Britain’s supermarket shelves have never been so reliant on imports from overseas, it has been revealed. Official figures from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs show the amount of food consumed in Britain that is grown in the country fell to 62% in 2023, the most recent year for which there is data.
This compares with a peak of 78% back in 1984, showing an eroded British self-sufficiency that experts fear is making the country’s food supply increasingly precarious.
A report published this year by the National Preparedness Commission found that “civil food resilience”, a concept meaning the public’s awareness of the risks to food supplies, ability to reduce unnecessary risks and preparedness to act to ensure society is well fed in a crisis, was “not currently adequately seriously by the UK”.
It called for a “new coherent UK food policy”, which would increase domestic production, and for food to be defined as “Critical National Infrastructure” by national authorities.
Tim Lang, the report’s author and professor emeritus of food policy at City, University of London told The Times: “The public is in a complete fantasy world of just thinking Tesco will always deliver.”
He added: “We’re not even self-sufficient in potatoes. We’re importing them from Egypt, for God’s sake, which is drought-stressed. Look at where we get so much of our veg: Murcia, in southeast Spain. It is water-stressed. It is bonkers.”
Lang’s comments came as Marks & Spencer sold potatoes last month from Israel and Egypt as a temporary measure while it waited for new British harvests to arrive.
Tesco sells spring onions from Egypt and Senegal alongside chicken and sweetcorn sandwiches that contain foreign chicken.
To add to the current state of affairs, the US-UK trade deal announced this month will allow America to export 13,000 tonnes of beef into Britain each year, an increase from the current 1,000 tonne amount.
Lang argued Britain does not have a food policy which encourages farmers to grow crops for supermarket shelves.
“The fundamental problem we’ve got in Britain with agriculture and food production is we don’t incentivise farmers to grow food. They’re growing for commodities,” he told The Times.
He fears for the next time a global trade crisis hits, or a blockage halts traffic in the Suez canal.
The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has been warning Brits about the risks of the nation’s food status for some time, with the body’s president saying last year that the country remains at the mercy of global supply chains.
The NFU claimed that if Britain only ate food produced by the “national larder” from the beginning of 2024, supplies would have run empty on August 14.
