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.
Adam Tugwell 