Tag: Food Security

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 expereince 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.

Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)
The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem
FOOD FROM FARMS GUARANTEED | Full Text

Is anyone reading the deeper messages from the Red Tractor dispute?

Before anything, I will say that the Red Tractor Scheme was a good idea, even though with my consumer hat on, I’m not convinced it really meant all that much to shoppers.

On that note rests the question of who really gets the value from it, and from that perspective, its possible to begin joining up the dots regarding the latest row that has developed around future changes and the relationship between the Scheme and ‘green farming’.

Whilst everything looks very simple, the truth is that complexity rules the day and many of us don’t understand the relationships and motives that lie behind many of the problems that agriculture and businesses are facing.

At face value, most people simply wouldn’t believe what’s actually happening and what corporate interests are doing to entire industries as they seek to control every part of the food supply chain across the UK. Acting as if even the farms they buy produce from, are no more than facilities that they own.

Regrettably, big money interests want more profit than they already have and they have successfully hidden behind the lie thar is ‘free markets’ and yes, Globalisation, to trash genuine government and regulations and then replace it with a system of their own that they control.

My concern is that whilst overtly created with the best of intentions for Farming and Food Production, devices like the green agenda are just new ways of ratcheting down more and more control of the food production system. So that every penny of profit or ‘the fat’ that exists at any point within the entire food supply chain is controlled and funnelled into the hands of those who control it.

Consider this scenario:

Many farmers – perhaps every farmer, has at some point signed up to some kind of contract sale arrangement for their crops, animals or produce, perhaps with a dairy, a big retailer or an agent of some kind.

Within these relationships, it has been considered normal or necessary to share just about every bit of data about the farm, what equipment is used, the number of animals, number and type of staff – and much, much more.

Afterall, what does it matter when you are working for the same goals and these are people you can trust?

It’s likely that right now, an unworldly economics graduate, perhaps sat in a commuter town HQ, somewhere near London, is looking at every detail their employer has hoovered up through this process of ‘granting contracts’ or ‘beneficial arrangements’ of some kind. That’s the one mentioned above where they have insisted that they are the farmers friend and that all this information helps to raise standards, meet targets, and no doubt of late ‘helps to achieve Net Zero, or make the industry green’.

What they didn’t tell you is that from this data, this analyst or someone like them that the farmer will never meet, can work out exactly what everything is costing on that farm. They can then then use statistical averages and data of the kind that inform our politicians, to make decisions on what the farmer is ‘entitled’ to earn – knowing exactly what their spreadsheets have told them the farmer should ‘charge’ to cover the costs of their ‘wage’ and absolutely everything else.

***

Yes, the chances are that the companies and retailers that farmers ‘sell’ to are working out what they believe those farmers need so that they earn the average wage (if they are lucky), and without the farmer even being aware, nothing is any longer that farm business owners’ choice.

If farms are dependent on these companies and their contracts – no matter how well intended or how they were sold, the business that the farmer is contracted too basically owns the farm.

As such, farmers are right to be very concerned about where so-called standards are taking the industry, as the level of data and therefore control that these interests will have and will be able to exert, is only likely to grow, whilst politicians continue to fail to represent the interests not only of the food producing industries, but of the public at large.

Right now, the destination is already over the cliff. But it could get worse, with Supermarkets now trying to claw back whatever they can from what they clearly believe to be over generous relationships with the key suppliers within the UKs Food Supply Chain.

Home Growing is essential to achieving Food Security and the aim of the UK becoming Self-Sufficient in Food Production

Young children are now suffering health problems that just decades ago were likely only to be experienced by a much older and very unlucky few. Obesity not only affects a significant part of the population, but it is also being championed as if it is normal, and we are vilified for daring to speak openly about such a point of view.

Like the rise in so many different health related conditions that are seriously compromising far too many people’s quality of life, the biggest proportion of all of them would be no more than an afterthought, if we were to bring back healthy eating and balanced diets in the form of basic and essential foods.

Sadly, the belief that cheap, sweet, salty, easy to buy, quick to eat ‘food’ is healthy for us is a well-crafted and massively convincing lie. We have had this nonsense repackaged by advertisers and the media in the same way that we are being told that if everyone were to consume healthy, basic and unprocessed foods, it would be more expensive than it is for us to eat it as the apparently luxury we have been conditioned to believe that it has now become.

We have been encouraged to eat the way that we eat and to feed our families the way that we do, not because it will benefit any of us. But because the foods, drinks and treats that we have become addicted to make somebody somewhere VERY rich.

What many of us don’t even realise that all of these ‘wonderful’ foods – and even the takeaways that have become a staple diet for some rather than just being an irregular treat – will have travelled many miles and been constructed artificially using ingredients that themselves may have been made in many different factories. They have traveled across continents before the end product you recognise has even been made.

It’s all part of the con called globalisation. A lie we are told we must celebrate and embrace as the legitimised truth. Because globalisation is all about international trade – which is how wars are stopped and how good relationships between different countries are made.

What the Establishment salesmen never talked about, and their pet media ignored, was the reality that jobs and communities have been lost, as well as the livelihoods that went with them.

Stupidly, we never really questioned the whole process because we were taught to become obsessed with speed of delivery, availability and what we still believe to be the lowest cost.

The reprogramming of our buying habits has contributed to or given the excuse necessary for almost all hope of this Country being Self-Sustainable in Essential Food Production being destroyed.

Meanwhile, the equally destructive EU policies that were supposed to be good for our economy within a so-called single market, also represented an advanced politicised form of the globalisation franchise. EU doctrine on food production has progressively made UK Farms all but impossible to run.

Globalisation was good whilst it lasted. Or rather, that’s what the majority of us are still expected to believe.

However, because of many different reasons that only include government responses to Covid, to Brexit, The War in Ukraine and the idiocy of Free Markets and Neoliberalism in the way that everything has been run, the supply chains that crisscross the world are now collapsing.

Forced change and possible shortages too, are only a matter of time.

As part of the so-called Great Reset or Agenda 2030, the solution to this coming problem that the elites created themselves isn’t to go back to basics and focus on localised supply chains. Indeed, whilst they actively ignore the crisis within UK Farming and in other countries where their counterparts are actively taking steps to see highly productive farms destroyed, they are instead telling us that we will all be happy eating ground up crickets and foods that have been made in a lab.

There is no good or humane reason for People to be treated this way, other than it being part of a strategy or plan to ensure that those who hold power over us now, remove our ability to support ourselves in the future.

As the crisis the Elites have created takes deeper and deeper hold, the agenda they are pursuing will ensure they will have and be able to maintain their grip on power, and we will all be dependent to a dystopian system where these few have absolute control. Unless we use the opportunity, their stupidity and greed has created, to take our own power back.

As part of The Grassroots Revolution and the rejection of everything held dear by the leaders of this dying ‘old world’, we MUST embrace a return to the most localised forms of food production and supply chains.

Food production must focus on healthy, basic and essential food items, using the absolute minimum of additional ingredients, so that our basic diets are home-produced, and this system of production is prioritised over everything else, so that the food we need, will always be available to us all in the cheapest and most accessible form.

Regrettably, because UK Agriculture has been deliberately pointed in the wrong direction for a very long time, younger generations of farmers have no working experience of anything like a truly localised food growing-to-production-to-retail system in anything like the way it historically was and will be needed now.

This means that the process of change will take time and that for reasons outside of our control, certain foods may become short.

It is therefore essential that everyone who is able use gardens, allotments, window boxes and whatever form of growing space available to ‘grow your own’. So that there will be sufficient basic and healthy essential foods available, whilst we all get behind our Farmers and develop the resources and cooperatives that will be necessary in every area.

We must do this to ensure that we have Food Security for the UK and achieve the National Self Sufficiency that we would have long since had, if politicians had been doing their job, and the greed and self-interest of the few, hadn’t been allowed to flourish and lead instead.

I have covered the subject of Basic Foods and Home Growing in detail within Levelling Level, the first book in the series leading to The Grassroots Manifesto. To read Levelling Level online or Download a FREE PDF copy, please Click HERE.

Levelling Level discusses the wider issues that we now face, how we got here and begins focusing on many of the things that we and our communities have the power to do.

In Part 3 of The Grassroots Manifesto, a series of Public Policies have been suggested for a new people-centric age. This is one of a number that relate specifically to this issue:

The Grassroots Manifesto | Policy 4 | Food Production, Security & Supply | Home Growing | xviii

Self-sufficiency of people is essential to achieving the aim of the UK becoming self-sufficient in food production and providing the Community with Food Security.

Our Future IS Local

The role of British Farmers has been neglected at our peril. Sadly, the politicians won’t see it until it’s too late, so it’s the Farmers who will have to begin the localised food supply chain revolution instead

Farmers are by nature, the most creative and entrepreneurial managers, engineers and technical workers that I know. They are, or rather they become these multitalented vocational giants by living lives that involve operational management, frequently calling them into action at any time, 24hrs a day, 365 days a year – pretty much from the day that they are born.

Farmers are, in effect, the complete antithesis of our Members of Parliament and the political class. And it’s because of the lack of understanding and respect for what British Farmers do, that the politicians we have – whether in Government or not, have allowed British Agriculture and all of the industries allied to and feeding into it, to reach the state that they are now in.

The problems that British Farmers face remain closely aligned to what their European counterparts are experiencing.

Indeed, whilst many from what in 2016 was the Remain camp are still pushing the narrative that leaving the EU and the whole Brexit vote was a gargantuan mistake, those same people are strangely silent when it comes to comment or discussion on what Farmers within in the EU Member nations are facing right now.

Across Europe, unelected bureaucrats and out of touch politicians are pushing an agenda which will see Nation States close down some of the very best food production in the world. All at a time when supply chains are already collapsing, there are growing food shortages and in no time at all it will not just be hungry people who are out of sight and out of mind that could be the ones who are about to starve or go without.

What underscores the futility and the madness of this perverse strategy, pursued by people who have never been at the hard end of an operational business in their life, is the reality that their grand plan mirrors the ridiculous decisions made by the political classes across Europe not only to shelve and mothball, but to destroy fossil fuel burning energy plants and sources. All coming under the ridiculous assumption that buying in supplies and services from elsewhere from across the World is not only safe, but can be sold to the public as being green and therefore alright.

Yes, you did read that correctly. The leading classes of Europe and the UK too, are and have for some time quite literally been shutting down, wilfully neglecting and even deliberately destroying our own national systems of production.

The politicians we have elected to look after our best interests have been making us all vulnerable to whoever they then do some kind of deal to buy replacement supplies and services from.

All of this is so that Politicians can pay lip service to fulfilling an impossibly idealistic promise of achieving Net Zero – or some other departure from reality based narrative they are pushing that isn’t just economic with the truth, but is an outright lie.

Why is the lie so important? The lie that the politicians tell is so important, because it’s just another lie to cover up the impact of another very big and very damaging lie about the benefits of globalisation and commercialisation – which is what the EU was always really about.

The irony should be lost on none of us that Globalisation and greed-based Commercialism are the real and genuine cause of all of the climate and environmental problems that we do genuinely have.

Equally, we should be under no illusion that the climate and environmental problems that we do genuinely have would go into free fall, in the direction of positive change, the moment that we stepped back from the money is god and a profit led existence, and allowed on-shoring, relocalisation and the protectionism that is now essential to the UKs future to be restored.

Whilst it will never be said about the European Union, even by many of the Brexiteers who never really understood this part of the EU Membership travesty themselves, the EU and everything about it has just been one disastrous exercise in globalisation and commercialisation.

The Common Market and everything that followed as part of the EU Project evolution was a self-serving spin off of the Globalisation myth, repackaged with the lie that with the overarching politicisation and centralisation of the European sub version, the issues that befall the removal of international barriers and the many risks it brings on a Global level, would never be our own.

As many of us can already see with just the Energy Crisis alone, this foolishness – however well intended, doesn’t work when so many differences of opinion, cultures and different ways of being are involved.

We can all see what has happened as a result of Western Governments responding as they have to the war in Ukraine, when the same politicians had destroyed our own self sufficiencies in order to ‘open up the doors’.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the impact of all the very poor decision making that got into full swing long before Brexit, Covid and Ukraine were ever in the frame.

Sadly, the system collapse that so many within the elites, the establishment and our own government are doing so much to hide, is already well underway.

It’s just the case that we are not all going over the cliff at the same moment in time. That’s why not all of us can see it. YET.

However, the fall of an entire industry that will affect all of us – our Farming Industry – is most definitely already underway. And we fail to realise, accept and understand this at our peril.

Yes, food is on the supermarket shelves. We can still get just about everything we could possibly want. So you are probably asking the question, ‘Why should we be worried about Farmers and British Agriculture now?

Sadly, we will not believe that life can be any different to what it is now, until it already is.

If you need an example that makes sense of this, cast your mind back to the beginning of 2020 when the first lockdown began and then life changed for us all in an instant.

We may have forgotten Social Distancing and Lockdowns for now. But many of the direct consequences of disastrously poor decision making on the part of our politicians is only just beginning to materialise now, nearly three years on.

Amongst all of the issues which are currently popular, the ability of the UK to feed itself is strangely absent from that list. Yet the UK Food supply is now at massive risk of collapse – That’s the supply of the food that we need to meet our basic needs and not the ridiculous variety of imported and mass processed items and ingredients that we have become used to.

Our Basic food supply is at risk for a number of reasons. These include the centralisation and globalisation of food supply chains which are going to collapse; the way that British Agriculture has been placed at the mercy of innumerable agents, resellers, speculators, traders and middle men who take massive profits whilst adding no value and push farm prices down, whilst pushing retail prices up; and decades of reconditioning under the auspices of EU membership that has led British Farmers to rely on subsidies that have taken away the incentive and freedom to compete.

There are many more.

The situation regarding our food supply is much more complicated and serious than it is possible to do real justice here.

The real tragedy and threat to us all, is that because our Politicians created or led the implementation of the market structures that are currently at work – even though they did so in no small part on behalf of the EU – everyone, and most importantly our Farmers, are expecting our politicians to ensure that every issue created by Brexit, along with the collapse of global supply chains and the fallout of other events such as the War in Ukraine, will be dealt with – as it is perfectly reasonable and logical for us to be able to expect.

They have not. They are not. They will not be addressed by the politicians we have.

I have been writing at length about the changes, challenges and difficulties we face. But this isn’t just the interpretation of one former politician and businessman sharing the reasoning of their own concerns. A former head of MI5 has warned about the issue of food security, as well as the National Farmers Union itself have been sounding the alarm.

The real problem that even these very credible sources cannot counter, is that our politicians are so out of touch and prioritise whatever they believe to be in their best interests.

It is not until you really begin to understand just how out of touch with reality our politicians actually are, that you can then start to consider and appreciate that the British People are heading for an extraordinary amount of pain, that would have been both unnecessary and avoidable IF we had politicians that fulfilled their responsibilities as they always should do.

Getting people and especially Farmers to realise and understand that the solutions will not come from this government or any new government that is formed from the political parties or groups that are known to us and that we have on offer to us today is challenging indeed. Especially as it means that the solutions we now need, through restructuring, onshoring and relocalising supply chains to a what we would recognise as being conversant with a much more traditional form, MUST be led with British Farmers and all of the related industries right out in front. Just as the political change that we all so desperately need must also come from the grassroots up.

I began writing this blog by making reference to the ingenuity and industriousness of our Farmers. This has already been well illustrated by the many ways that members of the Farming Community have already diversified their businesses, to become manufacturers, growers, producers and retailers of a very different kind, taking back control and managing every step of the process from farm to fork themselves, or working collaboratively on a very small localised scale, where it can quite literally be said that many hands make light work.

Whilst our Politicians will not accept this probably until it is too late to avert further harm, UK self sufficiency in food production, as well as the majority of the key things or basics that we are going to need, is not only now strategically key to our future. This is how world events and the UKs circumstances will soon dictate that they MUST be.

We cannot wait for the politicians to change their minds, or it wont just be the cost of living crisis, but shortages of basic foods that make British People hungry too.

Our existing politicians will always exhibit loyalty to the very system that has broken the back of British Farming for no other reasons than greed, profit and control. The existing Public Policies on Farming, Fisheries and Food have certainly never been for the purposes of benefiting UK Industries or British consumers – no matter the lies and the lies to cover up those lies that we have been continually told.

Please can we all wake up before its too late and there is nothing left to work with. We need a revolution in farming and we need it to happen now.

It will not come from the top and must run from the grassroots up. Farmers must be at the middle of local food supply – the way it should always have been.

The need for a collaborative approach to the UK Farming and Food Security Problem
Is the Collapse of UK Farming and Food Security now inevitable?
The threat to UK Farming, Our Food Security and Food Production: Either deliberate intent or outright stupidity is destroying our own ability to feed and support British People
What is Food Security?
The real implications of the UKs Food Strategy 2025
FOOD FROM FARMS GUARANTEED | Full Text
Who controls Our Food controls Our Future (Full Text)
The role of British Farmers has been neglected 141222 PDF_Vers1_6Oct25Download