The Belfast Way: A New Food Strategy for Our City
What if fixing food could help fix everything?
That’s the bold idea at the heart of Belfast’s new Food Strategy. Food connects all of us. It links our health, our environment, our economy and our communities. When it works well, it nourishes people and planet. When it doesn’t, the impacts ripple everywhere. And it’s not working right now.
Too many people in our city can’t afford decent, nutritious, planet friendly food, and even if they could, there aren’t enough accessible places to buy it, and there aren’t enough growers and farmers growing it.
To address these challenges, the Belfast Food Partnership is proud to share a new three-year roadmap for building a resilient, fair and nature-friendly food system - shaped by and for the people of this city.
Our Vision: A Food System That Works for Everyone
We believe:
Everyone has the right to affordable, nutrient-rich and culturally appropriate food.
Food should be grown and produced in ways that respect farmers, workers, animals and the environment.
Local economies should benefit from how we produce and buy food.
Our mission is to strengthen and enable local food partners to develop strategic, systemic solutions to Belfast’s food challenges - ensuring joined-up thinking from growing and distribution to consumption and waste. This strategy is rooted in food justice, systems thinking and civic resilience. Food challenges are interconnected - and so are the solutions.
Why now and why focus on resilience?
Our local strategy also sits within a wider UK context. A key influence on current thinking about food resilience is Just in Case: 7 Steps to Narrow the UK Civil Food Resilience Gap, written by Professor Tim Lang for the National Preparedness Commission.
The report highlights a stark reality: the UK’s food system is highly efficient but also fragile. Built on “just-in-time” supply chains, it depends heavily on imports, fossil fuels and complex logistics networks. When shocks occur - from extreme weather to geopolitical conflict - the system has very little slack.
Professor Lang argues that the UK has a “civil food resilience gap”: a lack of coordinated planning for how we would feed people in serious emergencies. For Belfast, this reinforces why our strategy matters. Cities are on the frontline of food resilience. Building stronger local production, transparent supply chains, community networks and collaborative governance isn’t just good policy - it’s preparedness.
Collaborating for resilience
The Belfast Food Partnership was formed in 2023 and brings together community organisations, statutory bodies, local businesses, academics, activists and citizens - including those with lived experience of food injustice.
We don’t always agree - and that’s healthy. What matters is that we find common ground and move forward together with curiosity, compassion and respect. We’ve been inspired by place-based approaches such as the Preston Model, the Birmingham Food Revolution and The Wigan Deal.
But we’re not trying to copy anyone else. We’re building the Belfast model - rooted in our own strengths, cultures, challenges and opportunities.
The Belfast Way
The Belfast Way is a roadmap that moves us towards producing food in ways that regenerate ecosystems rather than degrade them. It builds secure and continuous food supply offering healthy choice at affordable prices. It demands decent livelihoods for producers and workers. And it respects and ensures our communities’ right to food.
Next week the Food Ethics Council and Belfast Food Partnership are hosting Professor Lang in Belfast for an Imagine Festival event exploring what Belfast can, and must, do to ensure a resilient food future for everyone who lives here.
Can’t make it on the night? Neither can a lot of people, it sold out fast! But the ideas Tim Lang is bringing to Belfast, and what we’ve been building in response to the challenges he’ll cover, won’t stay in that room. We’ll be bringing it all to you. We’re building a food system that works for everyone.