And the winner is
I am very happy to be able to say that last night, at a very glitzy ceremony at London’s Victoria & Albert museum, the Cows Belong in Fields campaign I ran for Compassion in World Farming scooped the prestigious Campaigner of the Year award at the Observer Ethical Awards 2011.
According to the Observer review: “Thousands of people voted for Compassion in World Farming and its high-profile campaign against the Nocton “mega-dairy“. I am told that it was a decisive win in our category (all the more amazing since the shortlist included chef and food campaigner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and campaign group 38-Degrees). I’d like to thank everyone who voted for us. We were all really thrilled and delighted to be awarded what is widely considered to be the ‘green’ equivalent of an Oscar. Thanks goes once again to our partners on the front line in Lincolnshire, local activist group CAFFO, with whom we will be sharing this award.
For my part I take it not just as a vote of confidence for our campaign, but a strong statement about the public’s abhorrence of factory farming. Compassion in World Farming has made a bold commitment to end factory farming by 2050, and with the public behind us this commitment cannot fail.
It was ironic to be standing on the stage with my colleagues and our celebrity supporters, TV presenter/conservationist Bill Oddie and campaigner/vet Marc Abraham, accepting this award less than a day after the National Farmers Union issued a disturbing, rather sinister and grossly out of touch press release congratulating itself for its part in quashing a Women’s Institute resolution against factory farming.
The NFU is doing all it can to avoid the necessary conversation about where our food system is heading. At the same time we have a government, indeed we have had successive governments, that have formulated their food and agriculture policies on the idiotic assumption that if we can only make our food system big enough it will eventually be too big to fail (come on folks…where have we heard that one before?!).
As anyone can see from stories of rising food prices, failing crops, contaminated vegetables and farmers going out of business at an alarming rate, our food system is already failing. It’s failing our farmers, it’s failing consumers, it’s failing the environment and it’s failing our animals. Making it bigger will only make it a bigger failure. We can feed the world in a way that is ethical, sustainable, safe and compassionate. CIWF aims to be a leader in this important reform and to be the ones to really get that conversation going.
This award will be a great conversation starter!
