2023 AGM report
Moments of epiphany At this year’s AGM, Emily Norton, (then the Head of Research at Savills) gave the 2023 James Nichols Lecture and she spoke about her background in farming, law and how she became involved in studying global agricultural policy design to help consider what might be best for the UK in the future. We’ve summarised the key points Emily raised. Emily looked at a variety of countries – Australia, New Zealand, the US all of which are very different to the UK, which she described as unique and a “small, crowded island with complicated food security relationships with our nearest neighbours.” Emily explained she visited countries with similar challenges to the UK - Taiwan, Hong Kong, Cuba, and the Middle East to understand what it means to have a trading relationship with your nearest neighbours that influences how you think about your identity as a country.
76
Her moments of epiphany during this tour came in Hong Kong, a country which in the 1980’s had a huge liberalisation of import rules which saw almost all food imported from China and very little domestic food production. Academics realised (during the transition from British to Chinese rule) that without domestic food production, there was no sense of national identity, “There is nothing that says this is what we stand for, and this is what we can defend”. Hong Kong also had fairly weak environmental protection and every piece of farmland which previously had been productive had been destroyed or turned into storage for shipping containers. These attitudes to trade and environmental protection had to be changed, so a target was set for producing 10% of all the food consumed in the territory. So, the first epiphany was that if you don’t set a target for domestic production and you are encouraging free trade and have low environmental protections you can see what could very quickly happen to food production in the UK.
