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As wildfires rage in the US, Canada, Greece, Turkey, Spain and France, droughts and heatwaves are threatening to match or even exceed the threat from geopolitical upheaval in reigniting food price inflation, with pasta and olive oil once again in the spotlight. So it’s a touch surprising the UK government seems to be adopting such an openly anti-environmental agenda.
Fresh from making political capital out of London mayor Sadiq Khan’s ultra low emissions zone, it’s understood Tory backbenchers have persuaded ministers that taking a hard line against supposedly “lefty” eco-policies can prove an election winner, even if the UK’s environmental pledges go up in smoke.
One example is the inexplicable backtrack on mandatory food waste reporting. This was one of the key objectives achieved by The Grocer’s Waste Not Want Not scheme in 2018. But Defra has highlighted the £6m annual cost to business and is pushing a watered-down voluntary scheme. That’s despite research showing even a tiny 1% reduction in food waste in large and medium-sized food businesses in England would result in net savings of almost £25m a year.
It’s true the industry has lobbied successfully against the government’s EPR plans. Supermarkets are also trying to crush DRS plans as well, but the objections have been on the basis of their impracticality and ineffectiveness as much as the cost – whereas the government’s own consultation on food waste reporting acknowledged there was overwhelming support for mandatory reporting, including from large supermarkets.
Equally bizarre is the earlier scrapping of another hard-fought gain from our Waste Not Want Not campaign, after we secured government subsidies to help companies send surplus food supplies to redistribution body FareShare. The subsidies have been canned because of the cost, even though the charity has proved how a tiny £25m grant could save the government an estimated £154m in fighting hunger, at the same time as preventing nearly 70,000 tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere. How is that not a vote winner?
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