Country Life's columnist Agromenes urges us to take a cold, hard look at the way we grow and consume food.
‘The rain it raineth every day’ — Feste’s song rang in my ears as, yet again, only the 4x4s could get through from home to the village and we had to reroute our London visitors away from the flooded main road. Worse still was the sight of water pouring off the fields and the lakes forming across them. The grassland was already waterlogged and a neighbour’s horses were gathered uncomfortably close together on the one piece of his pasture that wasn’t entirely under water. All over the county, the tree-planting campaign spearheaded by volunteers from the Woodland Trust looks doomed, the saplings under water in places where flooding has previously never occurred.
Harvesting has been well-nigh impossible on the waterlogged fields and it’s no wonder that potato prices have gone up more than 20% over the past month. Organic farmers are having to re-drill fertility crops that have been washed out of the ground. They’ll lose much of a grazing season because the crop won’t be ready for the sheep until later than expected. Farmers of all kinds look askance at the continuing downpours that make the spring sowing, timed for the end of February, increasingly unlikely.
“British food processors are discounting their UK-sourced produce, as they believe our farmers will be hard put to maintain supplies”
The soil is too wet to get the machinery onto it and the weather forecast doesn’t cheer. Already, British food processors are discounting their UK-sourced produce, as they believe our farmers will be hard put to maintain supplies if the weather continues to be so wet.
The trouble is that weather-related concerns make alternative sources questionable. Worldwide, February will be the warmest on record and that’s after the warmest October, November, December and January. It’s a global phenomenon with temperatures of nearly 30˚C in Spain and parts of the US simply not having winter at all. This has at last rung alarm bells in Government. Rishi Sunak’s measures last week to enhance food security are only the tentative beginning of policies to confront the reality that food choices will be increasingly limited even in comparatively rich countries. Food-price inflation will be a constant issue and the spectre of shortage is becoming a political reality. If that is true for Britain, it is even more true for the poorer nations, where hunger will be an increasing problem and will bring instability and growing migration pressure.
“In the 1940s, food consumed roughly 33% of the average income; today it is 12%”
Farmers, faced with all this, are not being paid enough for the food they produce. All over Europe—on the mainland and here in Britain—we are seeing protests that, whatever the proximate reason, are about the fact that all governments have had cheap food policies that make farming ever more unprofitable. Yet ministers are urging farmers to produce more here at home, at the same time as looking after the soil, protecting biodiversity, improving the environment and providing more public access.
We ask all this, but we are not prepared to pay the real cost of food production, through the market or subsidy. If we want these ‘public goods’, we will have to pay for them and that does not only mean cash to conserve and enhance our precious natural environment. It means paying a proper price for the food we eat. We have grown used to putting every other demand before that basic need. In the 1940s, food consumed roughly 33% of the average income; today it is 12%. Before the Second World War, food security was not an issue; today, it is. The equation is inescapable. Our rich societies will simply have to re-gear and pay the proper price for what is essential to life.
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