8 June
Dear Jim McMahon,
I am writing to you in your capacity as Shadow Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs about the critical issue of our nation’s food security. In a time of short-termist, sticking-plaster politics, we need a serious, credible, long-term plan to keep Britain fed, and I wonder if Labour, during its time in opposition, might perhaps be best placed to lead this vision and planning.
There are of course really two sides to the coin of food security. On one side, we have the economics, which encompasses everything from the availability of food, to its market price volatility and affordability, to its profitability to producers, to its contribution to GDP. On the other side, we have the ecology, by which I mean the systems, both domestic and overseas, by which our food is grown and produced, and the sustainability of that output.
Within the context of the broader cost of living crisis, perturbed by global events affecting food price volatility, much attention is currently being paid to the economics, and in particular the very real and immediate issue that some families are struggling to put food on the table. While it would clearly be a grave error to lay the blame for this squarely on food prices, when rising energy bills and systemic issues of housing affordability and stagnant real wages (the average of which has only just this year surpassed what it was in 2008) show us a broader picture, this volatility is still a concern.
The UK now imports almost half of its food, creating a lot of exposure to global price dynamics, whereas in 1984, we were 78% self-sufficient. The common sense response might therefore seem to be that we should try to grow more food in Britain again, and I think that is broadly correct, although there are two key caveats. One is that our food tastes have changed and diversified since the 70s, and we have become used both to eating some foods that are not widely or readily grown in the UK and to a perpetual availability on supermarket shelves of many crops that are out of season at home. There is an argument here that we should therefore grow a greater diversity of crops in Britain, insofar as conditions allow, and that we should encourage people to again eat seasonally according to what we grow here. The second caveat is that while importing a lot of food increases our exposure to risk in terms of price fluctuations, it arguably also increases our resilience in the sense that we don’t have all our eggs in one basket should we experience events like bad harvests or disease breakouts at home. And that second caveat leads us to the question of ecology.
When it comes to growing food crops, pests and diseases are a problem everywhere: 20-40% of global annual crop production is lost to their attacks. We try to deal with that by breeding more resistant varieties and by using pesticides, but pests and diseases can be highly adaptable too, so it’s an uphill battle. And the stakes are high when we rely on such a small range of key crops with a very narrow genetic pool. Last year, we produced about 14m tonnes of wheat in Britain. The wheat rust fungus can infect and destroy vulnerable wheat crops in a matter of days, and currently there are three anti-rust genes bred into wheat varieties to resist the threat. But a strain of wheat rust emerged in Uganda back in 1999 (Ug99) that is resistant to all three of those protecting genes. It has already spread across parts of Africa and the Middle East, even reaching the Mediterranean. So there is a race against time to breed a new wheat strain to counter it before every wheatfield in the world eventually becomes unviable. And that’s just one disease affecting one key crop; there will be others.
As if that weren’t troubling enough, our intensive approach to agriculture is degrading the very soil we rely upon to grow anything at all. The Environment Agency calculates soil degradation in Britain to cost in excess of £1bn a year. This degradation involves not only soil erosion, which reduces the amount of viable soil left to grow things, but also compaction, which reduces soil fertility as well as increasing flood risk. As well as affecting food and flooding, we are also undermining a vital store of carbon. The 10bn tonnes of carbon in the UK’s soils equate to about eight decades of greenhouse gas emissions, and we’ve already lost about half of the organic carbon that had been stored in soil. There is no easy or rapid way to restore soil once it has been lost, and we are losing it at an alarming rate.
At the same time, our insect pollinator populations are in worrying decline. Biodiversity has been stifled through destruction of habitat and widespread use of pesticides, and while there are admirable schemes to restore habitat and promote biodiversity, the UK’s bee populations still fell by more than ten percent over the last two years. There are likely complex, interacting factors in this continued decline that are not yet fully understood. What we do know is that a third of crops are pollenated by insects, so their decline is another threat to food security.
All of this plays out against the backdrop of climate change. It’s hard to estimate the overall magnitude of future climate effects, but these changes certainly will not make life easier. Warmer, wetter winters combined with drier summers will likely reduce yields, and extreme weather events will likely further exacerbate erosion of unprotected soils. Cereal crops rely on a relatively narrow window of dry weather for harvest before those crops spoil, and farmers are already facing difficulties as such windows become smaller and are no longer guaranteed. Higher average temperatures also provide more opportunities for pests and diseases to generate and build resistance, as well as affecting the range and frequency of attacks.
The overall picture is grim, and despite the warning signs being evident for a long time now, these issues do not seem meaningfully to have entered public and political consciousness. Awareness must of course be the first fundamental step towards change. I believe that sustainable food production will necessarily become a central, defining social, scientific and political issue in the next several decades, but the earlier we take our collective heads out of the sand and work towards systemic change, the better chance we have of heading off a crisis of a catastrophic scale.
There are many promising avenues of possibility for building resilience ecologically and thus economically, which broadly involve moving away from an oversimplified industrial farming model to systems that recognise and incorporate greater ecological complexity. You will no doubt be aware of many of these opportunities and in the interest of brevity, I will spare you the details here. However, the overarching challenge will be to facilitate and bring together the very best ongoing efforts in research, technology, and practices into a movement that is systemic, that can be implemented and built upon in a coherent and cohesive national and international strategy. The scale and gravity of the food sustainability problem calls for a real, uniting vision and the understanding and planning to see it into reality. I don't see anything even approaching that yet, but would like to be among those who raise the call for such vision and action.
In writing this letter, I set out to ask you two simple questions: What would a Labour government do differently when it comes to food sustainability and security and what can it do from an opposition position to urge key changes in policy? I still ask these of you, but what I really want to know, Mr McMahon, is whether or not Labour is ready to take on a pioneering position of leadership in acknowledging and raising awareness of the mounting crisis in food security and in forming the vision and strategy that we so urgently need to see. We need nothing short of a paradigm shift in the way our food is produced, if we are to survive not only as a nation but as a species. Are you ready and willing to be there at the crest of the wave?
Yours sincerely,
Christopher Crompton
Christopher Crompton