When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes long-term plans, they call it communism. Any sustained state intervention attracts the prefix “Soviet-style”, and triggers vicious attacks across the billionaire media. So governments have developed a bias against long-term thinking. This may explain why we no longer maintain strategic food reserves.
In Britain, where soils have parched, market analysts warn that we’re facing the most severe food security crisis in decades. In normal years, crop failures at home don’t threaten our security, thanks to global trade. This is one of the reasons why hunger and famines are rarer and less deadly than they used to be. But this is not a normal year, because the problem is now global.
Similar impacts are hitting farmers across Europe and in the US, whose wheat production this year is forecast to be lower than at any point since 1971. Until a few weeks ago, harvest forecasts in Canada were excellent, now its spring wheat is also shrivelling in hot and dry conditions.
Ukraine has had a good growing season, but export forecasts have been cut as a result of Russia’s attacks on its ports. At the same time, crucial global pinch-points for food and farming supplies are tightening: Donald Trump’s aimless war with Iran has caused major reductions in shipping through the strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and the Suez canal. These have become essential trade routes for fertiliser and, more recently, food, thanks to the Middle East’s emergence as a major re-export hub.
One impact of these disruptions has been to divert more shipping through the Panama canal. But the canal is now afflicted by drought, which has led to restrictions on ships’ draught (depth under water). The global circulation on which our food security depends no longer looks reliable.
It’s not just that these impacts can immediately restrict the availability of food, even in wealthy importers such as the UK (poorer nations in the global south are, of course, hit much harder). It’s that they also land on a global food structure that has become systemically fragile. It is now highly exposed to the risk of cascading collapse that nearly brought down the financial system in 2008. In fact, it suffers from very similar dysfunctions. The government knows this, because a report by its own security advisers warns that our food supply is “at strategic risk of catastrophic failure” by 2030. It responded by suppressing the report.
As with all potential system failures, it’s impossible to say where the tipping point may be. But what we can say is that if such an event occurs, the impacts would be beyond contemplation. It could be the most deadly global crisis in modern history.
A world in which governments hold strategic stockpiles has a better chance of weathering either a temporary shortfall or a systemic failure. If food reserves were big enough, they would buy us enough time to rebuild the system. In their absence, if the food system collapses, so does society.
The UK once held strategic food reserves, albeit very limited. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, our governments decided they were no longer necessary, as private retailers would maintain sufficient stocks. As the National Preparedness Commission points out, this policy coincided with decisions by the big retailers to stop holding stocks and switch to a just-in-time system: goodbye warehouses, hello logistics. No subsequent government appears to have noticed that its food-security assumptions are based on conditions that no longer exist. Perhaps they looked away out of the fear of being labelled interventionist. Perhaps they fear criticism more than crisis.
Today, as far as I can tell, the government’s sole food storage intervention is a single unpublicised paragraph on its Prepare website. It instructs us to “Put together an emergency kit of items at home. This could include: Non-perishable food that doesn’t need cooking … how much you need will vary based on your own circumstances.” Invaluable advice, I’m sure. That scarcely anyone has seen it, that many people have no space for an emergency food store and no money to buy it with is just bad luck. Perhaps we don’t deserve to survive.
I write as though I’m confident that the UK does not maintain stockpiles. For several years, I have been asking the environment department this simple question: does it or does it not hold them? The Conservatives were honest enough to say “no”. But since Labour took office, it has repeatedly failed to answer. When I asked again last week, it sent me a long disquisition on related subjects, but signally failed to answer the question. I then asked why it hadn’t answered, and received no reply to that either. I find this response more eloquent than a candid “no”. It tells me two things: “the answer’s still no” and “we know the policy is wrong”. Otherwise, it would be happy to tell me about it.
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The government also told me: “The UK has a highly resilient food system, drawing on both strong domestic production and international trade and we do not expect the recent dry weather to have any impact on national food security.” This claim, which defies warnings from the security services, market analysts and the food trade itself goes beyond complacency. It’s denial.
As far as I can tell, since he became prime minister, Andy Burnham and his office have not said one word in public about the climate crisis. On Wednesday he chaired an emergency Cobra meeting to discuss the extreme heat, the drought and the wildfires. But, at the time of writing, there has yet to be a public statement about what has caused this crisis, and how we might cause less of it. Yet No 10 did find time last week to intervene on Westminster council’s plan to limit vertical drinking in Soho. Good to know it is laser-focused on the crucial matters of state.
The government’s disregard and denial sustains our proud tradition of heroic failure, from the charge of the Light Brigade to Brexit. Food reserves are for losers. Prudence is for suckers. Somehow the words “British” and “invulnerable” have become muddled up.
In good times, government stockpiles look like a waste of money and effort. But the role of governments is not to prepare for the good times. Governments exist to defend us from harm. And this isn’t possible without long-term plans.
