Britain teetering on brink of a major crisis in the supply of food

THE phrase “a perfect storm” is an over-used cliche. But sometimes cliches are justified. And when bad situations all come at once the impact can be catastrophic.

We are, thankfully, not yet at crisis point in the food and farming sector. But today’s timely warning from the National Farmers’ Union urging the Government to urgently intervene in sorting labour shortages that threaten to leave supermarket shelves woefully understocked must be heeded.

Crying wolf is never advisable. But the scale of the shortfall in the jobs market, particularly at a number of important points along the food chain, has been becoming ever clearer for several months. Add in the acute difficulties caused by soaring gas prices leading to a shortage of CO2 – vital for many food production processes – and you have the makings of a true crisis in very short order.

It is likely, as UK politicians have been saying for several days now, that a Government bailout and action by industry will fairly quickly solve the problems for the gas industry and get CO2 production started once again.

But the bigger problem, which is affecting a number of sectors, not just food and farming, has been growing month by month since even before the pandemic. It is now in desperate need of a solution.

Britain inside the EU became overdependent on European nationals who took full advantage of the free labour market to come to Britain and work on our farms and in food processing jobs. They were very welcome – but they lured everyone into a false sense of security which suggested the vegetables would always be picked, the fruit and flowers collected, the raw materials processed and deliveries would keep rolling up to the supermarket door.

Once Britain voted to leave the EU the drain of foreign workers began and a trickle has turned into a flood. Half-hearted efforts to persuade Britons to take on the work have failed and now shortages across the Labour market means no one needs to do the hard graft of harvesting our food or working in processing plants if they don’t want to.

There is the money to pay foreign workers to come back to Britain and take up the slack. But rules around overseas workers fail, currently, to allow them in.

The NFU is right today to demand a change and press for the introduction of a Covid Recovery Visa which migrant workers could use to allow them to come to Britain and fill those essential roles. As Britain prepares to host COP26 and is lecturing other nations on cutting waste and reducing the impact of global warming, so food waste here is growing for want to people to pick, process and pack it.

The Government’s response to a letter from 12 food and drink trade bodies worried about supplies, looks dangerously like complacency. To suggest that the UK has a “highly resilient food supply chain” is to put too much faith in how things used to be.

The facts suggest that “resilience” is under greater pressure than ever before. Ministers need to act.