Consumers facing sp shortages as sector i
Our post-Brexit agricultural policy should be built around food self-sufficiency balanced with sustainability, according to Terry Marsden
There is a general and growing consensus among food industry representatives that, with the dire spectre of a hard Brexit looming, the industry faces serious challenges and potential disruptions in a wide range of areas.
This substantiates the conclusions I and my colleagues Tim Lang and Erik Millstone reached in our July report, Food Brexit: Time To Get Real.
As I write, we await the Government’s release of its own reports on the impact and consequences of Brexit – but talking to the industry, we are made clearly aware of the significant challenges and adjustments that will need to be addressed.
For instance, severe labour shortages are beginning to be experienced in the food sector, especially in the food service, hospitality and food processing and producing sectors. Chefs, housekeepers, waiters and vets are moving abroad and up to 80,000 more hospitality workers are needed to fill gaps in the near future.
It is also estimated that there is a growing shortage of 35,000 lorry drivers. Integrated logistical systems upon which we all rely for fresh and chilled packages of food in our cafes, restaurants and bars are becoming more expensive and will become more difficult to deliver post-Brexit.
The European Single Market has allowed consumers to buy cheap, fresh foods, like mushrooms from Ireland and asparagus from Spain and France, and expect full freshness and all-year around supply. These reliable and accessible supply chains will become at best more costly and at worst far less reliable as the food and associated logistics sector struggles with the uncertainties and perishable fragilities of new customs and quality controls at our borders.
The assumptions and expectations consumers make about fresh provision and all-year-round supply will become severely tested. Food shortages and price rises will exacerbate food security, and politicians need to expect growing public concern about these consumer concerns as Brexit unfolds.
If an eventual unilateral reduction in food tariffs and decline in food consumer prices ever occurs after Brexit, as some of its supporters surmise, this will take at least the best part of a decade to deliver and at the same time severely reduce the quality of food standards and safety British consumers have come to expect.
We are now witnessing the emergence of a protracted period of regulatory divergence not only in trade volumes and rules, but potentially in food quality, market and production policy, safety and fraud standards, customs and logistical delivery. These divergences will need careful management – between the Irish borders, between Ireland and the UK, between the UK and mainland Europe and between the UK and the rest of the world.
They will come with significant extra costs to the UK and EU food industry, and the now high levels of supply chain integration which exist between Ireland and the UK and between both and the EU will be severely disrupted. A general “muddling through” approach to this regulatory uncertainty, and the recognised lack of a positive vision on the part of government by many in the food industry, is currently suggesting an approach: “to plan for the worst, and hope for the best”.
Creating a new UK food framework and strategy – an appeal for rationalism, not fatalism
While advocating more domestic UK agri-food self-sufficiency is never going to be all of the answer to these problems, it can be at least be a large part of the answer to some of them.
In our report in July, we argued that the UK Government now needs to take the lead in developing a new policy commitment to a modern, low-impact, health-orientated and internationally sensitive (fair) UK food system, based on the interrelated food security and resilience principles of sufficiency, sustainability, safely, health and equity. This cannot wait until the negotiations are concluded in March 2019; it needs to be developed in parallel to the negotiation and transition process.
The British food industry in all its components needs a co-ordinated and visionary statutory framework within which to operate in order to manage the wider economic and regulatory processes which confront it as Brexit continues to unfold. Government needs to take a proactive and strategic lead in setting and delivering a range of domestic food security and sustainability targets