The British government should be stockpiling food, according to a leading food policy expert, as it is not prepared for climate crises or wars that could cause people to starve.
Professor Tim Lang of City St George’s, University of London, said the UK produced far less food than it needed to feed itself and, as a small island reliant on a few large businesses to feed its gigantic population, was particularly vulnerable to crises.
The UK’s first food security report, from December 2021, found the country was 54% self-sufficient in food. Other wealthy countries like the United States, France, and Australia are all food self-sufficient, meaning they grow enough food to feed their populations without importing it if necessary.
The United Kingdom is one of the least food self-sufficient countries in Europe. The Netherlands, for example, which is densely populated, has 80% and Spain 75%.
“We’re not thinking about this properly. We’re skirting around it,” Lang said, speaking at the National Farmers Union conference in Birmingham.
“The default position that others can feed us is ingrained in the British state system and indeed in the nature of how agri-food capitalism works in Britain. Others are wiser. Other countries are building up reserves,” he said. “Other countries have much more flexibility in their systems than we do. What we glorify as efficiency is now vulnerability.”
Other countries have emergency reserves in case of war, food contamination or climate crises. Switzerland still has enough reserves to feed its entire population for three months and will increase this to a year. The UK government’s advice to households is to have three days’ worth of food in their cupboards.
The government has no plans to improve the UK’s self-sufficiency and will not set a target for food production. Environment Secretary Emma Reynolds said: “I’m not going to give a percentage. I would like to see us increase food production in our country, particularly in horticulture and poultry, where I think there are real opportunities for growth. But I’m not going to give you a figure.”
Self-sufficiency is likely declining; Production of wheat, beef, poultry and vegetables decreased last year.
A small gap in the food supply could have drastic consequences. Experts recently warned that a shock could lead to social unrest and even food riots in the UK, because chronic problems had turned the food system into a “tinderbox”.
Lang’s report for the National Preparedness Commission, published last year, found that the UK food system is extremely vulnerable to attack due to its concentration in a few large companies.
It found that the UK’s 12,284 supermarkets are “fed” by just 131 distribution centres.
These were an “easy target” for drone or cyber attacks by rogue states, he said: “The big nine retailers account for 94.5% of all food retail. That’s nine companies, using just 131 distribution centres. In drone warfare, that’s an easy target.”
According to its report, Tesco, which supplies almost a third of the UK’s retail food, operates through just 20 distribution centres. He said: “When four of the big 10 retailers account for three-quarters of food retail, if one or two of these mega-companies were to be affected in any way, or their tight distribution center system was disrupted, the impact on the public would be considerable.”
Lang’s report also says that UK civil defence, which involves preparing the population for shocks caused by war, received the equivalent of 0.0026% of total defense spending in 2021-22. He added: “The reality is that there are no binding laws in the UK that specify duties for central or local government to ensure people are fed.”
Brexit has also made the UK more vulnerable to crises, reducing the subsidies farmers receive to produce food and making it more difficult to import food from our largest trading partner.
In the three years since January 2021, EU agri-food imports fell by a three-year average of 8.71% annually, compared to the three years before Brexit, according to an analysis by the University of Sussex.
As climate change makes it more difficult to grow fruit and vegetables in southern Europe and northern Africa due to extreme weather, countries like the UK, which rely heavily on imports of fresh produce, will be affected.
According to the UK Health Security Agency, if the UK continues on current trends in land use, climate and agri-food, “by 2050, 52% of pulses and 47% of fruit will be imported from climate-vulnerable countries and the supply of vegetables, fruits and pulses is expected to fall short of what would be needed to meet UK dietary recommendations.”
This was already experienced in 2023, when bad weather in Spain and North Africa caused a shortage of fresh salads and vegetables across the UK. More than 80% of the UK’s fruit and more than half of its vegetables are imported.
Lang said: “Climate change, floods and droughts are part of the vulnerabilities of the food system’s just-in-time logistics system. The key conclusion of my report was that we created a food system in the name of efficiency, which is now inadequate for where we are, with a concentration of dominant large companies being the choke points. This creates vulnerability. Drone warfare and reliance on software make it doubly vulnerable.”
The professor has called on the government to legislate to ensure the food system is safer and able to withstand crises.
“I would like it to be a food security and resilience law, something that makes clear the fundamental purpose of food systems,” he said. The food system needed flexibility rather than being an efficient, just-in-time system focused solely on profits, he added. “The purpose of food systems is to feed people. How, what and under what circumstances, if you are a large commodity producer, are you really feeding people? Will it survive when there are crises?”
Lang also said the UK needed to boost food security and produce more food at home. “We have to increase production here, not because of petty nationalism, but because we have good land, good people, good resources, good infrastructure. It is a crazy misuse of land not to do that. We are not getting the leadership we need from the central government,” he said.
