Category: Foods We Can Trust

It’s not just British Beef at stake: the future of U.K. food production and our food security is on a knife edge

So obsessed have we become with tech, the next big thing and the apparent ease with which we can get everything that we want, that we have forgotten what’s actually important in life. And when it comes to the basic essentials for life, there’s likely to be nothing more important than what we eat.

Just like the air that we breathe, it’s easy to take the supply of food for granted. Unless you are already one of the growing number of us who cannot always afford to buy enough.

Yet, it’s not even as simple as having access to the food that we genuinely need.

For half a century and probably more, the food we eat, the systems, the supply chains that provide it and the governance that is supposed to be there in place to maintain supplies of the things that meet our basic needs have been changed, manipulated and replaced from top to bottom and from left to right. For no better reason than to allow someone somewhere to make more and more money, without any regard for consequences or what for us – and for our farmers and growers, is already becoming a very high price.

To really grasp the horror story currently unfolding, there is need to have understanding of our political system, of human nature and how money runs the world and makes everything work. Not in the sense of how we see it or how we talk about it. But in the sense of how it all really is.

This past weekend saw Channel 4 give a platform to yet another attack on meat production and specifically beef farming, leaning very much upon the narrative that to tackle global warming, cutting down and ideally stopping eating meat is the best place for everyone to begin.

Never mind the queues of private jets lining up at the very same time to fly an ‘elite group’ of very rich people to a meeting where they can all work out plans to force more of their green rules on the public, all in the comfort of luxury hotel suites in Dubai.

Regrettably, many of the people gifted high profile platforms to speak passionately about the guilt people trying to eat a balanced diet should experience for eating properly have become the useful idiots of a very cynical strategy. One being pushed by people who were never elected to their roles and so recognise that to have control over everything, they must gain control of any basic essentials for life that everyone seeking to exert their own freedoms and will must automatically prioritise first.

What they forget to mention – even when these same people have responsibility for public health, is that good, healthy and nutritious food, as part of a balanced natural diet, is the essential building block and foundation of a happy life.

So, why would anyone of sound mind want to destroy or kick the foundation of good, healthy and nutritious diets away?

You can be sure that its not anything to do with the methane that animals, humans and just about every natural biological process produces. But it certainly has a lot to do with money and the two things  that come with it: power and control.

Yes, it sounds like a conspiracy theory. But everything that the world is doing to itself today is thoroughly unsustainable.

The irony is that it is the same people, businesses and financial minds that created the false ‘need’ we have bought into who are responsible. On one hand, they have normalised unsustainable behaviour that has depleted the planets resources for no good reason. On the other they have systematically destroyed the governance and infrastructure that would make it easier for us to choose and adopt alternative ways of living that would be much healthier, affordable and sustainable too.

It is these same selfish and self-serving minds that are now determined to dictate the solutions to the problems they caused, so that we change and then behave in ways that will work better for them.

Food is power

Whilst it will make uncomfortable reading for farmers, including many great friends that I know, an entire industry populated by some of the most creative and entrepreneurial people imaginable has been reconditioned to accept grants, subsidies and ‘guaranteed’ contracts with big business and retailers as being ‘normal’. Instead of using their own freedom to do all the things that only British farmers and growers know how to do best.

The consequences of what is happening because of greed and self-interest are very serious indeed.

Yes, farms are going out of business and land is being taken out of production at an alarming rate. But the fact the food the U.K. grows or is capable of growing doesn’t often find itself into the mouths of the very people who live closest to the farms where it was grown is both part of the nightmarish reality that people in food poverty are suffering obesity and diabetes, and the accompanying reality that basic healthy fruit, veg and and high quality meat and fish that resembles its origin in an unadulterated form is now for many, simply too expensive to eat.

It shouldn’t be this way. Yet the travesty doesn’t end there.

Whilst we should all be able to depend on the public representatives that we have elected to put our health and the security of UK food production first, the reality we all have to face is that whether it’s the Conservatives this year, Labour or anyone else occupying No. 10 and the green benches to the right of the Speaker, next, none of these politicians have any idea of just how fragile the UK food supply is right now. Nor how serious even a few shortages of outside food supplies could make things get.

U.K. agriculture has reached the point where farmers, growers and the industries that are inextricably linked to U.K. food production will either choose to accept the risk of taking the steps necessary to facilitate its own revival or wait perhaps no more than just a couple of years and see everything that still exists swallowed up by some impractical idealists 2030-based agenda of some kind.

Farmers and the public are the two key stakeholders in U.K. food production and accompanying supply relationship. Yet neither farmers nor consumers have anything like the genuine say and influence that they should have.

It’s money, self interest and other people’s agendas at every step of the way.

The UKs Farmers shouldn’t have to lead the revolution of reality. But the reality is that a meaningful commitment to changing U.K. food supply and recreating the local infrastructure that would be able to make that work, will soon gather growing public support once the work has really begun.

Its then and only then that our hapless politicians will have no option but to follow.

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Food Security | Will British Farmers wait until it’s too late or realise our Politicians don’t understand or have the will to secure our Food Supply?

To some, Food Security would be the radio tags that supermarkets now attach to high value or vulnerable food items in stores where they are regularly taken without payment.

That it has become normal to focus on the overtly criminal act of theft, rather than the realities of a cost-of-living crisis where many people cannot afford to eat well, today, is bad enough.

But to overlook the reality that Food Security is the biggest, most pressing and bizarrely unspoken question that surrounds the UK’s dwindling self-sufficiency is in a different league all together.

The travesty doesn’t stop there. The farmers see it and are doing what they believe they need to.

But like everyone who believes that change happens when you convince the government and politicians that your argument is right, the farming industry is failing to reflect on experiences that make it clear that we have all been here with the political classes before.

Food security is the UKs ability to feed itself. It’s the condition, the reliability and the robustness of our own circular supply chain at local and national level that includes the foods that we grow, process, prepare and provide for ourselves or our own people.

Food Security represents the food-supply that the UK provides itself with, without any other country, international supply chain or other third party being involved. And what the reader may not realise is that current figures suggest that the amount of the food we eat in this country that is produced in this way through our own UK supply chains may now be as low as 50%.

All well and good, and there’s nothing to worry about if you can rely on the food that comes not only from Europe, but from across the world always being available and arriving on our supermarket shelves and at our doorsteps just in time.

But we can’t.

The fragility of global supply chains was laid bare for all to see by the government response to the Covid Pandemic and the paradoxical situation where politicians shut everyone up in their houses and still expected everything else to work as normal.

Those who are so heavily invested in globalisation and the monetary and economic system that they have profited from, are literally throwing everything they have at keeping the economic wheels turning to the point where the catastrophic damage that decades of financial mismanagement have caused is now plain to see, but everything appears to keep running while fuelling the expectation that they always will.

The explosively excessive printing of money should have imploded our economic system long before now. Anyone prepared to take a closer look at what is really going on, will soon see that economic and monetary stability is already hanging by a thread.

Those printing the cash could easily continue to keep flooding the economy with more and more monopoly money, until the hyperinflation that we can now expect kicks in.

However, the whole demise of this crooked way of managing and interfering with every part of our lives so that the few can continue to get rich may be about to hear the final bell called. If, as expected, the BRICS Nations launch their own gold-backed currency in just under two weeks’ time and FIAT Money such as the US Dollar, The Euro and our very own British Pound go into freefall, making the cost of everything – IF we can even get it – go into orbit.

Like the majority of us, Farmers do not have the true depth of our political talent weighed up for what it genuinely is. Just as they don’t understand how the public sector and everything that the tentacles of public policy and government touches, actually works.

Indeed, the ideas or expectations Farmers have of what politicians and public servants are in office for is quite correct in terms of what they should do. The now critical problem for us all, is that the Politicians, and those who would enthusiastically replace them, do not do as they should.

For now, that’s as much as it is worth saying on how we got here, and where ‘here’ really is.

Calling our Food Security or our Food Supply situation a ticking time bomb sounds dramatic. But it may well turn out to be far worse than it already sounds.

The stark reality we face is that even with the UK producing as much as 60% of our food – with much of that production currently geared to supplying large-scale food production and processing, rather than the production and supply of the daily essentials that each and every one of us need to live – the fragility of our food supply should be red faced and screaming at any politician who is genuinely there to represent the public good, telling them all they need to know about what will happen if an event should occur that effectively pulls the international food supply chain plug – or rather the rug, from under us.

Either way, on the current trajectory, we will reach this unspeakable destination, just through the progress that accompanies time.

Because we don’t have politicians who see any of this, accept this, and are prepared to act to deal with this, the UK is now dangerously exposed and vulnerable to critical food shortages.

With these same people in charge, as we have experienced with their response to the covid pandemic before, it is a safe bet that when the food crisis reaches our front doors, our decision makers will be primed to make a potentially catastrophic situation exponentially worse.

Today’s politicians don’t solve problems with the right solutions. They hide them with the easy ones.

If the UK’s external food supply collapses, the SPADS, advisors and civil servants in Westminster will take one look at the threat of hungry people taking to the streets and will conclude that UK self-sufficiency isn’t viable because nothing is in place. That it would take too long, will be too hard and will therefore be too risky to trust farmers and people to grow food for themselves, and that they will just have to pay someone else and prostitute the UK to outside interests. Rather than dig in and get everyone to start doing their bit for home production – just as our grandparents and great grandparents did without getting in a flap, when everyone had to before.

Farmers are some of the most creative and successful entrepreneurs that exist. There is no reason to doubt that if they were minded to do so, farmers, growers, fisheries and all their allied sectors across the UK could quickly reach and then go beyond a subsistence supply level for the whole Country, based on very local and highly transparent supply chains.

However, farmers are also some of the most damaged victims of the mind games, propaganda and deliberate measures taken to destroy the UKs self-sufficiency and industrial output that was forced upon us through the offshoot of globalisation that we have come to know as the EU.

Decades of subsidies, quotas and micromanagement rules ruined hundreds if not thousands of viable farming and growing businesses. They have conditioned today’s up and coming farming generations to believe that hand-outs accompanied by specific directives are ‘normal’ and are all that they can expect.

However we look at it, the Farming industry and its representatives still believe that the government and our politicians will eventually respond to the Food Security crisis that lies in front of us, in the way that they themselves see it. And that Westminster will come running with the public chequebook when they do.

But they wont.

And that isn’t going to change whilst we have the politicians that we have and know as the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats or indeed any of the pretenders who are outside of Parliament awaiting their chance – but think and behave just like all the rest.

The solution isn’t going to come from any politician.

The solution to the UK Food Supply and Food Security problem must come from within.

It’s our farmers that have to break through the perceptual barriers that currently encage them. They must do what they are best at, get on with the job that already waiting to go, and let the political classes catch up probably long after they begin.