The road to 2020: Soil Association launches new group strategy
28 September 2011
The Soil Association is pleased to publish its new group strategy: The Road to 2020 Towards healthy, humane and sustainable food, farming and land use. Encompassing the activity of both Soil Association Certification and the wider Soil Association charity, the strategy brings greater clarity to the work of the group and puts a strong emphasis on supporting innovation and reaching out to a wider audience. ‘We want to start where people are at the moment, and ensure that we are tackling the misconceptions that organic production is elitist or anti-science through everything that we say and do,’ says Helen Browning the Soil Association director. To this end the strategy is based around two major themes: ‘facing the future’ and ‘good food for all’.
The first major work theme, ‘facing the future’, will promote solutions that meet the needs of people for healthy food, fuel and fibre, while protecting the natural world. Through this theme the Soil Association will develop best practice in the organic sector, and disseminate it so that it is adopted by organic licensees and in other areas of agriculture. The group’s vision is of a complex, diverse, highly productive eco-system which involves and sustains humanity and wildlife through an equally complex web of community and business activity.
‘Good food for all’, the second major theme, is a commitment to ensuring that organic, seasonal, healthy food is accessible to everyone, especially those who will most benefit from the most nutritious diet. The Soil Association also wants to establish that its role in public health should be as powerful as it is in environment and farming. Good food can transform people’s lives, not just though the health benefits of a good diet, but by helping with cultural cohesion, improving life chances and tackling some of the great health and social inequalities in our society
‘We want to find the right balance between setting organic standards and other ways of improving the performance of our farming, food and land use systems,’ Helen explains. ‘Across the organisation there will be a new emphasis on innovation and on reaching out to people as citizens, consumers, growers and business people, to show the relevance of our work, even for those who are not eating or producing organically. We will continue to bring all perspectives around our table, to find the best way of meeting our aspirations for healthy, humane and sustainable food, farming and production systems.’
