First published on the Food Manifesto Wales website, which is being closed after 10 years
Much has happened since we started the Food Manifesto website in 2015. Food is now well established in Welsh policy, as Food Sense Wales noted earlier this year: the Future Generations office has made food a priority, the government has produced a Community Food Strategy, and serious moves are afoot to supply school meals with organic vegetables. Meanwhile, the FFCC’s Food Conversations are mobilising citizens to shape food strategy, and county farms in Powys and Carmarthenshire are being re-purposed to grow vegetables. The Sustainable Farming Scheme has taken the place of EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and nature restoration is widely supported, at least in theory. As poverty has intensified, community food initiatives have multiplied and food security is back on the agenda.
These changes have been driven – and followed – by many people and organisations, and it is this widely distributed support that gives the Welsh food movement its power. The Manifesto has been part of that, and it has been a joy to work with so many inspiring people, and see ideals turn into reality. Now as we formally close our website and move into a new phase, it’s time to look back on 10 years of our work and see how far we have come. What has our special contribution been, and what is needed next?
The Wales Food Manifesto was set up by a group of individuals following a conference in Cardiff to mark the end of a project called Food Values, which had been led by Organic Centre Wales (2000-2015, RIP). This brought together activists and academics to find out how people think about food – is it really just all about price? It turned out that people cared about much more. They wanted to see a world where everyone had enough to eat, where food was grown and prepared to high standards, and not wasted, and where children were given the skills to grow and cook together. Ultimately, food was seen as an expression of culture, love and connection.
The idea of the Manifesto was that it would be a set of principles that most people could agree on, whether they were in the food industry or feeding a family (or, of course, both), and which would draw people together across divides. It was also the year that the Well-being of Future Generations Act became law, and so it was natural to map our principles of the Manifesto onto the seven well-being goals. You can see our first draft here.
We built a website and used the Manifesto as a starting point for discussions at food festivals, conferences and community meals. It worked well to start conversations, and we found more and more resonance with work that was going on around Wales, to do with poverty, the environment, farming, food skills and other topics. It did indeed bring people together and articulate what was emerging in Wales, and elsewhere.
There is a limit to what a few individuals can achieve, though. We wondered if we should set up an organisation to hold the Manifesto, and with support from Sustain, RSPB and others, we held a few public meetings to test the water. The enthusiasm was certainly there, but the direction was not clear and so we paused. The website meanwhile became a vehicle to publish a wide range of articles on Welsh food, from beekeeping to nitrate management, from Wales’ role in tropical deforestation to food history. We published nearly 100 blog posts (this is number 98), as well as a Brexit briefing for the Food Research Collaboration.
It was in 2018 that a few of us who were regular attenders of the Oxford Real Farming Conference proposed a session on the Manifesto and the Welsh food movement. The ORFC wanted to encourage regional spin-offs of their popular event and wondered – would we like to use our slot to see if there would be interest in running one in Wales? We did, and there was.
And so in 2019 the Wales Real Food and Farming Conference was held for the first time in Aberystwyth, with Colin Tudge and Ruth West, founders of ORFC, as our guests. Led by people from Aberystwyth University, the RSPB, the Sustainable Food Trust, Organic Farmers and Growers, Garden Organic, Permaculture, Farming Connect and many other organisations, it was an immediate success. It has been held every year since then: twice online because of Covid, then at Lampeter, Ruthin and Lampeter again.
Now we are planning the seventh conference at Bridgend, taking it to South Wales in the run up to the 2026 Senedd election. It will be held on 19-21 November 2025 and will be a partnership with Food Sense Wales. This charity, which began around the same time as us, has done much to advance food system development in Wales, setting up the Food Policy Alliance Cymru and now running the local food partnerships which are tapping into the energy of ‘food citizens’ to drive change.
New organisation
The Conference may be an established event in the calendar, but just like the Manifesto from which it arose, it still lacks a legal structure or secure funding. We never know from year to year who will organise it or how it will be financed – only that somehow, miraculously, people come forward. Operating on a shoestring is exhilarating but it does limit what is possible and place a strain on volunteers. And so now we are building a charity that will run the WRFFC and take over the legacy of the Manifesto.
We are calling it CyFAN Cymru. This stands for Cymuned Dros Fwyd a Natur, or Community for Food and Nature, with the added benefit that Cyfan is Welsh for ‘whole’, expressing the way that food brings all aspects of life together. The plan is that CyFAN Cymru will not only be a vehicle for the Conference but will build on it, with year-round events and publications. We have already held two online seminars and have ideas for more.
It has a website, www.cyfancymru.wales, and you can find us on LinkedIn as well. Please take a look and sign up for our newsletter. The Food Manifesto will be archived here and eventually absorbed into CyFAN Cymru.
We are also looking for more trustees to join our board, as we prepare our application to the Charity Commission. That means articulating what exactly we bring to the food movement. We know that people come to our conference year after year, and we get more session proposals than we can fit into the programme, but why exactly? Perhaps it is because, like the original Food Values project, we ask what it is that people care most deeply about and we stand for those values.
We bring together people who are doing what they believe in – on farms, in our communities, in our workplaces – and we nurture the vision that arises from that. Where there is conflict, we look for points of connection, valuing complexity. We value service and the wisdom that comes with years of experience, as the ground from which innovation arises. We provide a space for reflection in a world that invites us to rush from success to success. We see that we are ‘all in this together’ and we provide comfort for people who are struggling on their own. We build community without, we hope, being a clique.
To put it grandly, with the Conference we create people-centred spaces where the food movement, and wider society, can renew itself. Please come and join us at CyFAN Cymru.
Feature image: Aber Food Surplus is one of many community food projects that are bringing the concept of sustainable food for all on to the high street
