Food and Farming in Twentieth-Century Britain

This chapter traces the twentieth-century history of British agricultural policy and the food system. It explains how the UK, like other western countries, came to adopt a particular model of agricultural policy centred on supporting production through the promotion of particular technological systems that have given rise to the farming and the food system that we have today. The chapter draws on historical research on the founding of this productivist model and maps out the stunning improvements in agricultural productivity from the 1940s to the 1980s. It traces the power relations around productivism before explaining how the model entered a period of crisis and flux from the 1980s and became subjected to a cycle of incremental reforms.