The water situation at the Willand plant began as an apparently local problem. A poultry processing site needed water, the local supply was under pressure, and decisions had to be made about how a constrained resource should be used. Yet once we considered the consequences, the problem stopped being local.
A disconnected system
Water may be supplied locally, but the infrastructure supporting it is regional, the food system depending upon it is national, and the climatic pressures affecting both availability and demand are global. Responsibility, meanwhile, remains divided between institutions whose boundaries are often clearer than the relationships they are meant to manage.
That is the wider lesson from the contretemps in Devon. It is not simply that food production requires water, which should surprise nobody, but that our essential systems are deeply connected while our arrangements for managing them are still largely separate.
A poultry processing plant cannot pause in the same way as an office or a factory making a product that can wait until next week. Birds continue to grow, farms continue to operate, animal welfare duties remain, employees and communities depend upon the business, and customers expect food to arrive. Water is not merely another input. It connects animal welfare, food safety, employment, public health, and the supply of an affordable food eaten by millions of people.
The difficulty is that these responsibilities do not sit within one organisation. The water company manages water, the food business manages food, local authorities manage local resilience, regulators manage their obligations, and government departments manage individual areas of policy. Each may be doing exactly what it has been asked to do, yet the system can still fail because nobody is clearly responsible for the relationship between them.
We describe Critical National Infrastructure through separate sectors such as water, energy, transport, communications, and food. That is necessary for assigning responsibility, but it can also encourage us to see each sector as a self-contained structure when, in reality, they are parts of the same system. Food depends upon water, water depends upon energy, energy depends upon communications, and all depend upon transport, labour, planning, and functioning public institutions.
The task is therefore not only to protect each sector, but to manage the points at which they meet. We need to know where pressure in one system creates risk in another, what minimum levels of service must be protected, how information will be shared, and who has authority to act when legitimate needs begin to compete.
Building a ‘complete’ food strategy
This is where a food strategy must earn its name.
A strategy concerned only with production, diet, trade, land use, or environmental targets will remain incomplete, however worthy its individual ambitions. It must also explain how food will continue to be produced when water is scarce, energy is disrupted, transport routes are blocked, labour is unavailable, or extreme weather affects several parts of the system at once.
Climate change does not arrive as an abstract policy heading. It arrives as drought, flooding, heat, disease pressure, crop failure, infrastructure strain, and competition for resources. It arrives through decisions made by real people, in real places, often with little time and imperfect information. Events once treated as exceptional are becoming recurring management challenges, so food strategy, climate adaptation, infrastructure planning, and emergency response can no longer be treated as separate conversations.
This does not require an immense central plan that attempts to predict every future disruption. The world has a reliable habit of producing the difficulty we failed to include. It requires something more useful: clear responsibilities, strong working relationships, shared information, agreed priorities, and the confidence to act before an operational problem becomes a national one.
The poultry meat sector can help shape that approach because it manages interdependence every day. Poultry production brings together farms, hatcheries, feed, veterinary care, transport, processing, water, energy, labour, packaging, retail, and the consumer; and it works only when those parts are coordinated with consistency and care.
That experience gives us a positive leadership role, not because we have every answer, but because we understand the practical consequences when systems connect well and when they do not. We can help identify dependencies, expose vulnerabilities, test proposed solutions against operational reality, and build relationships before pressure turns them into emergency arrangements.
Willand revealed a weakness, but it also gave us a place to begin. The problem was local, the infrastructure was regional, the system was national, and the pressures were global. The responsibility must therefore be connected, with every organisation understanding not only its own duties, but the consequences those duties create for others. Poultry meat can help lead that transition by turning interdependence into practical action.
About the author
Richard Griffiths is a food-system strategist and international industry leader whose work focuses on resilience, security and industrial transition.
He currently serves as president of the International Poultry Council, bringing governments, institutions and industry together around complex challenges affecting global food production.
Griffiths began his career in coal mines after studying mining engineering at Imperial College London. That experience shaped his enduring interest in how essential industries, communities and national capabilities navigate profound change.
He brings this perspective to food and agriculture, connecting commercial reality with policy and regulation to help shape practical, long-term answers to the question of how societies move responsibly from what was to what comes next.
