The prospect of rising food prices due to poor harvests raises some serious questions. The government and the agricultural sector can come up with measures to protect the short-term interests of farmers, such as improved insurance schemes, but what is equally important is how to prevent these incidents happening over the long term, by building the resilience of our natural agricultural resource base.

While we can’t control the weather, the droughts and the floods we have experienced this year have been exacerbated by the way we manage the hydrological cycle on farms and across landscapes.

The solutions aren’t, unfortunately, to be found in the mainstream but lie among the more pioneering fringes, in particular in broad-scale permaculture. Particular solutions that need to be tried and tested in the UK include setting up appropriate-scale water-storage mechanisms across the landscape (the current trend is to build large-scale water-storage mechanisms); building more fertile soils with a greater soil-water retention capacity; and introducing soil cultivation techniques that enable water to be held in the landscape.

My colleagues and I have worked for decades in the dryland regions of the world, and are also supporting experts from those regions, including Australia, to share their knowledge with land users in the UK. This approach of building resilience need not take very long, actually, and it is an investment we need to make if we want to avoid these problems reoccurring year after year.

Agroecology is the approach we advocate to build the resilience of our natural agricultural resource base. Yet while sustainable approaches to food systems are being applied at a local level, there are two major barriers to these being adopted more widely; a lack of knowledge and a lack of resources and appropriate technologies.

If agroecology is to become the norm, and in turn support the bigger challenge of ensuring food security, changes are also required in relation to government policy, economic structuring, research, institutions and practice.

A ‘business as usual’ approach won’t wash. To make these changes requires a major re-education drive at all levels. In addition to knowledge sharing and testing, the right political will is also required, and this means introducing regulation in support of agroecology.

Regulation is particularly important to reign in the private sector that does not have as its main priority the development of a healthy food system.

None of this is new, but certainly now is the time to seriously consider legislation in support of agroecology and tackle the issues that will help us create more resilient food systems worldwide.—