UK 'criminally' unprepared to feed itself in crisis - our diets may have to change

Sky News

6 hours ago

The UK is no better prepared to feed its population during wars, pandemics and climate disasters than before the COVID outbreak, the head of the National Farmers Union says.
With threats to our food supply increasing, Tom Bradshaw says, the UK has a "criminal" dependence on foreign countries to source some of its food.
He warns if Britain continues down this road for another decade, it will be too late to "turn the tap back on".
"We're living in probably some of the most volatile geopolitical times we've known," he says.
"If we are worried enough… to be investing more in defence, we should be having the same conversation about food security."
Bradshaw is one of a number of campaigners and experts the Money team spoke to who are sounding the alarm, including the UK's former food security ambassador, a public health nutritionist and a director of the UK's largest greenhouse complex.
With Labour having pledged to treat food security as national security, Money investigates the scale of the problems facing Britain's food supply and the changes to diets and supermarket shelves its citizens may have to stomach if the nation is to become better prepared.
'The brown stuff will hit the fan'
The COVID pandemic was the first time in decades that shoppers walked into a supermarket and couldn't get what they wanted.
Perhaps not since Germany's wartime blockade has the importance of food security become so clear to the British public.
Footage of Matt Hancock trying to reassure a panicked nation that the shops won't run out might have faded from memory, but new threats have emerged.
In the past five years, we've witnessed major wars in Ukraine and Gaza, an aggressive trade policy overhaul by the world's biggest economy and numerous climate disasters.
Britain needs to consider what happens to its food supply if the chaos continues at this rate, says Professor Tim Benton, former UK food security ambassador and distinguished fellow at Chatham House.
"Increasingly, it's easy to imagine a prolonged acute problem that would arise out of some significant geopolitical impact," he says.
"Governments all over the place are starting to worry about how do you ensure that there is enough food in the country to keep the country going."
The professor adds: "At some stage, the brown stuff will hit the fan and government will have to decide that it will need to invest in new ways to make sure that this works."
How self-sufficient is the UK?
Last year, the UK produced 65% of the food it needs, exported 9% of that and imported the rest, according to Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
That's down 13 percentage points from the height of British self-sufficiency, 78%, in 1984.
Since the 1980s, politicians have handed responsibility for food to the free market to save money, says Benton.
Food companies themselves have moved to fragile, just-in-time supply chains, while consumers shop more precariously too, often visiting the supermarket every day rather than filling up a larder.
When Benton warned Theresa May's government against these trends in the Climate Change Committee's 2017 risk assessment, he summed up their response as: "We don't need to worry about food security because the market will sort it out."
But since Brexit and the pandemic, reality has sunk in at DEFRA.
"You were right to be worried," Benton recalls a DEFRA official telling him at a meeting in 2021 as he prepared an updated report.
"There is a lot of thinking going on in DEFRA, and that is the absolutely necessary step," he says.
"We are much better placed now to act quickly, but we are not far enough along that road."
The government has allocated £11.8bn to food production this parliament, according to a DEFRA spokesperson.
It has also extended the Seasonal Worker Visa Scheme to address labour shortages in horticulture.
Britain's Achilles' heel
"Our Achilles' heel is really fruit and vegetables," says Benton.
Britain grows just 15% of its own fruit and 53% of its vegetables.
It's much better at producing meat, potatoes and wheat, but calories alone aren't enough without the vital micronutrients found in horticultural products.
A major long-term shock to imports could lead to malnutrition that overwhelms the NHS, says Benton.
Bradshaw, of the farmers' union, asks: "Why are we less than 20% self-sufficient in fruit? That is criminal."
Farms cover 70% of British land, but some 85% of it is dedicated to livestock - two million hectares on their feed alone, the World Wide Fund for Nature found in 2022.
Just 1% of farmland is used to grow fruit and vegetables, DEFRA figures showed the following year.
"When you look at foods that are absolutely a core part of a healthy and more sustainable diet, for example fruit and veg and seafood, we are highly dependent on other countries," says Rebecca Tobi, public health nutritionist and senior business engagement manager at the Food Foundation.
In a world where food is dictated by market forces, that's partly the fault of shoppers.
"We've got used to more exotic diets," says Bradshaw.
"We expect strawberries on the shelves 365 days a year," he says, despite the growing season lasting eight months.
British sweetcorn can only be produced for six to eight weeks of the year, onions for 42 weeks and broccoli between May and October.
And that's just the food that can be produced here in the first place.
"We have developed a liking for things, like pineapples, that we're never going to grow," says John Walgate, chief executive of the British Growers Association.
"Bananas are a staple fruit - they're not going to grow in the UK any time soon."
Households purchased more bananas than any other type of fresh fruit in 2021 and 2022, according to the most recent UK Food Security Report.
It's a sign of how dramatically eating habits would have to change should Professor Benton's warning of a major, prolonged shock to UK food imports become a reality.
But that's not all down to picky eaters.
Growing pains
"Growing - it's one of the riskiest businesses you can do," says Walgate. "It really is not for the faint-hearted."
Take an apple: A tree is a 20-year investment, but contracts with retailers are usually much shorter, meaning growers don't know what market will exist for their product when it's ready.
Retailers can also find cheaper options abroad because the cost of energy and labour in the UK often outstrips savings on transport.
External investors are hard to come by because the climate is increasingly unpredictable, meaning returns are uncertain.
"As growers, you can have a good year if the weather's good or you have a bad year if weather's bad. You're not in control of everything," says Rob James, technical director at Thanet Earth, Britain's biggest greenhouse complex.
Thanet Earth is a rare example of a grower that is expanding, producing 300 million tomatoes, 33 million cucumbers and 20 million peppers each year.
But the complex technology needed to overcome the industry's obstacles has cost the company tens of millions of pounds.
They buy gas and use Dutch-inspired combined heat and power engines to burn it, producing heat for the greenhouses, CO2 for the crops and electricity to sell back to the grid.
The 50-hectare site is 70% water self-sufficient, thanks to tech that collects and reuses rain and condensation, and covered in special screens to prevent sun-scorch.
Thanet Earth's seventh greenhouse, currently under construction, will cost £20m.
Cash for these innovations just isn't available to most farmers. In 2023-24, produce at 61% of English farms failed to cover the costs of inputs like fertiliser, labour and medicine, government statistics show.
Britons aren't paying enough to make investing sustainable, suggests NFU chief Bradshaw.
Prices need to be higher or more taxes need to be dedicated to fund government investment and subsidies, he says.
Asked if consumers must accept higher prices for more food security, he says: "Everyone wants everything, don't they? The world we've been brought up in now is that you believe you can have everything and that the hard, realistic choices aren't being put forward in front of people for them to make in an educated way."
He adds: "Somebody, somewhere has to be willing to pay."
A DEFRA spokesperson said farming profits had increased by a quarter over the past year.
They also highlighted the government has appointed former NFU president Baroness Minette Batters to recommend reforms to boost profits further.
Foreign nations feeding Britain
Without capacity at home, Britain looks abroad to make up the shortfall in its food supply - mostly to Europe (28%), as well as Africa, Asia and North and South America (14%).
The chart below shows the 10 nations the UK is most reliant on for food, feed and drink, with the Netherlands, France and Ireland in the top three spots.
While European allies dominate the table in terms of total product value, some of Briton's staple foods come from further afield, like rice from India, fish from China or apples from South Africa.
Dependence on countries like these risks disruption by trade barriers, geopolitics or extreme weather, the UK's Food Security Report found.
"A lot of those other countries that we're reliant on for imports of fruit and vegetables are themselves at very high risk of climate change and water scarcity," says the Food Foundation's Tobi.
Brazil, South Africa and Colombia are three of the UK's largest suppliers of fresh fruit, such as melons and bananas, but all are classed as climate change vulnerable by the Notre Dame Global Adaption Initiative.
A report by the Sustainable and Healthy Food Systems research programme found 54% of the fruit and vegetables imported in 2013 came from nations likely to face high to extremely high water scarcity by 2040.
"When you look at climate change modelling over the next 20, 30, 40 years, it's very, very questionable whether those places will still be producing food," says Bradshaw.
In the shorter term, we've seen prices for the likes of cocoa and coffee increase this year due to extreme temperatures and drought in west Africa, Brazil and Vietnam.
Between 2011 and 2020, the number of droughts and severe storms tripled across the globe, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
It's not just temperatures that are out of control. International conflict also threatens food security.
Russian blockades against Ukrainian wheat, a key ingredient in chicken feed, may have contributed to egg shortages in British supermarkets in 2022.
Climate change will only exacerbate security tensions, says Professor Benton.
"If global trade falls apart because of some climate impact, countries will start being more muscular about insuring their food supply," he says, be it more aggressive trade tactics, blockades or even invasions.
Trading preferentially with allies and not relying on global markets would allow the UK to become more resilient to geopolitical flashpoints.
The myth of self-sufficiency
But that doesn't mean pull up the drawbridge, says Bradshaw.
"Trade is part of self-sufficiency," he says. "If you have an extreme weather event here, you have markets that you're trading with and you can try to look to those markets to help fill the shortages."
Between 2021 and 2023, vegetable production decreased by 13% due to extremely rainy or hot weather that delayed planting, hampered growth and encouraged disease.
Britain has become more susceptible to weather events, according to Benton.
With private enterprises in charge, food production has leaned toward specialisation, dividing the nation into two halves: Livestock in the West, arable in the East.
"What we have is effectively eggs in two baskets," says Benton.
No longer do most towns have market gardens, local horticultural enterprises or integrated livestock, he says.
A bad year for one crop is a worse year for the farmer growing that crop alone.
Is eating less meat the price for security?
Eating less meat and more fruit and vegetables would mean more revenue for growers, allowing them to expand domestic production, says Walgate.
As it is, Britons eat 30% fewer fruit and vegetables on average than the government's dietary recommendations.
"If, as a nation, we ate what dietary guidance said we should eat, that would equate to something like an extra 1.5 million tonnes a year of fresh produce, most of which could be grown in the UK," says Walgate.
"That would turn the dial hugely in favour of food security."
Consuming less meat and dairy has "enormous potential" to free up land for other crops, adds Tobi.
But Bradshaw called on the government to liberalise the planning system across the board.
"Whether that be slurry stores on dairy farms, new poultry buildings, reservoirs for horticulture, the system is broken and rather than being an enabling policy, it's a blocking policy."
Tax incentives and favourable, government-underwritten loans should also be introduced to incentivise investment, he said.
The government is expanding funding available to farmers through Environmental Land Management Schemes from £800m to £2bn by 2028/9.
These schemes pay farmers to improve food production and environmental resilience.
Another £110m in farming grants have been allocated to trial technologies and innovation.
"It's not just about pandering to the agricultural lobby and saying we need to increase productivity locally," says Benton.
"Growing more wheat, growing more dairy, growing more beef, doesn't make any sense in the world in which we live.
"We could go weeks or months without eating beef, it's not critical for our functioning the same way as having access to fruit and vegetables."
Diversifying the fruit and vegetables we grow will make our food supply more resilient to climate change, says Benton.
In this area, Walgate says there is room for some optimism.
Precision breeding legislation is being debated by the House of Lords that would deregulate genetically modified seeds that grow plants more resistant to drought and with longer shelf lives.
"Looking ahead over the next 10 or 20 years, I think food security is only going to become more important as a principle of national security," says Benton.