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The writer is an emeritus professor at the City Food Policy Centre, University of London.
When it comes to food, Britain can’t decide what it wants. Therefore, wait for crises to come before doing much. This is the legacy of the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, when the country decided that food needed to be cheap to keep wages low and affordability high. Two world wars ruined that simplistic recipe for free trade.
Other countries like France and the Netherlands take their farmers and producers seriously for cultural and economic reasons. They tend not to see farms as investments for the wealthy but rather as economic infrastructure vital to food security. And safeguarding food interests is not necessarily considered a protectionist approach.
Earlier this month, last year’s hastily assembled building at 10 Downing Street “The “Farm to Table” Summit was reconvened. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced two policy statements to show he listens to farmers’ concerns.
Firstly, a “plan” for horticulture seeks to increase subsidies to £80 million, with support for automation. Horticulture has been hit by a shortage of agricultural labor since Brexit and by inflation in the costs of gas, fertilizer and essential equipment. The plan promises to maintain the limited seasonal farmworker scheme and remove “red tape” to allow growers to build new greenhouses, ignoring the fact that they are not planting in existing structures.
He said nothing about continuing arguments over the effects of strict contracts between retailers and suppliers, still accused by some of pressuring primary producers. Or what to make of a British food market where, according to the Food Foundation, even if the poorest families bought the cheapest fruits and vegetables available, paying for them would cost between 34 and 52 percent of a person’s weekly food budget ? the equivalent of five a day for a week.
At the other extreme, Sunak’s second announcement of a Food Security Index created a set of nine new indicators, most of which were given assessments of “broadly stable” or “some risk reduction”.
These ignored internationally agreed definitions and indices of food security. Since 1996, the term has been understood as availability (it’s there), access (you can get it and afford it), utilization (it doesn’t go to waste), and stability (confidence that it’s there). To these have been added sustainability (ecosystems will continue to function) and agency (consumers do not feel powerless).
Applying these indicators, things are not so encouraging in Great Britain. Border delays due to Brexit are creating constant supply disruptions from Europe, where a quarter of British food comes from. Food inflation may have slowed, but food prices are still 25 percent higher than they were a few years ago. The waste is a scandal. So is agricultural and food contamination. And consumers are nervous.
Fear not, Whitehall thought: new indicators may suggest a more optimistic outlook. The first indicator, which tracks the global food supply, is marked “broadly stable.” But this doesn’t mean UK consumers are food secure: last month’s Food Standards Agency survey classified 25 per cent of them as food insecure. The index also fails to acknowledge the collapse of farmers’ confidence in planting or accessing flooded land. And it doesn’t sufficiently analyze the impact of climate change, geopolitics, and poor diets on health care costs.
Shaken by the impact of the 2007-2008 oil price crisis on food, the last Labor government finally got control of the food security strategy in 2010, only to fall at the election. Since then, no administration has taken a serious interest in the issue, despite being urged to do so by independent reviewers.
So it should come as no surprise that today the UK is once again denying threats to the food system. As I discovered in a review of civil food resilience, Whitehall tends not to even think about consumers, only about supply. Should we wait for another world war before their approach to food security becomes more holistic and the government takes control?