It can take a thousand years to form an inch, which can be washed away in a moment. It provides 95% of our food, and yet we allow it to blow off in the wind. Civilisations rise and fall on how they treat it, and we treat it like dirt. I am talking, of course, about soil. Researchers at Sheffield University concluded two years ago that Britain’s fields are so depleted that our earth had a hundred harvests left in it. So make that ninety eight. Other stats are even scarier. According to New Scientist magazine, if we don’t slow the decline, all farmable soils in the world will be gone within sixty years.

There are lots of simple things which the government really should be doing to combat this. It has a unique opportunity to rethink our approach to farming, as Brexit will remove the UK from the EU ‘Common Agricultural Policy’ (CAP), repatriating regulatory powers. The government should better regulate or indeed curtail disastrous maize farming. It should encourage more crop-rotation and upland tree planting; support wetland restoration and beaver-reintroduction; ban heather burning on grouse moors; minimise soil compaction from livestock and machinery, and invest in a mass switch to organic farming.

But it seems to me that, whilst all of these policies are necessary, they are insufficient to tackle the global scale of this crisis. Adjustments to conventional farming methods help – but they don’t tackle another great problem: that the extensive land use required by such practises means eating into ever more wilderness, wiping out ever more species. So as well as reforming our traditional land farming, we should look into alternative agricultural solutions, which will allow us to feed ourselves without asset-stripping the planet and dooming future generations to food scarcity.

Hydroponic and aquaponic farming allow for the growth of vegetables in water enriched with nutrients (in the latter case, through the presence of fish). Famous largely for its use by cannabis growers, many other kinds of crop can equally flourish without soil. It’s not a new idea: Francis Bacon referred to ‘water culture’ in his 1627 book ‘Sylva Sylvarum’, and there was an eruption of research immediately afterwards. Studies in the 1960s showed it to be no more efficient than growing food in good quality top soil. But with less and less good top soil around, those figures get more and more appealing. And that’s without mass investment in research and development that could make these methods even more efficient.

Similarly, 3D ocean farming offers the opportunity to grow much more of our food in the seas, whilst at the same time replenishing our life-bereft maritime ecosystems. Seaweed doesn’t currently form a significant part of the European diet. But it is delicious, and can also be used as livestock feed. As the soil crisis hoves into view, it seems likely that new farming techniques along these lines will see ever greater demand. And just as those countries who got ahead of the game in renewable energy twenty years ago are reaping the rewards now, it seems likely that government backing for such agricultural innovations will reap long term dividends on the global market.

But if we are going to go down this road, it’s worth asking another question: If the 1909 allotment act gave each of us the right to land on which to grow food, why not update it to give every family access to a space in a shared hydroponic tower? What about our numerous impoverished seaside towns? Why shouldn’t councils lead investment into ocean farming co-ops?

And if much large-scale modern agriculture is done by carefully programmed machines, why can’t we equally automate the growing of our own food? Why can’t Britain be the country which develops the technology by which your own veg, or seaweed, or shellfish, grown in your community allotment, can be picked by your community’s automatic harvester and delivered to your home by a community-owned self-driven car or drone? Ownership of Britain’s agricultural land is astoundingly unequal, and new technologies offer an opportunity to democratise food production, beginning to tackle a food poverty crisis whose icon has become a growing array of food banks.

The food and drink supply chain is the UK’s single largest manufacturing sector. It accounts for 7% of GDP, employs 3.7M people and is worth £80Bn per year. Because of CAP, it has been protected from the global market for decades. As Britain leaves the EU, we must decide what role it will play in the future of our economy. We can allow it to be asset stripped like most of our industry, or we can accept that at a time of fast technological change and vast environmental challenges, we will have to embrace the former if we are to survive the latter.

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Since 2008, Britain has seen a surge in alternative economic thinking. From community finance to cooperatives, public ownership to tax avoidance; land taxes to local currencies, GDP to the creation of money; basic income to fossil fuel divestment, longstanding wisdom about how best to organise our economy is being challenged.

This explosion of new ideas – or, perhaps more often, the rediscovering of old ones – should come as no surprise. The credit crunch delivered a brutal blow to Westminster’s economic strategy, yet little has been done to change it.

Real terms wages have fallen by more than 10%. The two biggest countries in the UK are heavily reliant on finance and fossil fuels: industries that are far from sustainable. Britain’s other countries are the poorest in Northern Europe. Our trade deficit – chronic since the early 1980s – has only grown. Personal debt levels are booming. The housing vortex is sucking up ever higher portions of people’s wages, and steering investment away from productive industries: by some measures, net investment our economic future fell to zero in 2014.

Britain’s biodiversity is in free-fall and our depleted soils are estimated to only have 98 harvests left in them. The gender pay gap remains stubbornly wide at around 20%, and young people of colour have faced a 50% increase in unemployment. Meanwhile, the richest 10% of households hold 45% of all our wealth, whilst the poorest 50% own just 8.7%. The average FTSE100 CEO now earns 123 times the average salary, having seen a pay rise of 45% since 2010.

Our population is ageing and we seem to have little idea how future generations will secure pensions. Employment is increasingly precarious. Over half of the people in Britain say that their stress levels are rising, and whole swathes of the country have been abandoned to a brutal strategy of deindustrialization. Automation is now eating into skilled jobs in the way that, over the last century, it destroyed unskilled work.

This, of course, is before we assess the international situation: our dependence on low-wage and heavily exploited workers in the global south to produce the cheap goods we all consume; the extent to which Britain’s economy is propped up by stripping assets accrued through decades of imperial plunder; the new questions bound up with Brexit and the accelerating climate crisis.

This is the context in which we at openDemocracyUK are launching our new series: New Thinking For the British Economy. Over the next two years, we will host a vigorous discussion about how to mend the UK’s troubled economy.

To kick off, we’re collecting together a series of proposals – competing or complementary – for policies to help get us out of this mess. After this, we’ll facilitate discussion about these ideas: give them space to flourish or flounder, to be honed or cut down. And gradually, we hope that specific proposals will intertwine into plans, plans will become strategies, and strategies will find their way into manifestos. Because whilst individual ideas matter, no one proposal is a sufficient solution to the problems we face.

We want to hear your ideas about what the UK should do to transform the economy – and how we can do it. Join the conversation: send us your proposals, your policy ideas, your messages, your tweets and your critiques. We can’t leave the conversation about Britain’s economy to the people who got us into this mess in the first place.

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Or email us – adam.ramsay@opendemocracy.net  or  eleanor.penny@opendemocracy.net

The post Series introduction: We need to rethink the British economy appeared first on New thinking for the British economy.