Sarah Woolley’s speech at yesterday’s online event ‘A Fork in the Road Moment – For an Irreversible Shift in the Balance of Power and Wealth’.

The decisions made over the next few weeks will shape the kind of society we live in for generations to come.

And for me, one of the clearest examples of why we desperately need a different economic approach is food poverty.

I’m speaking today as General Secretary of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union, but also as Vice-Chair of the Right to Food Commission, which has recently launched its report and last night did so in Parliament.

We live in one of the richest countries in the world, yet millions of people cannot afford to feed themselves or their families properly – not because we don’t produce enough food, not because there isn’t enough wealth, but because of political and economic choices made over decades.

The Right to Food Commission has gathered evidence from people experiencing food insecurity, workers, academics, organisations and campaigners. And what comes through loud and clear is that food poverty isn’t simply about food. It’s about wages, housing, energy bills, social security and, fundamentally, who holds the wealth and power in our society.

At BFAWU, our own research found that six in ten members don’t earn enough to meet their basic needs. Nearly half have experienced food insecurity, and three in ten have gone without enough food.

These are people who produce the food we all rely on, yet some cannot afford to feed their own families. If that isn’t evidence of a broken economic model, I don’t know what is.

For forty years we’ve been told that wealth will trickle down, that privatisation delivers efficiency and that keeping wages low helps businesses thrive.

Well, we’ve had forty years of that experiment. And the results are all around us: growing inequality, insecure employment, struggling public services and communities increasingly dependent on charity and the voluntary sector to survive. Meanwhile, enormous wealth continues to accumulate at the top.

We don’t have a shortage of wealth in this country. We have a crisis in how that wealth is distributed. And that’s what has to change.

The Right to Food Commission is calling for a roadmap to end food poverty by 2035, recognising access to adequate food as a fundamental right rather than something dependent on charity.

But delivering that ambition requires more than legislation. It requires decent wages, secure jobs, collective bargaining, affordable housing, properly funded public services and a social security system that actually provides security.

And crucially, we cannot separate the Right to Food from tackling the climate emergency, because the climate crisis is already affecting our food system.

Extreme weather is disrupting harvests, damaging crops, threatening supply chains and driving up costs. And it’s working-class communities, both here and internationally, who are paying the highest price, despite having contributed the least to the problem.

Our members are experiencing these impacts firsthand – whether that’s unbearable temperatures in bakeries and food factories, extreme weather affecting production and distribution, or the growing pressure on workers as businesses respond to rising costs.

We’ve campaigned for years for a legal maximum workplace temperature, because nobody should be expected to risk their health simply by going to work.

But climate justice has to mean more than responding to the consequences. We need to fundamentally change how we produce, transport and distribute food.

That means investing in sustainable food production, reducing waste, supporting local supply chains, protecting biodiversity and ensuring our food system is resilient enough to withstand the challenges ahead.

And it means a genuine just transition, where workers and their trade unions are at the heart of shaping the changes needed, rather than being left to deal with the consequences.

We cannot tackle the climate emergency by making working people poorer, any more than we can tackle food poverty by ignoring the climate emergency. The two are absolutely connected.

And this is where the wider economic alternative becomes so important. Public ownership, investment in green industries, stronger workers’ rights and taxing wealth properly aren’t separate ambitions. They’re all part of creating an economy that works for people and the planet, rather than one driven by short-term profit.

Because ultimately this is about power. Who makes the decisions? Who benefits from the wealth we create? And who pays the price when things go wrong?

If we’re serious about shifting wealth, we must shift power too. That means stronger trade unions, sectoral bargaining, meaningful workplace rights and communities having a genuine say in their futures.

And I think this is particularly important when we talk about challenging the rise of the far right. Because when people are struggling, when their communities have been neglected and they feel nobody is listening, there will always be those looking to exploit that anger.

Reform and the wider far right want people to blame migrants, refugees or somebody else who has even less than they do. But migrants haven’t privatised our public services. Refugees haven’t created insecure employment.

And asylum seekers aren’t responsible for the enormous concentration of wealth at the top of our economy.

The problem isn’t the person standing next to you in the food bank queue. It’s the economic system that has put you both there. And we have to offer people a genuine alternative – one that improves their lives, gives them hope and demonstrates what can be achieved when we stand together.

The Right to Food gives us a way into those conversations because food is universal. Everybody needs to eat, and everybody deserves access to nutritious, affordable food with dignity.

We’ve already seen the TUC Congress support the Commission’s work, and now we need to turn those recommendations into a mass campaign that builds pressure for meaningful change.

I’ll finish with this. We’re constantly told that the things we’re demanding are unrealistic. That decent wages are unrealistic. Ending food poverty is unrealistic. Tackling the climate emergency properly is too expensive. Public ownership and wealth redistribution are somehow impossible.

But apparently, allowing millions to struggle to afford food, while the planet burns and enormous wealth accumulates in fewer and fewer hands, is perfectly acceptable.

Well, I reject that. What’s unrealistic is believing we can continue with the same failed economic model and somehow expect different results.

We have the resources, the knowledge and, through our trade unions and communities, the collective power to change things.

The Right to Food isn’t just about ending hunger. It’s about dignity, equality, climate justice and building a society where the wealth we all create is used to meet the needs of people and protect our planet.

Because the economic alternative we need isn’t about managing poverty or climate breakdown more effectively. It’s about building a society where neither is considered an acceptable price of doing business.

Sarah Wooley is General Secretary of the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union.

Image: “Bread – Free For Commercial Use – FFCU” by Free for Commercial Use is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.