Recommendation 6

Defra collaborates with other Government departments and with industry on food security issues, but this work is neither sufficiently co-ordinated nor long-term. The Government should establish a cross-government, cross-sector food security body to bring together all the actors in the food system to examine and make policy recommendations on long-term food resilience and environmental issues. While much food policy is devolved, some areas that affect food security, such as trade, are not devolved; and many farms straddle territorial borders. Therefore the cross- government body should also involve the devolved administrations. The body could be in the form of a Food Resilience Forum, but must take a long-term view. One Environmental change and food security 71 responsibility with which this platform could be tasked would be to conduct forward- looking reviews in specific markets to inform investigations ahead of, rather than during, a crisis.