Food Vision 2030 Still Sees Exports More Clearly Than Local Food Systems

Based on Cultivate’s submission for the Irish Government’s Public Consultation on the Food Vision 2030 Mid-Term Review:

Ireland’s agri-food strategy speaks of resilience, sustainability and innovation. But it still measures success too heavily through export value and global market performance, rather than asking more basic questions: can people eat well, can producers live well, and can communities build resilient food systems that hold together in a time of climate, market and geopolitical disruption?

Walk into any farmers’ market in Ireland on a Saturday morning and you will see something that Food Vision 2030, for all its ambition, has largely failed to recognise: a working food system.

Producers and consumers meet face to face. Value is kept local. Trust is built not through certification schemes or brand campaigns, but through simple conversations about what is in season, how it was grown, and who produced it.

Short Food Supply Chains, such as farmers’ markets, direct sales, community-supported agriculture schemes, farm shops, food hubs, and cooperatives, are far more than lifestyle choices for the environmentally or health-conscious. They are essential, practical mechanisms for improving producer viability, food security, enabling agroecological transition, and resilience against the shocks that have become increasingly frequent in recent years.

And yet, as Ireland reviews its Food Vision 2030 strategy and consults on what comes next, these local food systems remain largely invisible in national policy. 

The conversation is still dominated by export performance, sectoral competitiveness, premium branding and technological innovation. The question of whether Ireland’s food system is actually nourishing people, and sustaining the producers who grow, rear and distribute food, is rarely asked.

Food Vision 2030’s four missions; climate action, producer resilience, safe and nutritious food, and innovation remain broadly relevant. The problem is not the goals. It is what gets counted, and what gets funded, and what gets left out.

Success, under the current framework, tends to be measured in export value, international reputation, and market diversification. These matter. But a food system that exports record volumes while around one in eleven people in Ireland experience food poverty is failing on one of its most basic obligations.. A food strategy that celebrates producer competitiveness while the infrastructure needed to make diversification viable remains underdeveloped is leaving farmers exposed.

The least visible progress under Food Vision 2030 has been on Goal 2 of Mission 2: the equitable distribution of value. Many farmers and growers remain caught between high input costs, volatile commodity markets and the market power of concentrated retail and processing chains. Diversification is mentioned in the strategy, but the advisory support, logistics, aggregation capacity and shared infrastructure needed to make it real are largely absent. The result is that diversification remains a risk that individual producers are expected to absorb, rather than a supported transition that policy enables.

There is a tendency in Irish agri-food policy to treat resilience as a technical problem, one that better genetics, more precision data or improved efficiencies within the existing model can solve. But the shocks of recent years have exposed the limits of that thinking.

When input prices spike, when commodity markets collapse, when supply-chains are disrupted, when extreme weather events destroy harvests, the farms most exposed are those most dependent on imported inputs, long supply chains, and the narrow margins of export commodity production. Resilience comes from diversity: diverse production systems, diverse markets, diverse income sources, and diverse relationships between producers, communities and institutions.

Short Food Supply Chains are part of that resilience. A farm with a market garden supplying a local food hub, a CSA scheme with 80 members, a food cooperative aggregating produce from five local growers for public procurement (these are less vulnerable to global price shocks than a farm wholly dependent on commodity exports. They retain more value locally). They build relationships that hold under pressure.

But they do not develop on their own. They require coordination, shared infrastructure, cold storage, local processing, digital tools, and skilled facilitation. The EU4Advice Horizon Europe project, in which Cultivate coordinates the Irish Living Lab, has found consistently that one of the most significant gaps in Short Food Supply Chains is not producer motivation or consumer demand, but the absence of funded roles to hold these systems together: to organise meetings, coordinate logistics, connect producers with public buyers, navigate regulation, and develop local markets over time.

Ireland has no recognised category for this role within its national Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation System. That is a policy failure that Food Vision 2030’s second phase must address.

Conventional farm advisory services in Ireland are well established. Technical advice on soils, agronomy, animal health, environmental compliance. But the kind of advisory support needed for Short Food Supply Chains is fundamentally different. It involves brokering relationships. Facilitating producer cooperation. Supporting food hubs to access public procurement. Helping small producers understand food safety requirements, insurance, planning and labelling. Building the governance structures that allow producer groups to function over time.

This is not farm advice in the traditional sense. It is closer to community development, supply chain facilitation, and local economic development. And it is currently delivered, where it is delivered at all, on a piecemeal basis by Local Development Companies, NGOs, community food initiatives and local food partnerships, most of them working without dedicated funding, without formal recognition, and without connection to Ireland’s national food systems framework.

The Food Vision 2030 mid-term review is an opportunity to change this. A dedicated Short Food Supply Chain strand within Ireland’s national AKIS would not require reinventing the wheel. The knowledge and experience exists, in Living Labs, Communities of Practice, Horizon Europe projects, and on the ground across Ireland. What it requires is recognition, resourcing and coordination.

If there is one policy lever that could transform local food economies in Ireland faster than almost anything else, it is public procurement. Schools, hospitals, universities, government offices and local authorities spend significant public money on food every year. Most of that money flows to large catering suppliers and international food businesses. Very little of it reaches local producers.

This is not inevitable. Public procurement rules allow for sustainability criteria, local sourcing, seasonal food, and support for small and medium producers (but using them requires knowledge, capacity and political will. Producers need support to understand tender requirements, meet food safety standards, coordinate supply, and develop relationships with public buyers). Institutions need support to redesign menus, develop local supply chains, and communicate the value of sustainable food.

Food Vision 2030 could make public procurement a cross-cutting priority across all four of its missions. It would simultaneously support producer income resilience, improve diet quality in public institutions, reduce food miles, strengthen local economies, and demonstrate that Irish food sustainability is real, not just a marketing claim.

The Food Vision 2030 monitoring framework currently tracks actions taken rather than outcomes achieved. This matters, because completing an action is not the same as building a resilient food system.

A more meaningful dashboard would include indicators for the number of active food hubs and Short Food Supply Chain initiatives across Ireland; the proportion of public procurement spend going to local and sustainable food; the number of trained SFSC advisors and Local Food Facilitators operating nationally; producer participation in Short Food Supply Chains; and access to fresh, seasonal and sustainably produced food across different communities and income levels.

These indicators would tell us whether Food Vision 2030 is delivering real change, or simply delivering more reports.

Ireland has real strengths. Clean land, skilled farmers, a strong food culture and an emerging generation of agroecological producers, food entrepreneurs and community food organisers. The question is whether national policy is designed to harness those strengths in ways that nourish people, sustain livelihoods and restore ecosystems, or whether it remains primarily organised around maximising export revenue from a narrowing range of agricultural systems.

Ireland could be a genuine leader in sustainable food systems. Not just in the branding sense, not just in the ‘green and clean’ marketing campaigns that project an image of pristine landscapes and premium products onto international markets, but in the substantive sense: a food system that keeps value in rural communities, connects producers with consumers, builds local food security, and offers a viable livelihood to a new generation of farmers and food workers.

That vision is achievable. But it will not happen by accident, and it will not happen without the advisory infrastructure, the public investment, and the policy recognition that Short Food Supply Chains, local food economies, and the communities that depend on them actually deserve.

The mid-term review of Food Vision 2030 is not a formality. It is a decision point. The question is whether those making the decisions are listening to the right voices.

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Cultivate: The Sustainable Ireland Cooperative is a national NGO working in education, advocacy, and community-led action for sustainability, climate resilience, agroecology, and local food systems. The co-op coordinates the Irish Living Lab for EU4Advice, a Horizon Europe project focused on strengthening advisory services for Short Food Supply Chains, and are an active partner in the Feeding Ourselves Community of Practice, which brings together stakeholders to advance local, resilient food economies across Ireland.