4 hours ago
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I hate to sound like a prepper, but I feel bound to confess that over the past month I’ve been stockpiling food. I think, if you can, you should do the same. I’ve put aside 25kg of rice, 15kg of dried chickpeas, 15kg of bread flour, 7kg of chapati flour, 5kg of oats, six litres of vegetable oil, a slab of tinned tomatoes, some nuts and dried fruit. This, with the vegetables we grow, represents about two months’ supply for our family.
I hope the chances of having to use our stockpile are small. But if we no longer need this insurance, we can eat it. Strange as it may sound, I see this hoarding as pro-social. Building a reserve while food is abundant reduces demand in a crisis. Community stockpiling and resilience planning would be better still. But I’m not waiting.
Researching my book Regenesis, I learned about the extraordinary reliance of food-importing nations on the US. Almost 60% of the calories grown by farmers take the form of wheat, rice, maize and soya beans. As nations have polarised into super-exporters and super-importers, production for export has become highly concentrated in a handful of countries. The US is among the biggest exporters of all four commodities.
A deliberate effort to cut off the UK seems unlikely. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that even a modest interruption in supply, which Donald Trump’s antics render more likely, could trigger sudden global failure in the food system. Interruption risks include software outages, military attacks on the straits and canals through which huge volumes of food pass, and the collapse of one of the corporate food giants that have become too big to fail.
Trump will also exacerbate environmental shocks. The gathering “whiplash effect” – moderate weather replaced by a cycle of droughts and floods – is one of the factors that could cause synchronised crop failure in key growing regions.
Since 2015, a series of papers in the scientific press have warned that the global food system is suffering structural problems similar to those afflicting the global financial system before 2008. There has been a rapid loss of diversity, redundancy and other key elements of systemic resilience. The food system shows signs of “flickering”: widening fluctuations in output values (such as commodity prices) that presage collapse. Governments were able to prevent financial collapse in 2008 by issuing future money. They cannot prevent food system collapse by issuing future food.
Since then, the warnings have only intensified. Some governments have heeded them. China, Japan, Switzerland and Norway invest in stockpiles of grain. Food reserves not only insure against disaster but can be used as buffers to prevent prices from surging.
When I asked the UK government whether it holds strategic food reserves, it blanked my question. When I pressed, it claimed “we don’t comment on matters that pertain to national security”. That’s a wretched excuse. Other governments keep their people informed on this issue, fostering trust and reassurance. Even Boris Johnson’s regime responded to my question honestly in 2020. The answer was “no” then, and I suspect it remains “no” today, which probably explains this ridiculous obfuscation.
As the National Preparedness Commission, which reported on UK food security last month, notes: “If an absence of policy is for fear of worrying the public, this is a risky strategy. The public needs to be engaged as part of preparation.” Its report reveals almost comical failures by successive governments either to take the issue seriously or to involve us in addressing it. They have slalomed round every opportunity to enhance the food system’s resilience. Rather than developing a security plan, the government vests blind faith in a commercial sector whose just-in-time logistics expose us to severe risk.
Reserves are a necessary but not sufficient means of building resilience. While bearing in mind that food nationalism is not the same as food security (in some respects it’s the opposite, as global trade protects us from local harvest failure), here are some further steps the government could take.
The UK produces plenty of grain, but far too little feeds people directly. You might be aware of the preposterous cosmetic standards that supermarkets impose on fruit and vegetable growers. You might be less aware that mills and other processors impose even stricter standards. To give one example, we can make bread from a wide range of flours. But as a farmer explained to me, the mills demand “total consistency. Every loaf has to be the same, so every load of grain must fit the specs. They want a protein content of over 12%, a Hagberg falling number of over 300 and a water content of 15%. If we miss any of that, it’s disqualified as milling wheat and goes for animal feed instead, and we get a lower price. They don’t make concessions. They don’t accept suggestions.” Relaxing such standards could make much more food available for human consumption.
To an even greater degree, so can reducing the animal products we eat. Globally, a plant-based diet requires 76% less land than the current average diet. Here, 85% of our farmland is used for feeding livestock. Even sheep, which most people imagine subsist only on grass, consume hundreds of thousands of tonnes of supplementary cereals and oilseeds.
A government strategy to reduce livestock consumption could secure both food system resilience and ecological resilience, as our remarkably unproductive uplands could be rewilded. One good thing the government is doing is accelerating the approval of alternatives. Precision fermentation, to give one example, could greatly enhance our protein production, radically reducing imports of both food and fertiliser.
Replacing food imports does little for resilience if it means increasing fertiliser imports, on which the UK remains highly dependent. We should seek to maintain high yields with fewer inputs. If we understood soil better, we could rely more on biology (the fascinating interactions between plants and microbes) and less on chemistry. There have been some recent breakthroughs, but soil science remains woefully underfunded.
Governments need to break up corporate monopolies: anti-trust laws should be strong and intellectual property rights should be weak. They should involve us in decision-making, as Taiwan’s has done when faced with crises. They should assume a duty to ensure everyone, including people in poverty, is well fed at all times. Currently, if crisis strikes you’re stuffed. Sorry, I mean starved.
Our provisions are now boxed and stacked. Some of my friends and neighbours have followed suit. But we do this in the knowledge that individual action is never enough. No one is secure until everyone is secure, especially those in greatest need. My full shelves give me no satisfaction. It shouldn’t have to come to this.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
