Even if we could grow all our own food, doing so would only make us poorer

Covid-19 is pushing us to protectionism – irrationally but irresistibly. Several Conservative MPs have told me, over the past two weeks, that the current crisis proves the need for self-sufficiency. One, until now a reliable free-marketeer, said: “Surely even you, Daniel, can now see what’s wrong with importing 40 per cent of what we eat.”

Actually, no. If anything, the current crisis shows the opposite. Half the world’s economy is subject to restrictive measures, but global supply chains have continued to function normally. The only shortages, at least around me, have been in British produce. Even the organic farm shop, which used to source everything from local growers, is suddenly offering imported onions, potatoes and carrots.

The idea that growing your own food makes you more secure sounds plausible, but turns out to be nonsense. If you try to produce everything yourself, you are vulnerable to a local shock: a bad harvest, a blight or some other interruption. But the chances of the entire world experiencing such a thing at the same moment are remote.

The coronavirus is no exception. Not every country has been as badly hit as Britain. Our soft fruit harvest, for example, is supposed begin this month but, if movement restrictions remain in place, our growers will struggle to find pickers and packers.

That is not true everywhere, though, so there will still be supplies.

Even at the best of times, this is a counter-intuitive and difficult argument to make. A perceived threat, especially an epidemic, flicks switches in our brains, making us warier and more introverted. One of my neighbours, for example, has taken to complaining about “outsiders” using our well-stocked village shop. “And where do you suppose the food in it comes from?” I ask her.

If you think about it, national food self-sufficiency makes no more sense than village food self-sufficiency. Or, indeed, national combine harvester self-sufficiency (we import those, too). But the desire to hoard food appeals to our hunter-gatherer DNA in a way that the desire to hoard combine harvesters doesn’t.

Mercantilists see opportunity in the current crisis. They want to ensure that Britain emerges with an even more protected food sector than it had as an EU member. Some Conservative MPs want to amend an Agriculture Bill currently before the Commons so as to require all imported food to meet UK domestic legislation – not just on food safety, which is reasonable enough, but on issues such as animal welfare, something neither we nor any serious country currently does, and something that not even the EU is proposing in the current talks.

Such amendments would create precisely the vulnerability that their authors warn against, pushing up prices and reducing the security that comes from being able to call on a wide variety of suppliers. They would also make impossible the trade deals we hope to strike with the United States, Australia, Japan and others.

These trade deals ought to boost, not just our economy in general, but our farmers in particular. For example, our cheese exporters face a 17 per cent tariff in America; our beef exporters a 27 per cent tariff. British lamb is arguably the best around, but is currently barred from the US – the world’s second largest importer.

Behind these amendments lies the bizarre assumption that Britain’s farmers are too feeble to succeed on their own. In reality, we have one of the most innovative agri-food sectors on the planet. We produce, among other things, the world’s most efficient wheat and the world’s hottest chilli. We sell wine to France, tapas to Spain, curry to India and (yes, really) vodka to Russia.

Restricting trade in food is about the worst imaginable response to the coronavirus. It would make everyone poorer: our farmers, our consumers and our trading partners. Yet I have a horrible feeling that we are drifting that way.