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Urgent changes are needed to way food is sold, to protect local producers Nick Hempleman, owner of The Sussex Produce Company in Steyning, with Arundel and South Downs MP Nick Herbert NICK HEMPLEMAN, THE SUSSEX PRODUCE COMPANY Email Published: 17:21 Monday 12 March 2018 Share this article The Taste West Sussex food and drink summit was a fantastic celebration of local food and that is a wonderful tribute to so many people, who have put so much work in to get us to where we are today. Our shop, The Sussex Produce Company in Steyning, has been open for ten years and when we got our alcohol licence back in 2011, there were 21 breweries in Sussex. Today, there are 60. We have some of the best wineries in the world on the South Downs, as well as some of the best food and drink producers. However, all is not well in the world of local food and it would be amiss of us if we indulged purely in a bit of self-congratulatory back slapping and ignored the elephant in the room. I am a passionate supporter of local food but local food needs local outlets, local retailers, and these are under threat. In five years, more than 13,000 specialist stores around the UK have closed and the small independents’ share of the grocery market has fallen to just six per cent, while the supermarkets’ share has increased to 88 per cent. A report from Manchester Metropolitan University suggests that at the current rate of demise, there will be no independent retailers left by 2050, and a report by the All Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group predicts that many will have ceased trading by 2020. Those that stock locally-grown produce are of especial concern. In the last year alone we have lost Crossbush Farmshop outside Arundel, Sussex Farm Foods in Bury, Saltdean Fruits, Rag Dolly Polly in Forest Row, Gilbert & Bashford in Worthing, Fresh in Billingshurst and Aggies in Brighton. Many more are hanging on by their fingernails.
Without local retailers, local wholesale markets have shrunk and disappeared. Twenty years ago, Brighton wholesale market boasted 19 businesses, with extra space for market gardeners to sell their produce directly to the trade. Today, only TG Fruits and Premier are left. Wholesalers are often rather overlooked but they are important for fruit and veg because without them, small-scale farmers, the backbone of the countryside since Anglo Saxon times, have no easy outlet for their produce. They stop farming and their land is sold off for housing or for golf clubs, never to return. These changes are not inevitable, indeed on the contrary, they are the result of conscious decisions by politicians, planners and regulators who for decades have allowed giant, out-of-town supermarkets to destroy our high streets, to dismember our farming communities and to grow into effective monopolies. For millennia, local food was a way of life but over the last 30 years, the growth of the big supermarkets has required the development of industrial-sized farms, often abroad, to satisfy their enormous, centralised distribution systems. This model is neither sustainable nor local, nor in the interests of basic food security. |
