UK Food Security – ‘Nine Meals from Anarchy’?

The five main functions of government are generally understood: defending the country and its interests via our armed forces; maintaining law and order through the judiciary and police; providing public services such as the NHS; delivering ‘good education for all children’ through the State School system; and raising taxes to pay for all the above. I argue for a sixth, Food Security – that is ensuring sufficient, affordable, and resilient supplies of food (and the resources needed to produce it).

Food Security does not mean the UK should be 100% self-sufficient, producing all the food and drink we consume here. Our diet, health, and enjoyment of food would be the poorer without imports. But it is of concern that the proportion of UK home-grown food has been steadily declining over the past 30 years.¹

Over the same period our own and the world’s population have increased and are set to grow further; overseas regions and international transport routes have become more vulnerable to disruption by climate change, by war and regional conflicts triggered by drought and extreme weather events linked to climate change, and many food exporting countries having their own growing populations to feed.

Food Security has not been entirely off the political agenda. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair as Prime Minister under the last Labour government in 2007, the first policy review he commissioned was to ‘examine our approach to food policy across the board’. Its key conclusion was that our national food security is entangled with and affected by global issues, “The principal food security challenge for the UK is a global one. A world in which food is scarce, less affordable, is less stable.”²

Brown had experienced the ‘Fuel Protests’ of 2000 which nearly brought down the Blair government, as truckers and farmers joined forces to blockade oil depots and supermarket distribution hubs in protest against rising fuel prices. Their actions revealed how vulnerable the UK supermarkets’ ‘Just In Time’ shelf-filling systems were to even short-term disruptions and shocks. At the emergency Cobra committee convened to discuss the crisis, supermarket bosses warned Blair that London and other major cities were within three days of running out of food – bringing the UK on the brink of meeting the MI5 maxim of any society being just, ‘Nine meals from anarchy.’

The warnings were taken seriously, with the Treasury finding the money to cut fuel and excise duty, so ending the protests. But if that challenge to the nation’s food supply was seared into Brown’s memory, Defra civil servants were more relaxed in their response, “The UK currently enjoys a high level of national food security, which reflects the diverse and abundant supply of foodstuffs available in our supermarkets. We produce much of our food ourselves, and because the UK is a developed economy, we are able to access the food we need on the global market.” ⁴

A Perfect Storm
That response seems dangerously complacent in the face of today’s challenges to both our national and global food security:
• UK and global population growth
• Accelerating climate change, including more extreme cycles of floods and droughts
• Ongoing degradation, loss, and annexation of agricultural land here in the UK and globally.

Challenges which already amount to a ‘perfect storm’ but are being supercharged by global geopolitical instability, not least the displacement of millions of climate refugees worldwide – predicted to exceed one billion people by 2050.⁵

Population – ‘Mind the Food Gap’
Over the past 30 years, the UK population has grown by over 11 million people, from 57.8 million in 1994 to 69.1 million today.⁶ The Office of National Statistics forecasts further growth to 74 million people living here by the mid-2030s, rising to over 76 million by 2050.⁷ Modest compared to the global increase (see below), but still totting-up to 6 to 7 million more people – all requiring housing, educating, and of course, feeding.⁸

Globally, our human population is projected to increase by over two billion from the current 8.1 billion to 9.7 billion by 2050, 10.4 billion by the mid-2080s.⁹ In its 2018 report, ‘Creating a Sustainable Food Future’, the World Resources Institute (WRI) warned of a 56 per cent food gap between total calories then produced with those needed to feed the world’s population in 2050, “Expected population growth of 2.8 billion people between 2010 and 2050 drives the majority of expected growth in food.” The area of farmland needed to close that ‘food gap’ was calculated at being 593 million-hectares – nearly twice the area of India.¹⁰ The following year, the Swedish non-profit food, health and sustainability platform EAT collaborated with The Lancet to address the question, ‘Can we feed a future population of 10 billion people a healthy diet within planetary boundaries?’ Their conclusion was only if there was a “Great Food Transformation” involving profound changes in diet and food production, “Healthy diets from sustainable food systems are possible for up to 10 billion people but become increasingly unlikely past this population threshold.”¹¹

Climate Change – global dependency, global vulnerability
Defra’s civil servants set great store on our food imports being spread among many different suppliers, “no one country provided more than 11% of those imports”. With nearly 40% by value imported from our near European neighbours that argument might seem reasonable. However, considerable quantities come from further afield, both as food for direct human consumption and much greater amounts indirectly as livestock feed, from countries with different climates that are or have been best suited to growing foodstuffs that we can’t – but whose weather patterns are now changing. According to the non-profit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), around half of our food imports comes from countries already considered ‘climate impact hotspots’ and in a state of ‘low climate readiness.’ Imported food and drink items that the British public have come to regard as staples of their weekly shop, such as tea, coffee, bananas, and rice:

According to the ECIU, of the ‘100 million cuppas’ we Brits drink every day, more than half of the tea has been grown in Kenya. With an expected global average temperature rise of at least 2°C, tea production in Kenya and across East Africa is predicted to decrease by 40%.¹²

As the nation’s favourite fruit and the most regular supermarket shopping basket item, the UK imports over half a million tonnes of bananas annually. Three-quarters of which, according to the same ECIU study, come from ‘low-climate readiness’ countries.

The two main countries supplying rice to the UK are India and Pakistan. Following the higher than average monsoon rains of 2022 (500% above previous ‘norms’) which flooded 10–12% of the country for over five months, rice yields in Pakistan fell by 20%. In 2023, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi banned the export of non-Basmati rice, as climate change linked heavy rains reduced yields. This may become a regular restriction as India’s population overtakes China’s to become the largest in the world at around 1.4 billion people, increasing to over 1.7 billion in the mid-2060s.

Bananas, rice, coffee, even tea – perhaps, we could live without them and fall back on what our land and farmers can best grow?

‘Ghost acres’
The UK is blessed with productive, rain-fed lowland and upland grassland, characterising what many people value in our farmed countryside, and producing much of the red meat and dairy produce we consume. But almost all our livestock production relies on some supplementary feed, the majority grown in countries thousands of miles away. Thirty million tonnes of animal feed are imported each year at a cost of over £5.5 billion (the single highest input cost to UK agriculture) – requiring 850,000 ‘ghost acres’ overseas.¹³ The majority soybeans sourced from just one country, Brazil.¹⁴ Soya production has long been linked to the clearance of rainforest and high biodiversity habitat. Further destruction is likely as climate change disrupts temperature and rainfall patterns, making over 65% of current areas unsuitable for soybean cultivation, forcing further clearing of natural forests.¹⁵

Water – “Entering the jaws of death”
The UK’s food growing areas are also vulnerable to climate change: 60% of our ‘best’ Grade 1 farmland lies close to or below sea-level, making it vulnerable to flooding or the incursion and seepage of seawater into the soil. The currently highly productive arable areas of East Anglia, and rich dairy pastures of the Somerset Levels are most vulnerable.¹⁶ Analysing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) future global average temperature rise scenarios, the UK’s Environment Agency concluded that “sea level will continue to rise to 2300 under all climate change projections”.¹⁷ If we can achieve the IPCC’s low-emissions target of keeping average global temperatures below 1.8°C, the range for sea-level rise is between half a metre to two metres over the next two centuries, but if temperatures rise by an average 2°C to 2.4°C that could be closer to three metres.¹⁸ With many scientists believing that a rise of 2.7°C is most likely, even the second scenario is looking optimistic, “Despite increased pledges and targets to tackle climate change. Current policies still leave the world on course for around 2.7°C end-of-the century global warming.”¹⁹

Lack of water is just as much a concern, with climate change and population growth combining to stress available sources for crop irrigation and as drinking water. In 2019, Sir James Bevan, Chief Executive for the Environment Agency, described the UK’s future water situation as “entering the jaws of death”, with climate change and increased demand leading to shortages within 20 years.²⁰ A theme he expanded on in an article for The Royal Society in 2022, “In England, May 2020 was the driest on record. The Environment Agency’s estimate is that summer rainfall is expected to decrease by approximately 15% by the 2050s in England, and by up to 22% by the 2080s; and that by 2100 in the southeast we will increasingly see temperatures above 35°C, and sometimes 40°C.”²¹ Conditions more usually associated with parts of Africa, as affirmed by The Royal Geographical Society, which has ranked southeast England at 161st out of the world’s 180 most water stressed regions (1 being least, 180 most stressed) and gave the astonishing fact that less water per capita is available in the region than in Sudan.²² It is also one of the most densely populated and developed regions of the UK, slated for further development.²³ ²⁴

Geopolitical Instability – creating trade ‘choke points’
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the disruption to grain exports, global feed prices have risen by 50%. The war has more than halved the Ukraine’s productive arable area from 15 million hectares in 2021 to 7 million currently. In the Middle East, Yemen’s Houthi rebels have responded to Israel’s military operations in Gaza and The Lebanon by attacking merchant shipping in the Red Sea, halving the number of ships passing through the Suez Canal, which as the most direct route between Asia and Europe is normally used by 15% of all global trade by sea. On the other side of the world, lack of rainfall linked to climate change, has restricted the number of ships able to pass through the Panama Canal, impacting another 5% of maritime trade.²⁵

Tech will save us (again!)
Shifting weather patterns and population growth globally raise serious doubts as to the UK’s long-term reliance on food imports, but optimists point to technological innovation and societal adaptation as available solutions. The pressing issues, such Panglossians argue, are not lack of supply, but of access to affordable, nutritious, healthy food. Those are the main take-aways from the National Food Strategy review published over 2020 and 2021, its recommendations focused on addressing ‘Junk Food’, ‘Reducing diet related inequality’, ‘Making the best use of our land’, and ‘Shifting food culture.’ Population growth is not considered as an issue nationally or globally, other than in a brief reference to the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 1940s–70s and its initial success in heading off world hunger through the high-yielding crop varieties developed by the agronomist, Norman Borlaug. Whilst critical of the dependency of ‘Green Revolution’ crops on vast inputs of artificial fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides, the review’s authors admire its productivity gains, arguing that with some tweaks, such boosts in crop yields can be sustained.²⁶

It’s worth quoting what Borlaug actually said on receiving his Nobel Prize in 1970, “Science, invention, and technology have given [humankind] materials and methods for increasing his food supplies substantially and sometimes spectacularly… Man has also acquired the means to reduce the rate of human reproduction effectively and humanely. He is using his powers for increasing the rate and amount of food production. But he is not yet using adequately his potential for decreasing the rate of human reproduction. The result is that the rate of population increase exceeds the rate of increase in food production in some areas. There can be no permanent progress in the battle against hunger until the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control unite in a common effort.”²⁷

No Food Security without Land Security
Given these accelerating challenges, you’d expect UK farmland to be protected from development as a critical national strategic resource. Yet according to a report by the Council for Protection of Rural England (CPRE) published just two years ago, almost 14,500 hectares of the country’s ‘Best and Most Versatile’ (BMV) agricultural land with the capacity to grow over 250,000 tonnes of vegetables a year, has been ‘lost to development’ over the past ten years. CPRE highlights the inconsistency of government policies on nutrition with its assessment that 2 million people lost one of their recommended ‘Five-A-Day’ portions of fruit or veg along with those 14,500 hectares. The developments those productive hectares were lost to being mainly housing and renewable energy projects: since 2010, 300,000 new homes have been built on 8,000 hectares of prime farmland, with ‘solar farms’ covering another 1,400 hectares.²⁸

Keir Starmer has committed to building a great many more of both. According to planning experts, greenfield land double the area of Milton Keynes (38,000 hectares) will be needed to meet the government’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes over the next five years.²⁹ ³⁰ Permanent changes to and loss of what should be seen as strategically valuable, irreplaceable food growing land, as noted by the then Chief Executive of CPRE, Crispin Truman, “For the first time in several generations, our food security is at risk – yet we’ve seen a 100-fold increase in the loss of our best farmland to development, since 2010. Heating, eating and housing are fundamental needs. A healthy environment, mitigating and adapting against the devastation threatened by the climate emergency, is the bedrock that underpins them all. We need to know what to put where. That’s why we need a land use strategy. Maintaining agricultural land for domestic food production is critical. This must be achieved in the context of addressing and adapting to climate change, reversing the loss of nature and increasing demands on land for other purposes, not least housing and production of renewable energy.”³¹

Agreed. But more: The UK needs not just a land-use strategy, but integral to that a comprehensive, long-term, national food security strategy.

One future-proofed against the global shocks, challenges and impacts of climate change – and the resulting geopolitical disruptions.

And which considers human population growth nationally and globally as a key factor. How else can we assess the combined capacity of our own food growing resources and the long-term availability and sustainability of imported food?

It was a Labour Prime Minister who last raised concerns over the UK’s Food Security, a Conservative one, Ted Heath, who set-up the Population Panel in 1971 to assess the policy impacts of population growth nationally and globally upon the nation. The Panel’s report published in 1973 recommended that the government should prioritise a population policy overseen by a dedicated Minister. The Panel’s conclusions remain pertinent, “Looking further ahead to the middle of the next century, problems of accommodating a further 10 or 20 million people are likely to be progressively more difficult. Sooner or later, Britain must face the fact that its population cannot go on increasing indefinitely.”³²