps forward to repair, reconnect and create a better future. We offer a set of outcomes as a framework for what we consider to be the main elements of the needed transition to a sustainable future. These are not intended to be prescriptive but rather are designed to stimulate debate and, together, provide some guidance to towards an agreed future.

Northern Ireland inquiry

John Woods

The context for the Commission’s work in Northern Ireland differs somewhat from the rest of the UK. Ours is a region of small farms with 95% of the land in grass and rough grazing for beef, sheep and dairy. Pro-rata, agriculture employs twice as many people as in Great Britain and our food processing industry employs as many people again. Nearly 80% of what we produce is exported. Our farms are heavily dependent on subsidies: for every pound earned by Northern Ireland farmers, 87 pence comes from CAP payments.

Our border with the Republic of Ireland is porous and, these days, largely invisible. Cross border movements of goods and animals are stitched into the fabric of our economy and many people’s lives and livelihoods. The Irish Sea is a significant physical barrier between Northern Ireland and Great Britain with implications for security of food supply and biosecurity. Both the border and the Irish Sea are central to the Brexit controversy. It is difficult to overstate the implications of Brexit for Northern Ireland.

As a devolved jurisdiction we make our own laws on food, farming and environmental issues. We have a record of poor environmental regulation with a catalogue of failures to meet international obligations on biodiversity and carbon emissions. We have a particular challenge in that nearly 30% of our emissions are from agriculture compared with 10% for the rest of the UK.

With no government in place for two and a half years, there has inevitably been a brake on progress in these and many other aspects of life in Northern Ireland. This extends to our emergence from decades of destructive conflict followed by further decades of uneasy peace. Divisions in our society and our attempts to heal them effect just about every aspect of public policy, not least that of food, farming and rural life.

What we have heard from citizens

The Northern Ireland inquiry decided at the outset that it would be citizen led. Evidence of citizens’ views was gathered through a series of workshops with people from a wide variety of backgrounds: farmers, shoppers, urban and rural community groups, environmentalists, growers, chefs, traders, young and old.

What emerged was a series of ‘disconnects’ in the complex system of our food, farming and countryside. While these disconnects paint a graphic picture of what is wrong with the system, we discerned within each negative a positive impulse to repair, reconnect and create a better future.

The disconnect between the efforts required by farmers and their ability to earn a living. Farmers feel they are under constant pressure to be ever more productive. But when they invest in improved productivity they see little or no economic benefit as the value is captured elsewhere in the supply chain.

The disconnect between the provision of public subsidy and benefits to the public. While there is broad support for the principle of supporting farming through subsidies, people feel that they don’t really work. Some believe they are captured by corporate interests higher up the supply chain, that they penalise farmers that work hardest, whilst others say that they should focus on environmental protection. An end to subsidies could damage rural communities irreparably and lead to land abandonment and the demise of the small family farm.

The disconnect between how land is used and a healthy environment. Many farmers regret that commercial pressures drive them to destroy habitats. Many people are angered at farming’s role in loss of biodiversity, climate change and pollution, whilst some farmers are angry and fearful about current and future regulation. There is frustration that farming and nature are in conflict while nearly everyone believes they can be mutually supportive, but there is a lack of trust between farmers, environmental organisations and government.

The disconnect between the price of food and the value of food. People were enthusiastic about our high quality local produce and they like the idea of organic and free range. Good food is seen as expensive and we are all caught up in the expectation that food should be cheap, driven by competition between supermarkets. Thus there is a deep disconnect between what people would prefer to do and what they actually do, between what they want and what they are offered.

The disconnect between producers of food and consumers of food. Farm shops, market stalls and the Belfast Farmers’ Market rate highly for many people. They enjoy dealing directly with food producers and the conviviality of the experience. They regret a system that has evolved where they have little knowledge of where food comes from or who produced it.

The disconnect between the food we eat and food that sustains health. Our health depends on a good diet of healthy food, but for many people it can be unavailable, too expensive or too difficult to prepare. People want to see a stronger focus on the nutritional value of food and, for some, a shift from meat and dairy towards more plant-based diets. The epidemics of obesity and diabetes are seen as being driven by advertising aimed at school children.

The disconnect between the food we produce in Northern Ireland and the food we eat. Farming has the potential to increase the availability of healthy food but the food system here is skewed towards meat and dairy and most of what we produce is exported. We also import a huge amount of food, even things that could do well locally. There is a very weak connection between the need/demand for healthy food amongst people in Northern Ireland and local supply.

The disconnect between our relationship with food and our mental health. Food was described as ‘social glue’, contributing to both our sense of community and our mental health, but people feel this role is greatly undervalued. The production, preparation and eating of food can make an important contribution to mental health. This can be in structured settings such as care farms, community gardening or cooking skills education aimed at those suffering from poor mental health. Or it can be in the everyday business of growing vegetables or preparing wholesome meals to eat with others.

The disconnect between our education system and the food system. Food education is mainly provided by supermarkets and multinational corporations. The profile of agriculture has largely disappeared from rural schools and many schools fail to properly support the practical cooking elements of Home Economics. People also feel that children are not adequately taught about diet and health. These failures disproportionately affect those from poorer backgrounds.

The disconnect between people and nature. The countryside is seen as having an important role in contributing to mental and physical health through public access to green spaces, with lack of access identified as an issue. The isolation experienced by many farmers is seen as contributing to poor mental health and associated with more intensive forms of farming.

The physical disconnect between the remaining fragments of our natural/ semi-natural habitats. One of the primary causes of our significant loss of biodiversity has been the fragmentation of habitat caused by agricultural ‘improvement’ with the loss of connectivity making it difficult or impossible for species to spread and disperse.

Signposts

There is little consensus on what our farming system is for — is it to maximise exports, to care for the environment or to provide food for the nation? Is our food system there to provide nutritious food or to maximise returns on investment? Is the environment a resource to be exploited for maximum return, a provider of ecosystem services or something with more intrinsic value that should be protected regardless of its utility to humankind? Are rural communities best seen as a kind of green suburbia for commuters with bucolic tastes or should they be nurtured to provide a sense of ‘place’ for the people who live there.

To many people the answer to these questions are obvious and to many others they are equally obvious — but not the same. We suggest that a number of guiding concepts may help us navigate our way through this complexity.

Transition

The disconnects described above, together with the global drivers of climate change and biodiversity loss, combine to make a major transition in food, farming and our relationship with the countryside inevitable. This transition will occur whether we like it or not — arguably it is already occurring and not in a benign way. Our collective challenge is to make it a good transition.

Resilience

Resilience is the ability of a system, such as an individual farm, a local economy, a community or an entire country, to withstand shock and then to adapt. These shocks could be the impact of climate change or global economic shifts, for example, but they can also be opportunities to engage in positive and creative ways to improve the overall performance of the system and the wellbeing of those who are part of it.

Prosperity

Prosperity is much more than creating wealth; it is also about thriving and flourishing. We think that prosperity is an essential characteristic of a healthy system — ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to do well in accordance with their hopes and expectations.

Inequality

Perhaps the greatest enemy of prosperity is inequality. Food poverty is growing while profound health inequalities are exacerbated by the cheapest food being the most unhealthy. The eradication of such inequalities must be front of mind as we envision the transition before us, ensuring a just transition where benefits are shared and costs are born by those best placed to do so.

Wellbeing

‘Improving wellbeing for all’ is the over-arching purpose of the Northern Ireland’s Programme for Government. Wellbeing is a holistic concept, bringing together social, environmental, economic and democratic outcomes. Wellbeing is about how society is progressing as a whole and goes well beyond relying on GDP as a measure of social progress to focussing on real improvements to people’s lives.

Stewardship

For historical and cultural reasons landowners in Northern Ireland tend to focus on rights rather than responsibilities. The Land Matters Task Force reported, ‘There is a resistance to change… For example there is no system of public rights of way across land… and very strong opposition to any form of wider public access’ and ‘deep suspicion about any form of landscape protection, with widespread antipathy to the introduction of National Parks…’. The concept of stewardship, however, recognises the rights, responsibilities and social contribution of landowners and dovetails with the emerging policy of ‘public money for public goods’.

Fairness

There is a widespread view in the farming community that the operation of the food supply chain is inherently unfair, with the processors, wholesalers and retailers taking the lion’s share of the profit, leaving little or nothing for the producer. The food and farming system must be fair to all.

Democracy and participation

A successful transition must fully involve a wide cross section of society well beyond the usual interest groups. At stake is not only the economic success of the food and farming industries, but also the wellbeing of whole communities, the health of our people, the state of the local environment and the future of the planet. Innovative forms of participation are especially important in the absence of the Assembly at Stormont.

Governance

Our Programme for Government commits government to work across departments in order to achieve shared outcomes. Such an approach, if implemented, can have a critical enabling role in the kind of systemic change that a benign transition will require. At a more local level cooperation through community planning is another opportunity to reconnect across the system.

Destructive conflict and peace building

Conflict is an inevitable part of life and can function as a motor for change and development in society if handled constructively. Conflict becomes destructive when it leads to a breakdown of communication, damaging social relations and exacerbating tensions that can lead to violence. Peacebuilding, on the other hand, is both the development of human and institutional capacity for resolving conflicts without violence, and the transformation of the conditions that generate destructive conflict.

Systems leadership

A successful transition will depend on leadership from multiple sources and in multiple ways. Such ‘system leaders’ need to be open minded and to see where they may be getting things wrong; to cultivate the ability to see the larger system from other people’s point of view; and the need to shift the focus from problem-solving to co-creating the future, from a focus on deficits to the potential of the positives. Such leaders are potentially everywhere in society and we need to unlock their capacity to provide leadership.

The way ahead

The challenge for Northern Ireland is to affect a transition to a safe, secure, inclusive food and farming system, a flourishing rural economy and a sustainable and accessible countryside.

The Food, Farming and Countryside Commission’s main report identifies the fundamental changes needed: farming systems must change radically to become more sustainable; farming and food systems must work together for human and planetary health; and the nation should choose how to make best use of its land. The citizens who attended our workshops came up with a wide range of potential solutions to the many ‘disconnects’ they identified.

These changes are explored in the Northern Ireland inquiry’s final report (to be published in September 2019). It is clear to us, however, that a benign and just transition will only be achieved in Northern Ireland through fundamentally reconsidering the purpose of the complex system that governs so much of our health, our environment, our economy and our whole way of life.

This will require a significant and sustained intervention to agree a way forward based on a collective vision that commands public confidence. The task of such an intervention is to go beyond the many perceptions and misperceptions that exist, build the trust needed for effective working relationships to be developed and build consensus on practical ways forward.

Since the collapse of Stormont in January 2017, political direction has been absent from government and there are limits to what civil servants can and should do. We believe it is up to civil society organisations to offer the leadership needed to tackle this great challenge. Northern Ireland is a small place and it is possible to bring the key stakeholders from government and wider society together in one room.

We therefore offer the following outcomes as a framework for what we consider to be the main elements of the needed transition to a sustainable future. These are not intended to be prescriptive but rather are designed to stimulate debate and, together with the signposts above, provide some guidance to towards an agreed future.

Suggested outcomes

• The efforts and investments made by farmers are rewarded through appropriate farm incomes and all those working in the agriculture and food industries earn a decent living.
• We farm in a way that conserves and enriches our soils, eliminates pollution, restores biodiversity and reduces carbon emissions.
• When public money is spent it is done in a way that contributes to the common good.
• Food of high quality is produced and its value is recognised through the price it commands.
• The food available to people is nutritious and diverse and forms a healthy diet affordable by all.
• Resilience is built through a shift towards satisfying local food demand from local produce.
• Relationships are built between producers and consumers of our food.
• A culture of good food and its social value is nurtured and celebrated.
• Young people understand and appreciate the relationships between farming, food, environment and health.
• The countryside is accessible to all and people are able to reconnect with nature.

Reflections on the process

As the members of the FFCC Northern Ireland inquiry gathered together in a room for the first time, there was an air of excitement but also trepidation and a little doubt. It was exciting to be part of a group tasked with looking at the entire future of our food, farming and countryside as part of a UK wide process. Some trepidation was to be expected given the scale of the challenge, the broad range of interests involved and the demanding context ranging from Brexit to climate disruption and biodiversity collapse. And then there was that nagging doubt about our own role in this. Granted, we were a diverse group of people with a range of social, environmental, farming, food and academic interests but that did not necessarily entitle us to take on such a role.

It was from that largely unspoken element of doubt that the defining feature of the Northern Ireland inquiry emerged. One of our group simply said that whatever else we do, we should ensure that we are citizenled. Once heard, the point seemed self-evident and shaped the work of the inquiry over the following year. The job, however, was not to find out what citizens think and then merely to report it, but rather to use what citizens would tell us as the raw material for our own deliberations. That way, the agenda would be set by citizens, and the experience and expertise of the inquiry members would be brought to bear to draw some conclusions from what we had heard.

It is easy enough to commit to being citizen-led but putting it into practice is rather more challenging. How to speak to enough people from different backgrounds? What is enough? What kind of diversity should be targeted — gender, age, geographical, urban/rural, age, disability, socioeconomic background, and in Northern Ireland, religious/community identity? What can be done on a modest budget? Are there things out there already happening that we can build on? Who can help us? What creative ways might there be to engage people meaningfully in this exciting piece of work?

Luckily, Northern Ireland is no stranger to creative means of public engagement. The Building Change Trust has developed a toolkit for civic participation with information on a wide range of methodologies from around the world. A number of these have been used locally and there are some very experienced and creative practitioners around.

For us the key was the wonderful facilitator we engaged to help us design the process and make the most of it. The result was a series of workshops held across Northern Ireland. Each workshop lasted two hours or so in relaxed surroundings — a pub, a community hall, a wildlife sanctuary — and each had the same format that aimed to maximise discussion and interaction among participants. It was all about getting people to talk and to listen to each other.

Perhaps the greatest challenge in designing these workshops was how to start — what would be the ‘calling question’? It is not difficult to imagine the agonies that went into crafting a question that would bring people into a discussion on such a huge issue as the entire future of food, farming and the countryside. Either it was too general or too particular, too open or too leading; there did not seem to be such a question. Our inspired facilitator suggested we forget words and use images. And so it was that every workshop started off with participants choosing a single photo from a wide range of strong images of all things food, farming and countryside, and to talk a little about what it meant to them. That produced some remarkable stories. At the end of each workshop, participants placed the photos on the floor and made connections between them in what proved to be a very informative process.

The theme of connection is one that emerged early on in the inquiry and then reemerged as disconnection and reconnection. In many ways this was the central insight of the whole project: the relationships between how we farm, how we produce food, how we eat food, how we care for our health, how we care for the environment, and how we sustain rural communities form a complex system. ‘Systems thinking’ tells us that the essential characteristic of such complex systems is that no one is in control — if someone was in control the system would not be malfunctioning. We can deal with this complexity by building a vision that is widely shared across society, enabling many types of leadership, recognising our interdependence, and tackling the ‘disconnects’ by focusing on relationships across the system.

A major part of the challenge is to identify where are the most effective places to intervene in the system: to discover what actions can exert the most leverage to have a benign impact.30 This could include some changes to the ‘rule’, such as how subsidies are paid or changes to how rules are applied such as the way regulation is carried out, or more strategic changes such as how we plan land use. Our inquiry concluded that the vital place to intervene is near the top of this hierarchy of leverage points — ‘redefining the goals of the system’.