UK: Food security is perilous: let’s grow our own

Britain must find inventive ways to produce food and use every part of the nation including tunnels, parks and rivers

By Libby Purves
The Times
December 30 2024

Food! The season brings gatherings around groaning boards followed by dismay, diets or associated drugs. Whether gourmet, glutton or superfood-seeker, it’s our happy obsession (hilariously exploded by an “Ig Nobel” award) that imitating the diet of distant lands, of fish heads and sheep’s milk, will make us live to a hundred. Meanwhile, British harvests are the worst in fifty years and rising prices mean that one in six families can’t feed themselves.

Our national food security is fragile. For decades governments have been preoccupied on the one hand with industrial growth and on the other with idealistic environmentalism. In between, the basic matter of growing edibles from earth was neglected or sidelined and that has left us vulnerable.

So maybe 2025 should be the year of good conversations about agriculture, livestock and horticulture (it is certainly a bad moment for government to start another battle with farmers). At some bleak future date historians may look back in amazement at the way a small, temperate, fertile and leisured island was content to import nearly half of what it ate, and that among its millions of people, many rarely shopped for food in person or cooked from basics.

• British farmers suffer one of worst harvests since records began

It’s worth saying, without undue paranoia, why Britain ought to produce enough to feed itself in a crisis, whether caused by terrorism, politics, meteorology or catastrophic AI failure in logistics. Any of our deep-sea ports could be blocked and fully a quarter of fresh food imports come through the straits of Dover or the Channel tunnel. Air-freight? It represents only 1.5 per cent of imports and is massively higher in carbon cost (yet what government dares deprive us of Peruvian blueberries or sub-Saharan avocados?).

Critically, most of what we buy and eat is subjected to the same “just-in-time” procurement strategy as manufacturing industry, so it would take only a few days to create palpable shortage and panic-buying. There are no government warehouses full of food to reassure and supply the populace, and few well-stocked domestic pantries and big freezers. If the crisis is multinational other countries might be slow to help: the EU was once our reliable feeder, before that I suppose the Empire.

How would we behave? A report for the National Preparedness Commission stated that wheat, bread, pasta and cereal are the most likely shortages to trigger civil unrest, and that 40 per cent of food experts expect it in the next ten years. Twice as many predict it within the next fifty.

So what do we do? Not, I think, cling fiercely to the “UK net zero” target (globally so minimally important). Not by covering any more acres of agricultural land with solar panels to feed our greedy digital and domestic habits. These are touted to landowners as a way to “unleash your land’s true income potential” and in hard farming times that’s tempting. But if, as solar companies plead, the final total of “agrovoltaics” covers only 0.5 per cent of good land, less than we lose in golf courses, it’s still a loss of food.

• Farmers to target Labour MPs in new wave of protests

Another warning came from the Campaign to Protect Rural England, pointing out that 11 per cent of our farmland is very close to towns and cities, providing a great deal of their food. That makes it “green belt”, hence vulnerable to the government’s gung-ho enthusiasm for suburban building. We are promised specific protection for sites of special scientific interest and “nature” but not for ordinary agricultural land. It has, except in 20th-century wars, always been difficult to make farmers and government fond of one another.

So in the interests of national food security there is need for rebalancing and clear thinking by our predominantly urban, phone-for-a-pizza ruling class. And there are positive, interesting and useful new things that could reduce imports of both food and synthetic fertilisers (incidentally improving the balance of payments). More small and diverse farms should be encouraged and supported to work and sell locally and give a chance to a new generation (demographically, farmers are getting dangerously old).

Horticulture is interesting: many fruit and vegetables are grown in low-lying areas like Lincolnshire that will flood as the climate changes. But visionaries see a possibility of many more plantings: allotments, city farms, gardens and parks growing orchards and vegetables. A Lancaster University survey calculated that 40 per cent of the fruit and vegetables we eat could grow in green urban spaces. And that’s before you even start to think about chickens.

• Far more funding needed if UK is to decarbonise grid by 2030
  “Cycloponics” involves using underground spaces for more than just mushrooms. There are vegetables growing beneath Paris, and in London some Second World War and unwanted Transport for London tunnels are similarly being used experimentally. Imagine the reduction in food miles if city-dwellers could get tomatoes and endives from pretty much underfoot (though producers would have to make up silly names to market them: Mole Farm perhaps). Evangelists for inventive horticulture talk of urban rooftops, vertical farming and rafts of barges on urban rivers sprouting nutrition. There are outdoor, healthy jobs in it provided workers are properly paid: another rebalancing needed.
  There’s excitement as well as anxiety in thinking about these things: defiantly admitting that we are bodies, not just minds on sticks fed by screens but cellular organisms growing and regenerating. Nor need we be mere cogs in weary, outgrown corporate systems. Roll on an inventive and energetic nation, rejoicing in natural partnerships we can see. And eat. Happy New Year to our fertile and flourishing piece of earth!

Link.

Source: https://cityfarmer.info/uk-food-security-is-perilous-lets-grow-our-own/