UK must stockpile food in readiness for climate shocks or war, expert warns | Food security
The British government needs to stockpile food because it is not prepared for climate shocks or wars that could starve the population, according to a leading expert on food policy.
Prof Tim Lang, of City St George’s, University of London, said Britain was producing far less food than it needed to feed itself, and as a small island dependent on a few large companies to feed its huge population, it was particularly vulnerable to shocks.
The first UK Food Security Report in December 2021 found the country was 54% food self-sufficient. Other rich countries such as the US, France and Australia are all self-sufficient in food; This means they grow enough food to feed their population when necessary, without needing to import it.
The UK is one of the least food self-sufficient countries in Europe. For example, in the densely populated Netherlands, this rate is 80%, and in Spain it is 75%.
“We don’t think about it enough. We ignore it,” Lang said at the National Farmers Union conference in Birmingham.
“The default position in which others can feed us depends on the British state system and indeed the nature of agri-food capitalism in Britain. Others are smarter. Other countries are stockpiling,” he said. “Other countries have much more flexibility in their systems than we do. What we glorified as efficiency is now fragility.”
Other countries maintain emergency stocks in case of war, food pollution or climate shocks. Switzerland still has enough stock to feed its entire population for three months, increasing that to a year. The UK government’s advice to households is to keep three days’ worth of food in their cupboards.
The government has no plans to increase the UK’s self-sufficiency and will not set a target for food production. Environment Minister Emma Reynolds said: “I won’t give you a percentage. I want us to increase food production in countries where I think there are real growth opportunities, particularly in horticulture and poultry farming. But I won’t give you a figure.”
Self-sufficiency is likely to decline; Production of wheat, beef, poultry and vegetables declined last year.
A small deficit in food supplies can have very serious consequences. Experts recently warned that a single shock could trigger social unrest and even food riots in the UK as chronic problems leave the food system a “tinderbox”.
Lang’s report for the National Preparedness Commission, published last year, found that the UK’s food system was extremely vulnerable to attack because it was concentrated in a few large companies.
It has been revealed that 12,284 supermarkets in the UK are ‘fed’ by just 131 distribution centres.
He said they were a “sitting duck” for cyber attacks by drones or malicious governments: “The big nine retailers account for 94.5% of all retail food. That’s nine companies using 131 distribution centers alone. In the drone war, that’s a sitting duck.”
Tesco, which supplies almost a third of retail food in the UK, operates through just 20 distribution centres, according to its report. He said: “When four in 10 major retailers account for three-quarters of retail food, if one or two of these mega-firms were somehow hit or the tight system of distribution centers was disrupted, the impact on the public would be significant.”
Lang’s report also said UK civil defence, which includes population preparedness for war-induced shocks, was equivalent to 0.0026% of total defense spending in 2021-22. He added: “The reality is that there are no binding UK laws setting out duties for central or local government to ensure people are fed.”
Brexit has also made the UK more vulnerable to shocks by reducing the subsidies farmers receive for food production and making it harder to import food from our largest trading partner.
In the three years from January 2021, agri-food imports from the EU fell by a three-year average of 8.71% compared to the previous three years pre-Brexit, according to analysis by the University of Sussex.
Climate disruption will make it harder to grow fruit and vegetables in Southern Europe and North Africa due to extreme weather, while countries that rely heavily on imports for fresh produce, such as the UK, will suffer.
According to the UK Health Security Agency, if the UK maintains current land use, climate and agro-food trends, “by 2050, 52% of legumes and 47% of fruit will be imported from climate-vulnerable countries, with supplies of vegetables, fruit and legumes projected to fall short of the amount needed to meet the UK’s dietary recommendations.”
This already happened in 2023, when bad weather in Spain and North Africa caused shortages of salads and fresh vegetables in the UK. In the UK, more than 80% of fruit and half of vegetables are imported.
Lang said: “Climate change, floods and droughts, these are part of the weaknesses in the just-in-time logistics system of the food system. The key finding of my report was that we have created a food system in the name of efficiency that is inappropriate for where we are now, the concentration of large companies and the choke point. This creates vulnerability. Drone warfare and software dependency make it doubly vulnerable.”
The professor called on the government to legislate to make the food system safer and able to withstand shocks.
“I would like this to be a food security and resilience bill, to clearly state the fundamental purpose of food systems,” he said. He added that the food system needs flexibility rather than being a lean, just-in-time system that focuses only on profit. “The purpose of food systems is to feed people. If you’re a large commodity producer, how, what, under what conditions does it actually feed people? Will it survive when there are shocks?”
Lang also said the UK needed to improve food security and produce more food at home. “We need to produce more here, not because of petty nationalism, we have good land, good people, good resources, good infrastructure. Not to do so is a wild misuse of the land. We are not getting the leadership we need from the central government,” he said.
