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The Right to Retail (report)
Respublica
The report, which has been reported on by the Guardian, ConservativeHome, The Grocer, Platform10, Regeneration and Renewal, The Retail Bulletin and Scotland on Sunday, argues that the Government must give communities the power to rebalance the retail economy away from the ‘Big Four’ supermarkets, which control nearly 80 per cent of the UK’s £150 billion pound grocery market.
The radical plans contained within a 55 page report on the future of small shops are being unveiled by the influential centre-right think tank ResPublica. The report urges Ministers to give sweeping new powers to town halls to protect local shops.
Controversially the report proposes new tax raising powers on large out-of-town shops with the money being used to slash business rates on small retailers.
The report The Right to Retail – Can localism save Britain’s small retailers, by Adam Schoenborn, Senior Research Fellow at ResPublica argues that the Government must do more to rebalance the retail economy.
And it sets out a raft of policy ideas which are designed to encourage new models of retail including mutuals, level the playing field between large and small retailers, rebalance the retail sector away from the ‘Big Four’ and reverse the decline of the high street.
“Britain every year is less and less a nation of shopkeepers – assets and ownership are concentrating, finance has become the preserve of the City of London and high streets have converged as though by centralised design,” says the report.
“The UK’s 8151 supermarket outlets today account for 97 per cent of total grocery sales, and 76 per cent of groceries are sold by just the four biggest retailers.
“When we talk about rebalancing the economy, what we are really talking about is shifting back the locus of ownership and economic control to communities. The goal and evidence of a genuinely new economic settlement, of any political stripe, must be the end of this declining trend in popular ownership. The challenge of the next settlement – in the retail industry as in the economy at large – will be embedding the small and the local owner into our economy, without compromising competitiveness or consumer benefits.”…
…Key recommendations from the report include:
1. Allow Communities to designate retail mix in Neighbourhood Plans
2. A Community Right to Appeal
3. Treat shops as local assets
4. Business rate reduction for designated retailers
5. A Community Right to Buy
6. A Community Right to Try
7. Embed small and medium owners in Local Enterprise Partnerships
8. A Community Interest Clause
9. An annual national report on “buying power” and “price flexing”
10. Encourage mutual retail models
11. Encourage community-run retailers
The Right to Retail.pdf
The Right to Retail – ExecSumm.pdf
(May 2011)
The Business podcast: Are supermarkets too powerful?
Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian
Supermarkets now sell us 97% of our groceries. As the big four continue to grow, small and independent competitors are in steady decline.
This week Ed Miliband backed a stronger voice for local people who oppose the spread of supermarkets in their towns. But the issue is not simple: supermarkets also offer jobs, convenient shopping and low-priced food. But have they become too powerful … and if so, what can be done about it?
In the studio this week we have a panel of experts:
Phillip Blond is the director of the thinktank ResPublica which recently published The Right to Retail – Can Localism Save Britain’s Small Retailers?.
Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation and author of Tescopoly.
Shiv Malik is an investigative journalist and author of Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted its Youth. He reported from Bristol on the recent riots at the new Tesco store in Stokes Croft.
Nils Pratley is the Guardian’s financial editor.
Also on the podcast this week: we discuss the controversial windfall tax on North sea energy companies, plus the details of Portugal’s bailout.
(4 May 2011)
Sustainable ag education loses funding
Stephanie Paige Ogburn, High Country News
The U.S. government has long been in the business of supporting education for farmers. In 1914, Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act, which formalized a system of agriculture education that is still ongoing. Known as cooperative extension, it was a partnership between the U.S Department of Agriculture and the land grant colleges. The partnership allowed the government to help those state universities get farmers the most up-to-date knowledge on the best agricultural practices in their area.
The extension system still exists today, although many grumble that it only serves large, conventional farmers. The farm bill of 1985 partially addressed that problem by creating a resource for smaller farmers looking to grow sustainably. Back then the program was called ATTRA, and although its name has changed to the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, most people still refer to it by its former acronym.
Or they used to. In the recent budget bill passed by Congress, ATTRA,* a 35-year-old program that has provided knowledge and training to new and existing farmers looking for information on how to use sustainable production practices, had all of its funding eliminated. Overnight, the program went from a $2.8 million budget to $0.
“(It’s a) terrible disservice to anyone who wants to farm sustainably,” says Patty Bancroft, who farms 300 organic acres in Vermilion, S.D.
Bancroft relied heavily on ATTRA’s services when she transitioned her family’s Evergreen Farm, which grows corn, beans, and alfalfa, from conventional to organic agriculture.
“It’s really difficult to make the transition. And we had a lot of trouble with weeds and we had a lot of trouble with how to apply (organic) fertilizer,” says Bancroft. The information she got from ATTRA, which was based on current research, helped her family make the transition successfully, said Bancroft…
(20 April 2011)
Food prices driven up by global warming, study shows
Damian Carrington, The Guardian
Global warming has already harmed the world’s food production and has driven up food prices by as much as 20% over recent decades, new research has revealed.
The drop in the productivity of crop plants around the world was not caused by changes in rainfall but was because higher temperatures can cause dehydration, prevent pollination and lead to slowed photosynthesis.
Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, Washington DC, said the findings indicate a turning point: “Agriculture as it exists today evolved over 11,000 years of reasonably stable climate, but that climate system is no more.” Adaptation is difficult because our knowledge of the future is not strong enough to drive new investments, he said, “so we just keep going, hoping for the best.”
The scientists say their work shows how crucial it is to find ways to adapt farming to a warmer world, to ensure that rises in global population are matched by rising food production. “It is vital,” said Wolfram Schlenker, at Columbia University in New York and one of the research team. “If we continue to have the same seed varieties and temperatures continue to rise, then food prices will rise further. [Addressing] that is the big question.”
The new research joins a small number of studies in which the fingerprint of climate change has been separated from natural variations in weather and other factors, demonstrating that the effects of warming have already been felt in the world. Scientists have shown that the chance of the severe heatwave that killed thousands in Europe in 2003 was made twice as likely by global warming, while other work showed that the floods that caused £3.5bn of damage in England in 2000 were made two to three times more likely.
Food prices have reached new record highs this year, and have been implicated as a trigger for unrest in the Middle East and Africa. A rising appetite for meat is a critical factor, said Wolfram. “We actually have enough calories to feed the world quite comfortably, the problem is meat is really inefficient,” as many kilogrammes of grain are needed to produce one kilogramme of meat, he said. “As countries get richer and have a preference for meat, which is more expensive, they price people in poorer countries out of the market.”…
(5 May 2011)
The report abstract is here. The report is behind a paywall.
Many orchards in neglected state, aerial study finds
BBC news
Nearly half of England’s traditional orchards are in a neglected condition, a study of aerial photographs suggests.
Some 35,378 orchards – home to wide varieties of apples and pears, as well as wildlife – were identified by the People’s Trust for Endangered Species.
Researchers say 9% are in pristine condition, 46% were in a good state and 45% were in a poor condition.
The five-year project aims to map sites that are in decline to provide a basis for future work to protect them.
The trust said traditional orchards were increasingly at risk because of neglect, intensification of agriculture and pressure from land development.
Anita Burrough, orchard officer for the trust, said: “The mosaic of habitats that comprise a traditional orchard provide food and shelter for at least 1,800 species of wildlife, including the rare noble chafer beetle which relies on the decaying wood of old fruit trees.
“With this loss of habitat, we also face losing rare English fruit varieties, traditions, customs and knowledge, in addition to the genetic diversity represented by the hundreds of species that are associated with traditional orchards.”..
(5 May 2011)
The link to the aerial photographs is here.
