Whitehall faces fresh curbs on food sourcing

GOVERNMENT departments are to be prohibited from buying cheap foreign foods from the start of next year as part of a shake-up of how it sources food.

From January 2011 all Whitehall bodies will have to ensure that any

food it uses adheres to British welfare standards, such as that signified by the Red Tractor logo.

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The announcement was made in Defra's "Structural Reform Plan", in which it laid out its objectives for the next two years.

The plan stated that as well as altering how they buy food, every Government department will be required to do so without increasing costs.

British law requires UK farmers to adhere to welfare standards which are much higher than that followed by many foreign competitors, meaning the UK's agriculture sector can often be undercut in price – a source of frustration to many farmers.

A Yorkshire Post investigation in 2009 showed that Whitehall departments were importing a third of their food at a cost of more than 600m a year.

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Defra will also seek to seek to compel the country's retailers to adopt more honest labelling to reflect accurately where the ingredients have come from. It will initially seek to encourage retailers to do this voluntarily, a practice it will review in May 2011.

If unsatisfactory the Structural Reform Plan said it would take "further steps to ensure the greatest possible transparency by food retailers and producers to consumers".

Some supermarkets, such as Morrisons, already follow this practice.

Elsewhere it said work was already underway to develop measures of support for hill farmers and to look at what it called "science-led" ways of controlling badgers, widely thought to be behind the spread of the deadly TB virus in cattle.

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Alistair Mackintosh, livestock chairman of the National Farmers' Union, told the Yorkshire Post: "When it comes to badger control we are hoping the Government is going to take steps in the right direction and we are more positive that they will than we have been for some time.

"Hill farming has to be recognised – its operations produce some of the best quality livestock there is and the lowland areas depend on that. We hope that they can get the support they need in the right areas so they can keep producing the quality food we all know they can."

Defra Quangos facing cull

The Government is to carry out a major cull of the 87 environmental quangos currently operating.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman has suggested that Defra's arms length bodies would be sacrificed in order to protect front-line services.

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Mrs Spelman said many of the quangos were set up in the 1970s and 1980s to perform functions that were now "mainstream" and are part of what Defra does as part of its day-to-day operations.

"It is quite possible to rationalise those and make savings without compromising frontline services," she said.

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