As record-low UK harvest looms, UK must act to protect our food security – Alistair Carmichael

The produce on sale in supermarkets has dramatically improved since the 20th century, but growing food insecurity now poses a real threat (Picture: Leonard Burt/Central Press) | Getty Images

Earlier this week, I came across a social media post plaintively asking whether anything had improved in the UK in the last 40 years. Answer there came: “Quite a lot of things, actually.”

A common theme amongst the replies, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the quality and variety of food we consume. Anyone who was around in 1986 (to say nothing of the 60s or 70s) will attest that there has been a sea change in the food we can access in our supermarkets and on restaurant menus, at almost any price point.

The question, of course, is whether we can continue to take that plethora of quality food for granted, in a summer which risks seeing record-low harvests around the UK. That shock – even as turmoil in international trade rumbles on – should surely be the final wake-up call to our governments to rethink how we protect our food security.

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Farmers face £390m loss

The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank has this week suggested that our harvest of barley, oats and rapeseed could drop to just 19.5 million tonnes this year. That is the worst since records began in 1984 – and could cost farmers as much as £390 million in lost revenue.

You would have to have spent the last few months locked in a fridge to have missed the immediate cause of this crop shortfall: an exceptionally hot and dry summer across the UK. Even parts of Scotland have seen water scarcity – a brutal wake-up call for a country where it is practically a national pastime to joke about our immunity to drought.

The upshot of this is stress to crops, with smaller, lower-quality yields and, almost inevitably, a need to import more to make up the difference. That means higher prices for consumers – with no benefit to our homegrown producers.

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Climate change is not the same as individual weather events, but it is all-too easy to see the impact of global warming here. The long-term response must therefore be to work with international partners to rein in the worst excesses of our warming climate.

However, even with that action taken for granted (and that is no easy assumption), we are still going to need a more robust plan for how we maintain the quality of food supplies to which our country has become accustomed.

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A question that cannot be ignored

To rely solely on international trade is problematic enough when times are good. When old assumptions about open trade come into question – and when our neighbours are just as vulnerable to climate change harming their crops as we are – it is downright dangerous.

What has been lacking in our government’s policy-making is a basic answer to a fundamental question: how do we want our own farmers and food producers to contribute to UK food security? This is a question that can no longer be ignored – and to which the Burnham government must apply its mind sooner rather than later.

We have been fortunate over the past 40 years to see an incredible proliferation in high-quality, diverse food in our country – enabled both by international trade and our homegrown food production. If we want our citizens to have the same abundance in 40 years’ time, then our governments must act now.

Alistair Carmichael is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Orkney and Shetland