Giving power back to farmers

How you can help the People's Food & Farming Alliance

- PIPPY JONES

PFFA Founder, Katherine Macbean, became concerned about supermarket dominance and the centralisation of British farming and food production over 20 years ago.

She spent several years working in the industry to discover whether her original concerns had any realistic merit. Sadly, they did.

Supermarkets were increasingly becoming behemoths and their centralised control structures were slowly taking over traditional food production systems and altering not only how food is grown and produced, but also how it is processed.

We saw traditional mixed farms move closer to mono-crop/mono-product cultures, which over time caused an increase in chemical outputs due to disease build-up, as well as limiting a farmer's direct route to market, the loss of broad agricultural knowledge and skill-sets and poorer quality food for consumers, and increasing damage to soil and natural habitats for wildlife.

Katherine also noted DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs) was continually expanding its remit, with increasing legislation forced upon farmers and producers which were costly and did not benefit farmers, as well as a lack of DEFRA action that supports actual food production. This legislation has applied incredible pressure to already busy farmers, which ran parallel with increased reports on mental health problems within the agricultural industry.

Shift forwards 20 years and Katherine and her team can barely find any local butchers, bakers, greengrocers or fishmongers, as the majority have been pushed out of the marketplace by supermarkets.

In September 2022, the PFFA was born. There were immediately three clear areas of focus for Katherine and a very small team of volunteers, which are Grow Your Own, Community Growing Groups and Farmers & Producers.