Poultry sector growth plan risks UK national security, campaigners warn

The environment secretary has said one of the biggest barriers to expanding the poultry sector was planning constraints. Photograph: Farlap/Alamy View image in fullscreen The environment secretary has said one of the biggest barriers to expanding the poultry sector was planning constraints. Photograph: Farlap/Alamy Poultry sector growth plan risks UK national security, campaigners warn Government’s food security push is said to rely on animal feed imports with vulnerability to supply chain shocks The government’s planned poultry sector growth plan is a risk to national security, campaigners have warned. Earlier this month, the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds , told the Groundswell agriculture festival that the key to improving food security was consuming more homegrown produce, and said this was why the government had set up the Farming and Food Partnership Board, whose members include industry leaders such as the president of the National Farmers’ Union and the chief executive of the Food & Drink Federation. Reynolds said: “I would like to see us use different levers of the state and use the board to really boost the level of food production in the UK.” In a parliamentary committee hearing earlier this month, the environment secretary said one of the biggest barriers to growth in the poultry sector was planning constraints. The Guardian has previously revealed that ministers were rewriting planning rules to make it easier to build intensive livestock farms despite concerns about water pollution, air quality and local opposition. View image in fullscreen Emma Reynolds, the secretary of state for the environment, food and rural affairs, said she would like to ‘really boost the level of food production in the UK’. Photograph: Jill Mead/The Guardian But this focus on growth in the poultry sector to tackle food security has met with strong criticism. Ruth Westcott, a campaign manager at Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, said the plan to produce more UK poultry was a risk to UK food security, not a solution. “Intensive poultry farming is highly resource-intensive, polluting and inefficient, so it can never be a solution to food security,” Westcott said. Sustain and the campaign group Communities Against Factory Farming (CAFF) are calling on the government to axe its poultry growth plan and focus on homegrown sources of protein such as pulses, legumes, nuts and beans. “The government’s own national security assessment warns that ‘animal farming at current levels is unsustainable without imports – soy from South America makes up 18% of produced animal feed’,” said Maya Pardo, the campaign lead at CAFF. “Besides destroying the Amazon rainforest to feed factory-farmed chickens, heavy reliance on imports of animal feed also leaves us vulnerable to supply chain shocks and ecosystem collapse, which is a national security issue.” Concerns about the UK’s food security have been expressed across the board. Last month the government’s farmi