It’s not necessary to go far in British politics - which includes the newspapers, of course, where minds are changed - to find the nation’s 30,000 professional farmers holding out the begging bowl. The National Farmers Union has been known to tell us that we’ll all starve to death if we don’t hand over a few billion £ real quick.
The claim is tosh, of course it’s tosh, but it’s politically effective tosh. Fortunately we’ve now an actual test of this tosh.
Sure, it’s emotionally appealing to an island nation to insist that if we don’t grow some important portion of our food here at home then we’ll just get starved out. Hey, the Krauts tried it a couple of times too so there we are. Hand over the cash to the yokels.
The correct reaction is still that they can bugger off back to their ovine girlfriends (caprine’s still a bit too racy for rural).
We can appeal to logic perhaps. Blights and bad weather do indeed kill off crops. That makes food from one specific area pretty short. Those areas can be fairly large too. So, one aspect of food security is probably to gain our food from more than one geographic - or likely to be blight affected - area. That would seem to militate against dependence upon one geographic area - it’s the same statement in fact.
So, err, why would we want to have local food only? Sure, do whatever you want, you’re an adult and all that. But as a strategic move depending for all our food on one rainy island off NW Europe would be a bad idea.
And, you know what, we used to do that too? Landlords (of farmland) used to have great political power in Britain. So much so that foreign wheat could not be imported unless prices were at nosebleed levels. This kept up the price of wheat, kept up the rent on wheat growing land and crushed the incomes of the working man. We then abolished all that - that’s what that stuff in the GCSE about the Corn Law is - and British food started its now near two century long decline in price to that working man. Sure, the owners of the farmland got fucked. In fact, that was the destruction of the grand aristocratic fortunes. That £7,000 a year that Mr Darcy got (if I’ve the right Austen heartthrob) might well be only £7,000 today, in the money of two centuries later. But, you know, we’ve already said we like screwing the landlords.
It’s also true that it’s only after free trade - and proper internal free trade too - were we able to banish famine from the land. The last of those were really very late - 1850s, 1860s, in Cumbria, Northumberland. Actual drop down dead starvation before the railways got there. Local crops failed, there was no transport system available to ship in the necessary quantities, sorry kiddies.
And, of course, slightly earlier we’ve that warning system of a population dependent upon home production. The potato blight did not make for a happy experience in Ireland even as the same potato crop failure happened right across Europe.
So, yes, we think we’d like food sources from a number of different weather systems and potential plant plague areas. You know, thanks?
Which is the opposite of spending fortunes to make sure that we grow lots of our food right here, isn’t it? So, bugger the farmers then.
But logic and history, even economics - we know those three have no chance in politics. We’d not have the monstrous politics we do if those three were involved. Can we use any other story, example, prejudice? Sure we can:
Farmers warn of first year without harvest since Second World War
Wot? No harvest?
So, meat will get significantly cheaper as farmers slaughter flocks that simply cannot be supported in the absence of fodder. No, really, not just fall, crater. Once that’s all eaten up then food prices will rise inexorably until we’ll be lucky if a diamond can buy a slice of bread, right?
Unprecedented flooding and wettest 18 months on record mean crop yields will be significantly down, with risk of food shortages
Oh, OK, just down, with shortages?
The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board has predicted that wheat yields will be down 15 per cent, winter barley down 22 per cent and oilseed rape down 28 per cent – the biggest drop since the 1980s.
Ah. We’re not even going to notice, are we? Because we have a sensible food supply system. One that collects from just about every geographical area on the planet. One that’s not dependent upon local food for local people, one that will continue to feed us even though this year will have no domestic harvest.
Oh, well, that’s cool then, we’ve solved that problem. This is the first time in what, 10,000 years - since the invention of agriculture - that we people who eat food really don’t have to give a shit what the local weather is. Ain’t that an advance in civilisation - even if we English will, of course, continue talking about the weather (hint, from Georges Mikes, we’re the only people who have weather, everyone else has a climate) - that whatever it is we’re not going to starve?
It also gives us our line to feed to the whingeing farmers - we’ve settled your hash matey, we’ve got steamships now. Off w’ye, bugger off. No, no cash.
So, super. Mmm, yes, please, another rasher, ‘n egg and that fried bread looks good. Weather’s bad is it? Terrible, terrible. But we’ve the steamship now.
Ah, economic arguments in favour of free trade devolve down to security or resilience arguments?
Where's Jim?
Anyway, I have to admit that I do find it amusing that the efficiency justifications for, say, Just-In-Time manufacturing, subject to models and frameworks for accounting and finance, get blown out of the water by the security argument.
That said, if faced by lower food prices resulting from greater supply, then farmers (aka the NFU) should shift to higher margin products.
https://winegb.co.uk/who-we-are/industry-stats/
Ah. Are these people members of the NFU?
Of course, there's this sort of stuff going on;
https://deframedia.blog.gov.uk/2022/06/16/sussex-wine-to-receive-protected-status/
https://www.gov.uk/protected-food-drink-names/east-kent-goldings