With the coronavirus disrupting global food supply chains, arguments for the UK to reduce its reliance on imports are being voiced, writes Nick Hughes.
With just a handful of deaths recorded to date, Singapore has been held up as an example of how best to counter the coronavirus threat. Yet in one key respect, the densely populated city-state is more vulnerable to the crisis than most. Agricultural land is at a premium meaning Singapore produces just 10% of its own food, relying on trade with countries as diverse as France and Vietnam for the remaining 90%.
With the coronavirus pandemic disrupting global food supply chains in a way not seen since the 2008 financial crash, the Singaporean government has been forced into action. At the beginning of April, officials announced new measures to boost local food production including a plan to turn car park rooftops in public housing estates into urban farms. “Local food production mitigates our reliance on imports, and provides buffer in the event of food supply disruptions,” authorities said in a statement.
Almost 7,000 miles away, self-sufficiency – and the extent to which it should be a policy goal – is re-emerging as a topic of debate in the UK too. Although nowhere near as dependent on imports as Singapore, the UK still shops veraciously from the global larder. In 2019, DEFRA figures showed domestic producers supplied just over half (53%) of the value of food consumed in the UK when exports are subtracted from production (volume is said to be slightly higher at around 60%).
For fruit, in particular, the UK is almost entirely reliant on imports from Europe and further afield. In 2017, just 16.7% of the total UK supply of fruit came from these shores. Home vegetable production is higher at 53%; however, horticulture in total accounts for just 3% of the UK’s croppable area despite our varied soils and mild climate allowing farmers to grow over 300 different types of vegetables, salad crops, tree and berry fruits. By contrast, self-sufficiency rates are above 75% for beef and chicken and as high as 98% for lamb (this in itself creates an interesting dynamic whereby foods that on average contribute most to climate change also dominate domestic land use).
In an aptly timed book, Feeding Britain, written prior to the outbreak of Covid-19 but only recently published, Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London, argues that lessons learned from the second world war, when Britain had to double domestic food production in six years to support the war effort, “have been forgotten or deliberately undermined”. In making the argument for greater self-sufficiency as part of a broader vision for food systems change, Lang describes the core policy assumption that “world trade is a calm pool of supplies from which the UK can draw cheaply and at will” as “risky, short-sighted and politically illiterate”.
In March, as the threat to the UK from coronavirus escalated, Lang, along with two fellow professors, wrote to the government expressing concern about an impending food crisis and criticising the government’s “weak and unconvincing” messaging about food supply.
Lang has long been a critic of what he characterises as a “leave it to Tesco” philosophy that has informed UK food policy in recent decades (and continues to do so even in the grip of coronavirus). In Feeding Britain, he remarks, presciently, that “the logistics revolution which has swept the food system has created seeds for its own downfall”, citing a globally connected just-in-time system that means food rarely remains in one place for longer than a few days, or even hours. Sure enough, just days into the UK’s effective lockdown, supermarket shelves were being emptied of store cupboard staples. March has subsequently proven to be the biggest month of grocery sales ever recorded, according to Kantar, but while growth was originally assumed to have been driven by people panic buying in bulk, data suggests it was in reality a consequence of lots of people buying a little bit more than normal.
The supermarkets have since recovered a modicum of control over their stock levels by placing limits on certain items and managing the number of people in store at any one time. Yet the food crisis that Lang warns of continues to play out beyond the shelves of Tesco. Over Easter, the Food Foundation warned that 1.5m Britons reported not eating for a whole day because they had no money or access to food.
It is unclear to what extent, if at all, greater self-sufficiency would have reduced the shock to the UK’s food system from Covid-19 – food, after all, still needs to reach the people who need it most regardless of where it has come from. The instinctive industry response to coronavirus was to focus on potential disruption to continental supply chains from port closures or customs delays. Understandably so, since the EU accounts for well over half the food consumed in the UK we don’t produce ourselves. Yet Covid-19 has exposed challenges with getting food that already exists within UK supply chains to where it is needed. Supply chains for retail and foodservice function independently of one another with different customer specifications and legal requirements, meaning that when one breaks, as has been the case with foodservice, that volume cannot easily be transferred to the other even if the product is produced and stored locally. This partly explains why dairy farmers have had to pour thousands of litres of milk down the drain and why Scottish fishermen, faced with the collapse of foreign and hospitality markets, are turning to food banks to feed themselves.
Growing more food at home in the long term wouldn’t just require a change in land use policy – it would need infrastructure, including transportation and storage facilities, to scale up in line with increased domestic production. Food production and processing skills, many of which have been lost from the UK, would need to be repatriated – first-stage processing of fish, for example, has mostly been offshored to countries like China. Domestic producers are also facing a drastic shortage in labourers available to pick and pack the UK fruit and vegetable crop that is traditionally harvested by migrant workers. Coronavirus has created an exceptional set of circumstances for farm owners, but access to labour is set to remain a long-term problem under the UK’s proposed new points-based immigration system.
When self-sufficiency is put forward as a cure for global market instability there is no shortage of economists queuing up to punch holes in the argument. A key contention is that by trying to produce food domestically that can be produced more efficiently elsewhere prices are kept artificially high (an argument that has most recently been applied to post-Brexit trade). Price, it should be noted, remains king for the majority of UK consumers. Although 78% surveyed by DEFRA say it’s important to support British farmers, less than half (38%) are prepared to pay more for it. The same is often true among business buyers. Although there is a market for British produce in more premium areas of catering, in the wider cost sector buying British tends to be low down the list of priorities.
A purely economic view of food security has Singapore near the top of the list. Indeed, the nation-state has ranked in first place in the Global Food Security Index (GFSI), compiled by The Economist Intelligence Unit, for the past two years, largely on account of its combination of high incomes and low tariffs on agricultural imports that keeps the flow of food consistent and affordable.
Until, that is, there is a shock to the system. In a separate Natural Resources and Resilience table, Singapore was ranked 109 out of 113 countries by the GFSI, a placing reflected in its urgent response to the coronavirus crisis.
As Lang points out in his book, “long supply chains are open to more risks than shorter ones”. When risk becomes reality, those countries with high levels of self-sufficiency hold most of the aces. Bloomberg reported on March 25th that some governments are already moving to secure domestic food supplies during the coronavirus pandemic. Kazakhstan, one of the world’s biggest shippers of wheat flour, banned exports along with others foods including carrots, sugar and potatoes. Vietnam temporarily suspended new rice export contracts, while Serbia has stopped the flow of sunflower oil.
“Is this the start of a wave of food nationalism that will further disrupt supply chains and trade flows?” asked Bloomberg. That we don’t yet know. The threat of coronavirus will, one hopes, eventually subside and markets will begin to recover, but the extent to which countries like Singapore and, to a lesser extent, the UK will continue leaning on others to feed their citizens is less clear cut.
Short, sharp shocks to the system can be overcome, but what happens when those shocks are long and persistent? For years scientists have been warning of the catastrophic effect climate change will have on agricultural production, with some areas of the planet rendered unviable for cultivation and all countries facing a heightened risk of food supply chain instability. The IPCC, in its special report on climate change and land, wrote of “cascading risks with impacts on multiple systems and sectors” under all future GHG emission scenarios.
To date, the UK government has been relaxed about the resilience of the UK food system – a position some feel is misplaced. In an article for The Conversation published in March, Lang says he “gasped” when he first read DEFRA’s annual food civil contingencies infrastructure report in 2018. “It is barely a page long (in public at least) and assures us everything is O.K. and that the food system is resilient and able to withstand shocks,” he wrote. Needless to say, Lang disagrees, describing the new Agriculture Bill as “an economist’s bill” rather than the framework for food systems transformation he and many others believe is required.
Self-sufficiency is just one piece of a (figurative) food security jigsaw of which dietary health, climate change, livelihoods, trade, inequalities, food culture and natural assets such as soil health, water and biodiversity are all represented. Unfortunately, unlike an actual jigsaw, the pieces do not fit together perfectly.
Covid-19 presents an opportunity to end decades of policy drift and think seriously about the way we produce and consume food in the UK. Even the most optimistic expert will concede there is no guarantee it will be taken.
