Britain's Ticking Time Bomb: The Food Security Crisis

Could the UK be facing empty supermarket shelves by 2030? Are food distribution centres sitting ducks for drone warfare? And how has Britain got to a place where is has just 3 days to 3 weeks worth of food supplies? This week, Caroline Lucas sits down with food security expert, Professor Paul Behrens from the University of Oxford. To hear the full episode and the whole series as it drops, sign up here or at therestispolitics.com Please continue to send in your questions for Caroline, Alastair and Rory. ⁠⁠Read the redacted Joint Intelligence Committee Report here⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Find out more about the National Emergency Briefing here.⁠⁠ ⁠Find Paul Behrens book here ⁠ Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Josh Smith Social Producer: Celine Charles General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:06Speaker 00

  To cover up one high-level report into the impact of nature and climate collapse on the UK's national security looks odd. To cover up two starts to look like a pattern. Last week, we spoke about the first report that the government didn't want us to see, which was compiled by, no, not politicians, not environmentalists, or even economists, but by top intelligence officials from MI5 and MI6, the people who warn the government about the biggest threats of conflict and instability facing the country. That report, from the intelligence chiefs, essentially told us that climate and nature collapse is a serious national security concern for the UK. And at the heart of that hidden

• 0:47Speaker 00

  report, which was eventually published, albeit heavily truncated and redacted, is a stark warning about the UK's ability to feed its population. It identified food supply as the UK's single greatest vulnerability in a world of climate and nature breakdown. Put plainly, without intervention, people of this country could go hungry. In this episode, we uncover a second hidden report, this time from 2024, commissioned from a now-disbanded team at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to brief an incoming government on long-term risks. Yet, oddly, it wasn't included in official handover documents, and the only reason it's come to light at all is thanks

• 1:30Speaker 00

  to Ben Cook at The Times newspaper. Now, its conclusion is equally stark. Climate change, habitat loss, and geopolitical instability mean that the UK's food security is, and I quote, "at risk of catastrophic failure." Not in some distant future, but potentially under some scenarios by the end of this decade. Now, that could mean empty shelves, rationing, and the state losing its ability to guarantee food supply. And what's remarkable is that the warnings are coming from within the industry as well. Last year, a whistleblowing memo from senior food industry figures made headlines when they described the level

• 2:12Speaker 00

  of food security threat as, and I quote, "like none we have seen before." In this episode, we'll ask why the UK is so vulnerable to food shocks, why isn't the government coming clean with us that access to food might be compromised, and what can we do about it?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  I'm really pleased to be joined by Paul Behrens, a British Academy Global Professor at the University of Oxford and an expert in food system transformation. So, welcome. We now have two hugely important reports, both of which have been suppressed by the government. We've got the Joint Intelligence Report on Global Biodiversity Loss and Ecosystem Collapse, which is a bit of a mouthful, and we've now also got the DEFRA Critical Systems Report. And so, I wanted to ask you, what on earth do you think the government is doing when it's trying to keep us from seeing the contents of these reports? Why aren't they levelling with us about the scale of the risks that we face?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Carolyn. Yeah, I think these reports are both very worrying about the risks that we face. They're very clear about what we're facing in terms of ecosystem collapse, in terms of impacts on the food system in the short term. We're uniquely exposed to some of these shocks as a high-income country, and so I think if you are going to start publishing these in full, then you're going to need to start bringing out some policies, because you're going to have to start reacting. Some of the reports are quite clear that we need quite far-reaching and deep changes to our food system. And of course, that's a lot of efforts that might not align with the government's agenda, and it might mean that the government has to do a lot more communication to bring

• 3:54Speaker 01

  people on board, and that's just a huge effort. But I'd be interested in what you think, having been, you know, close to the policymaking.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I do think you're spot on. It really does feel as if the government's trying to save face here. I mean, so many of the policies they're pursuing, like slashing the international aid budget, for example, seems to be going in exactly the wrong direction when we're told that it's precisely the vulnerability of so many of the poorer countries that is not only causing their own populations great hardship, but also making the whole world more insecure as well. But I wanted to quickly zoom out and just look at the global picture a second, because it seems clear that the climate and ecosystem stability that has given us reliable harvests by and large in the past is now gone. We're talking about droughts, we're talking about floods, wildfires, heat extremes, and on top of

• 4:45Speaker 00

  that, scientists are now warning us of a super El Nino on its way, a naturally occurring event when waters in the Eastern Pacific surge in temperature. But it makes climate impacts even more severe. So what does all of that mean when it comes to global harvests and the people that depend on them?

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so important. The world in which agriculture developed and the climate in which it's being used to is now completely changed. The world that we think we're living on no longer exists. And what that means is far more extremes, droughts, floods, that you just mentioned, but also this difficulty of actually responding to that, of adapting to that. You know, we can only do so much on the ground in a certain amount of time. And the changes now are coming so thick and fast that it's really challenging to people to actually make those changes. And so, yeah, we're seeing floods around the world, extremes, droughts around the world. I mean, already, these are starting to flow into food prices, which is my great concern, is how, in high-income countries, for example,

• 5:45Speaker 01

  how food prices go up, and then that really destabilizes societies. We see lots of cost of living worries. And one estimate suggests that in 2023, about a third of the food price inflation was due to climate change. And so, you can see how this goes, how you get more and more pressure on farmers, on agriculture, that flows through to prices, that makes people unhappy, and then we get more and more unrest. We see this, actually, a really good example is Trump in the US, where you actually get a vicious cycle, where people are really worried about the food prices increasing. They vote for somebody who promises to change everything, to fix the food prices, and then Trump comes in, and then he guts many of the options that farmers have for understanding the climate and responding to it. And so, it makes it worse, and so food prices go up even further.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  And, you know, these are the sort of dynamics I worry about in high-income countries. And of course, in sort of lower-income countries, you see increases in food insecurity, you see increases in hunger. I mean, the World Food Programme estimates about 45 million more people are going to be food insecure over the next year.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  And there's, what is it, 800 million already who are facing chronic hunger?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, 800 million already. And we're not, you know, when we're talking here about climate change as it has been in the past, I mean, we've had three of the worst harvests in the last five years in the UK, but a layer on top of that, the El Nino, as you said, and that's like putting things even more on steroids. So we're going to get deeper droughts and more floods. And some regions might, may seem to see slight benefits, but on the whole, we're very worried about Southeast Asia, for example, not getting the monsoons, not getting the rains. And then on top of that, you've of course got the closure of the strait of Hormuz, which we can talk about. But, you know, there, you're seeing the interruption of energy into the food system. So the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN estimates about 30% of energy goes into the food system. So you rise the energy prices, you're going

• 7:34Speaker 01

  to increase the food prices. And a third of the fertilizer comes through that area in the strait of Hormuz. And so, that's going to, this is storing up pressure later down the road for when the harvests actually come in. So six, 12 months later, we're going to be seeing El Ninos, we're going to be seeing more and more hot climate impacts, and we're going to see those impacts of the strait of Hormuz closing.

• 7:54Speaker 00

  Well, you've touched a number of times now on the particular vulnerability of the UK to food shocks. And so I wondered if we could, we could go through some of the details of that, what is it that makes us so vulnerable? And maybe we could start with our dependence on imports, because we are very dependent on food imports, aren't we?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're hugely dependent. So we import around 84% of our fruit, around 50% of our vegetables. We import overall about 40% of all our food. It's not just the fruit and veg, though, I should mention, because it's also the things that go into the agricultural system. And people forget this. We think about food as just being the thing that we buy on the shelves, but actually, food is the fertilizers, it's the diesel, it's the vitamins that go to animals, et cetera. And what, you know, we see is actually there's a huge dependence on inputs from around the world as well. So if we think about chickens, for example, UK's favourite meat, that is mostly coming for, in terms of feed, from

• 8:58Speaker 01

  the protein, soy protein in the Amazon, and then sort of actually destroying a lot of the protein by going through the animals. And so, actually, it's not just the dependence on the fruit and veg, which is like a nutrient security issue, but it's actually all of these other inputs as well. We import almost all of our vitamins for animals, for example, that we give as they're growing.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  And of course, the Amazon was one of the areas which the Joint Intelligence Report really identified as a key area of potential collapse, which could have really profound implications for food security here.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not too much to say that our addiction to having beef burgers around the world is causing the destruction of the Amazon. And our addiction to meat in general is plowing through this ancient tropical forest.

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Perhaps that's a good moment to talk about dietary change and so forth. So in terms of our dependency and our vulnerability is part of that problem, that we are so dependent on meatstuffs and a plant-based diet could be more resilient in this way.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's because animals in general are poor converters of the feed that we're giving them. So I'm a physicist originally, so I sort of like look at these sort of systems and I think, wow, you know, this is incredibly inefficient. So, you know, animals will only convert somewhere between three and 20% of the food that they're fed.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  So the grain gets converted to the meat?

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, you could be throwing away around sort of 97% of the calories if you're feeding cattle, for example. And on a planet where the safe space for agriculture is shrinking because of all of these impacts, because we see yields going down and we see all these impacts on farming, we don't have the space for that anymore. And the fortunate thing is, and some days I kind of think to myself, oh, how terrible would it be if we actually really needed these meats for our diet? You know, imagine there was no way around it. But actually, the nutritional advice, the dietary associations around the world, they all are very clear that you can be exceptionally healthy on much less meat. In fact, you'd be much, much healthier indeed. Like, so the diets that

• 11:07Speaker 01

  we normally study, which were built from the concept of what's best for nutrition for people, to put this in perspective, the middle case of those diets is a beef burger once every two weeks, ideally less, chicken fillet once a week, some dairy a day. They do suggest you can eat even less than that. But it just, on top of that, has all of these environmental benefits and these resilience benefits as well.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  I was struck as well that I read that half of Britain's wheat harvest is currently fed to livestock, which is quite an extraordinary statistic. Going back to the UK's vulnerability, I wonder if you could say a little bit about the just-in-time supply chains and our lack of storage, because it seems again that we are building in vulnerability into our system by depending on that kind of supply chain.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've got this culture in the UK, unfortunately, where we just think that the market will provide around the world. And I don't know where that comes from, whether that comes from a little bit of our old colonial attitude that, you know, well, you know, other countries will provide us with the food. And what's happened is, over the years, is that we've had more and more of this leaner and leaner supply chain. So, you know, food is not stored along the way anymore. It sort of arrives just in time for people to go to the shops and pick it up from the shelves. The result is, is that there's probably somewhere between three days and three weeks of food in this country, depending on the type of food you're talking about. And that doesn't give you too much buffer. And this is something

• 12:38Speaker 01

  sort of very different to what other countries are looking at. So we've got countries in the Nordics, we've got Finland, we've even got Germany, looking at sort of building up some resilience here, building up some storage of food. Not to hoard, not to stockpile over the long term, not to panic buy, but just to give a little bit more of that sort of buffer, should we get some sort of shocks. You know, an awful lot of our food comes through our ports. If you have an impact at Dover, you could see that hit the shelves within, as I say, three days to three weeks.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  And presumably, all of that is exacerbated by the fact that I was reading in Professor Tim Lang's National Preparedness Commission report, that all of the UK retail food goes through just 131 distribution centres. And as he points out, for modern drone warfare, those centres are sitting ducks. There is a real vulnerability right there.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Yeah, you're so, you're so right there. And, you know, what we really need to think about is the, we've got this energy transition, and this energy transition is going towards decentralised energy, much more resilience, much cleaner, much more efficient. And we have to think about how would food systems look if we were to take a similar picture about decentralisation, more community ownership of food systems around them, more engagement in local areas with farmers, with food producers. I mean, that's the sort of excitement I get when I think about what food resilience could look like in the future.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  And one thing we haven't talked about, which I think is really important, is that obviously, these various impacts will affect people differently. Because, of course, the frankly shameful fact, really, an indictment on previous policy, is that one in five people in England and Wales are already technically food insecure. In other words, they can't have, can't find consistent access to nutritious food. So when we're piling on top of a system that is already not properly feeding the people that we have here, and one in five is a massive figure, then that is going to cause untold hardship, I should imagine, unless we act very quickly to make sure that those families, those communities are much more resilient too.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a really good point. I mean, sometimes you get this point from people. They say, well, you know, the amount of money that you're spending on food has gone down over time. And on average, that's true over time. The lower income brackets, they're spending a larger proportion of their food, of their money on food than higher income. And so when you see any sort of food price inflation, that really cuts into, should I heat the house? Or should I eat? You know, can I buy the kids some more school shoes? Or, you know, do I eat? And so that's where you really get yourself into a lot of problems in unequal societies. The real key sort of feedback that I see there that's a bit worrying is that the more unequal societies become, and the more pressures that families have,

• 15:30Speaker 01

  the less likely they are wanting to, going to have, want to risk anything, or want sort of, sort of counterintuitively, want change, because they feel they're just holding on at the moment. And then they become risk averse, because there's no bandwidth to sort of take risks, to look at sort of community food systems, or to look at new ways of organising. And so I get a little bit worried here that as inequality continues, it will sap away our energy to actually deal with the climate and the nature impacts that we're seeing.

• 15:57Speaker 00

  There is so much more that I'm going to be covering in this series. We're going to be looking at issues around water scarcity, and about the myths, really, behind the headlines to do with climate migration. So don't miss it. Please sign up at therestispolitics.com.