A response to the Mayor’s Draft Food Strategy

A response to the Mayor’s Draft Food Strategy PDFA response to the Mayor’s Draft Food Strategy RTF

Mike Tuffrey, on behalf of the Environment Committee, has produced a response to the Mayor's Draft Food Strategy. The response broadly welcomes the strategy as a useful tool for bringing together the main themes and issues in the current debate about London's food economy. The lack of public infrastructure in this sector means that the process goes largely unplanned, and the strategy provides ambitious aims and actions to tackle the consequences of this.

However, we found that sheer scale of the food economy means that the strategy loses sight of some of the hard choices that need to be made. Our central conclusion is that the strategy risks not being fully effective in making a significant impact on London’s food sustainability until the priorities for action are more clearly identified, the main players are properly engaged, and specific actions are highlighted, distinguishing between short and longer term. A key tool to achieve this is economic mapping, to identify the flows of money in the food industry. This will illustrate the centrality of consumer choice in the food economy. We would also like to see environmental impacts given more prominence, acknowledging the impact food has on environmental sustainability.