The Landworkers’ Alliance is a union of farmers, growers, foresters and land-based workers.

Feedback for us

If you have any comments, critiques, considerations, compliments, complaints, about anything the Landworkers Alliance is or isn’t up to, do let us know your thought. We love feedback, it keeps a system healthy. Please fill in this quick form.

Membership / Supporter / Donation Queries

Please contact Lauren.Simpson@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Requests for work, volunteering or internships

We are currently not recruiting for any roles but please read our newsletters for any announcements. We currently do not offer any volunteer or internship placements directly with the LWA, but keep an eye out in the newsletter or on the forum for any members looking for volunteers or workers.

Academic/Research Enquiries

Please look at the Agroecology Research Collaboration to see if it fits your area of research/work.

Membership Support / Advice

Currently the LWA does not have capacity or resources to help individual members or potential members on their specific projects, farms or programmes. We get a lot of requests for individual support and would love to have the time to respond to each request in full. We are fundraising for a new role for somebody to focus on membership support and services as we have identified it is a gap in our offering so please watch this space. Having said that, if your query is critical and urgent please email info@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk including the word URGENT in the subject header and it will get picked up and we can try our best to help.

Contacting Individual Staff

Please take the time to explore our staff page here to see who the most relevant contact for your enquiry is.

Our addresses format is firstname.lastname@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

You can also find information under the About Us header about branch and regional organising, and identity groups within the LWA membership.

Press/Media Enquiries:

For any queries relating to press please email press@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

Merchandise/calendar Enquiries

For any enquiries to do with shop sales including the calendar please email merchandise@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk

To Include an Item in Our Newsletter:

You can fill in this quick form to submit it to be included in the next bulletin/newsletter. The deadline to submit is the end of Friday each week for the following week’s member bulletin. With the same form you can also submit to the monthly non-member newsletter which goes out in the first week of the month.

All Other Enquiries:

For any other enquiries that are URGENT please email info@staging.landworkersalliance.org.uk with the word ‘urgent’ in the subject header and we will do our best to help.

Follow Us

Food Policy

Food justice and food sovereignty are common threads which bind much of our advocacy and campaign work together, driven by our belief that nutritious, sustainably produced and culturally appropriate food is a basic human right, and that those who provide it should be entitled to dignified livelihoods.

We advocate for government policy and legislation to be grounded in a fundamental Right to Food, and to be guided by the six principles of food sovereignty: that food is produced for people, not profit; that food systems operate on a local and regional scale where possible; that control is centred in the hands of local communities; that food producers, farmers and growers are valued; that land-based skills and knowledge are nurtured and developed; and that food production works with nature and not against it.

See below for more information on our food justice campaign and policy work in England, Wales and Scotland.

England

National Food Strategy

In 2021 our Horticulture Campaigns Coordinator Rebecca Laughton was part of the Advisory Panel for Henry Dimbleby’s government-commissioned National Food Strategy review. The report looked at the whole food supply chain, from farm to fork, and outlined a set of comprehensive recommendations for future policy and legislation. The Government have promised to publish a White Paper in response to the findings of the report, which will outline a cross-departmental strategy for building a better food system in England. The White Paper is due to be published in spring 2022.

You can read our response to the National Food Strategy yma.

Right to Food

Dee Woods, our Food Justice Policy Coordinator, is also active in the national Right to Food campaign, led by MP Ian Byrne together with Fans Supporting Foodbanks and a range of other local and community organisations. The Right to Food campaign is calling for access to food to be a legal right for all, and to put an end to food poverty, you can read more about the campaign yma.

Cymru (Wales)

Welsh Food Bill

In November 2021 the Welsh Senedd voted in favour of supporting a Food Bill proposed by Peter Fox MS. We will be working with MSs to ensure that this piece of legislation supports small-scale producers, promotes agroecological farming and land-use practices, and strengthens localised food systems and short supply chains. You can read more about the Food Bill yma.

Community Food Strategy 

The current Programme for Government includes a commitment to create a new Community Food Strategy. Very little detail has been announced yet, but we will be campaigning for an ambitious strategy that builds a localised, sustainable food system in Wales.

Scotland

Local Food Strategy

The Scottish government has put forward a strategy for the future of local food in Scotland, and consulted the public on this strategy in late 2021. To respond to this consultation we brought together the voices of members from across Scotland to ensure producers are centred in discussions about local food.

Our response outlined how a local food strategy must empower food producers and local communities, in keeping with the principles of food sovereignty. It must involve the creation of decentralised food systems based on short, direct supply chains, without reliance on big supermarkets. In order to achieve the aims of the local food strategy, there is a need for greater support for local food producers in Scotland. The local food strategy must be closely linked with policy on environment and agricultural transition, and include a focus on the crucial role agroecological farming can play in the development of local, sustainable food systems. We also used this opportunity to highlight the amazing work our members do to contribute to genuinely local food supply in Scotland, in the face of significant systemic challenges.

Our full response to the consultation on Local Food Strategy in Scotland can be found here.

Good Food Nation Bill

Scotland faces significant challenges related to food, from inequality to ill health to ecological damage. The Good Food Nation bill is a piece of framework legislation put forward by the Scottish Government to try to address these challenges. Initially intended to be introduced in 2020 following a lengthy consultation process, the Bill was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and was instead first brought before the parliament in late 2021. We’ve been working as part of the Scottish Food Coalition (SFC) to campaign for this legislation to be ambitious, just, and give us all more power in our food system. This includes demanding that the Good Food Nation bill incorporates the Right to Food in Scottish law, and ensuring that the implementation of the bill is overseen by an independent statutory body. More information about this campaign can be found on the SFC website.

OUR CAMPAIGNS

View Campaign
Food In Our Hands (2022 – ongoing)
Partnering with other food and farming organisations to build the UK Food Sovereignty movement
View Campaign
Solidarity with Migrant Landworkers
An investigation into the working conditions of seasonal migrant agricultural workers in the UK.
View Campaign
VOCAL FOR LOCAL (2021 – ongoing)
The Vocal for Local campaign makes the case for local and short supply chains as the route to just, sustainable, healthy and resilient food systems fit for the 21st century.
View Campaign
Stop the Deregulation of Gene-Editing
A campaign to protect the interests of farmers and food producers and stop the deregulation of gene-editing technologies in the UK.

 

PUBLICATIONS

Download PDF
LWA’s Response to the National Food Strategy (2021)
The LWA's response to the National Food Strategy; an independent report commissioned by the UK government and published on 15 July 2021.
Download PDF
Vocal For Local (2021)
The Vocal for Local report reveals the market failures of the UK supermarket supply system, outlining how local food systems can address these pressing issues in six key areas.
Download PDF
A People’s Food Policy (2017)
How To Develop An Integrated Holistic National Food Policy

 

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