The UK Agriculture Bill is currently at the Reports stage in Parliament, and sustainable food project IKnowFood , which came from the N8 Agrifood Resilience Programme at the University of York, said the Bill needs to give more thought to the implications of farming methods on the UK’s food industry and public health.
Professor Bob Doherty from the University of York is Principal Investigator for IKnowFood, and was invited to sit on a round-table group in Westminster and help draft amendments to the Bill.
Doherty said the development of a new post-Brexit UK agriculture policy would be a seminal moment for the future of the country's food system, but the Bill said more about land management and agriculture than food, and raised concerns over a lack of "a strong and explicit commitment" that sustainable agriculture and food would not be undercut by the need to secure trade agreements outside the EU.