Beyond Business As Usual

A Food Ethics Council project to enable progress by government and business towards a fair, healthy and sustainable food system

‘Business as usual is not an option’. That’s the unambiguous message from the Food Ethics Council’s Food and Fairness Inquiry.

Our project, Beyond Business as Usual, takes this message as its starting point. Our aim is to enable progress by government and business towards a fair, healthy and sustainable food and farming system. It recognises that moving beyond business as usual is essential to address the social, environmental and economic challenges facing our food system today, and finds that there is a strong mandate from industry for government leadership on this issue.

Beyond Business As Usual explores this mandate for government leadership by asking businesses in the farming and food sectors to tell us what effective government leadership would look like. What practical steps do businesses need government to take; what are the obstacles; how might they be overcome; and what are the priority policy areas?

At the same time, we will seek to understand what policy makers – politicians and civil servants – perceive to be the opportunities and challenges, and what support they need from business and civil society.

In 2011 we held informal discussions with key stakeholders, supplemented by research into the challenges confronting government and business. In 2012 we conducted a six-month process of dialogue, involving influential stakeholders from all parts of the food chain.

To that end, during spring 2012 we ran a one-month online survey of stakeholders across all the relevant sectors: business, government, civil society, academia, and the wider general public. We also conducted in-depth interviews with leading stakeholders.

Our analysis of this dialogue and the survey will provide the focus for a series of seminars and smaller meetings, which will help us test our findings and proposals. To ensure that our proposals are practical, and address the most pressing issues identified by business and government, we plan to develop a series of case studies.

The outcome of this process is a report, which we launched in January 2013, containing a set of robust, informed, and far-reaching proposals for progressive government and business leadership on food sustainability. You can read the full report by clicking on the link at the bottom of this page.

You can read all the outputs from Beyond Business As Usual here including the terms of reference, the three roundtable reports, and a synthesis report of our survey, interviews and roundtables.

The final report was published on 30th January 2013.