Is lettuce crisis just the tip of the iceberg?
WHILE recent stories about the courgette crisis and the rationing of lettuce have been used to give us a bit of a laugh, the issue might be a bit of a wake-up call on food security.
For while it seems to be only just too easy to import food from somewhere else in the world if we’re a bit short on the home market – this shows that these supplies might not always be there.
And, at a time when there’s a great deal of political wrangling over what is going to happen to farming after Brexit, it might be worth flagging up some statistics.
In the UK the level of food security – the amount of our food grown in this country – has fallen from 75% in 1991 to 62% today. This has happened mainly as a result of cheaper food imports undercutting what we produce at home – and our growing taste for stuff we can’t grow in this country.
And while the bald figures might not actually mean too much to a lot of people, what they equate to is this: if, for whatever reason, no food could be imported from abroad we’d only be able to produce enough to eat for about eight months of the year before the shelves of the supermarkets were bare.
So it’s worrying that as politicians look at what sort of farm policies we should have after we leave the EU, some people have been suggesting the plug should be pulled on farm support straight away – and that our own farmers should be left to sink or swim under a flood of cheap imports.
But if someone asked me why taxpayers should pay for farm support I’d say to them that it could be looked on as a bit of an insurance policy.
One which guarantees a consistent supply of safe, healthy, nutritious and inexpensive home-grown food which is produced to high animal welfare and environmental standards. One which helps keep the jobs in the more remote parts of the country that keep local villages going.
And one which ensures the countryside and landscapes we know and love are looked after and kept in good repair.
So while we should maybe change how farm support payments are paid out, I doubt if they should be done away with altogether.
If the alternative is relying on a dodgy supply of cheap food, from crammed poultry cages or cattle feedlots abroad, produced to questionable health, welfare and safety standards while our own countryside goes to rack and ruin, I for one wouldn’t see that as much of a saving.