There’s Nothing New Under the Sun: We Need to Be Realistic About the UK’s Perennial Vulnerability to Food Insecurity

Recent weeks have seen alarming headlines suggest that the UK risks serious strife due to limited food production capacity, thereby touching on something that makes the public feel vulnerable at a visceral level – literally something we will feel in our gut: the chance we might not have food tomorrow. 

But this is not a recent risk, nor the result of a particular policy programme. It is a core piece of the UK’s strategic security puzzle, composed of challenges that cannot be approached in isolation. While the new attention that this public alarm brings to the subject is welcome and necessary to some degree, we must remain alert to the reality that this remains the germ of some perpetually vexing implications for British statecraft. 

A recent academic study led by researchers from the University of York highlighted three particular pathways which a shock to food availability might take on the way to civil unrest. These boiled down to international conflict, extreme weather events due to climate disruption, and cyber attacks – not speculative calamities but events which we are seeing occur with high frequency before our very eyes today. 

Also published recently was the government’s own report titled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, where answers were sought to key questions about UK security and environmental breakdown. It emphasised the cascading effects of ecosystem collapse and the heightened geopolitical competition that will result from increased scarcity of essential materials and agricultural products (read: food). 

Underlying both of these reports is the simple fact that, as a small state made up mostly by a single island with limited sunlight hours, the UK is not capable of farming enough, nor enough of a variety, of crops to meet all its citizens’ needs. Practically since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1818, statespeople in Britain have seen the best solution to this problem as lying in international trade. The UK currently relies on food imports for 40 percent of its needs. 

Where once in its imperial heyday Britain commanded the flows of global trade, today the UK is largely at the mercy of them to help protect it from big shocks to its food systems. But imports of various foods are hardly free from shocks themselves. Aside from the effects of climate change, the traditional ‘breadbasket of Europe’ for example – the grain-rich stretch of farmland found across Ukraine and south-western Russia – has been fraught with additional challenges since the 2022 invasion.  

Reducing import dependency significantly would mean disruption and upheaval on a scale no voting public is going to want to make until they have no options left. 28 interventions were identified by the academic research group, for example, which in various combinations would improve the UK’s situation. But the researchers admitted the “feasibility of the proposed interventions is governed by their political acceptance, public acceptance and ability to change behaviours (where needed), and availability of any required financial capital.” Little reason to feel sanguine, then. 

Beyond thinking about peacetime trade, the UK also needs to consider critical supplies for the most precarious situations it may face. During the First and Second World Wars, for example, America as either an ally or friendly neutral was the UK’s lifeline, shipping food (as well as materiel) across the Atlantic when Britain’s own imperial and European supplies were cut off. 

After the war, Britain had to rely on appealing to major food exporters to restrict their own domestic consumption, freeing up export stocks. Attlee acknowledged in 1946 – referencing the USA, Australia, and Canada –  “it is thanks to the prompt action of those countries, that the situation has not become entirely out of hand.” And times were indeed hard enough as they were; rationing had to continue until 1954. Today we must learn to accept the lesson this represents: in times of massive global crises the UK will be kept afloat by relationships with the most reliable sources of food imports. 

For the UK today, relations with Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, and the European trade bloc will be of great importance. Yet for its geostrategic stability (with regards external threats at least), the USA will be the single most valuable source of food imports in a major global crisis. Especially in cases of war, if hitting the UK’s food supplies entails striking at the USA, then it will almost certainly mean either the UK’s food supply is relatively secure, or that it has its transatlantic partner – not to mention a global great power – in the fight alongside it. 

In various circumstances this may come with a punishing set of trade-offs and other suboptimal outcomes, as indeed Washington today is making it hard to sustain diplomatic and trade relations on an even keel. The hard truth, though, is that especially when food insecurity becomes existential, the UK’s population may have to hold its nose in order that it can fill its mouth.  

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Einboeck.official

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