Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. Green Alliance is a charity and think tank that is all about ambitious leadership for the environment.

My name is Belinda Gordon and I'm the strategy director at Green Alliance.

The food we eat affects our environment in hundreds of ways.

In managing to massively increase production to feed our growing population,

the environmental impact of our food system has become increasingly negative.

Farming has been the biggest contributor to biodiversity loss in the UK since the Second World War,

and, despite the potential to sequester carbon,

agriculture and land use actually accounts for 12% of our greenhouse gas emissions.

The way we use our land in this small country, with its varied geography, has always been contested.

Although we can never be self-sufficient in producing all the food we need, we also cannot simply return all our land to nature,

as this would mean importing food from parts of the world that may not be as well suited to producing

it as we are, not to mention that much of the wildlife we love is adapted to thrive in the farmed

environment, albeit much less intensive farming than is now the norm.

Having left the EU with its damaging common agricultural policy,

we are now able to address the negative impacts of farming and incentivise farmers to produce

the so-called public goods that we all need to keep us and our planet healthy.

However, there are also risks as we develop our own trade policy

and strike deals with countries that produce food to very different standards from our own,

often meaning that food can be produced more cheaply, undercutting UK farmers.

These trade issues are something that has been the focus of much of the work of Greener UK.

A Green Alliance-led coalition of environmental organisations working to improve environmental standards.

Through this, we are pushing the government to protect the environment through trade deals

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