Western Daily Press (Saturday)
I hope you will still buy local when this is over
With a return to something like normal life now in sight, Bridgwater and West Somerset Conservative MP Ian LiddellGrainger tells Defra Secretary George Eustice he detects what might be a silver lining for farmers
DEAR George, Like many people I have been considerably bucked by the announcement that non-essential shops will be able to reopen their doors – all being well that is – in a couple of weeks’ time.
Equally, I am only too well aware of the fact that many such businesses will not be trading again such has been the devastating effect of lockdown. And I would wholeheartedly agree with those who are telling us the high street will be a very different place as a result of this ghastly pandemic.
But while I don’t seek to belittle the impact of such cases on proprietors, their families and their customers there are, I believe, one or two positives emerging. Such as the fact that so many consumers have cottoned on to the idea of shopping and sourcing food as locally as possible and have turned during lockdown to the army of independent food retailers, farm shops and direct sellers who have been working to ensure that there has still been something on the table three times a day.
Consumers got a nasty shock when they started seeing empty supermarket shelves which it had been impossible to restock partly because of the complexity and fragility of long supply chains, partly because of the decision taken some years back for individual branches not to hold huge stocks themselves but to rely on just-in-time deliveries from a few centralised depots – and the suppliers, of course.
More than once in the past I have heard a farmer suggest that the way the food chain was operating in this country left us just three days away from anarchy and I think we had a pretty unpleasant foretaste of what that might entail when the panic buying set in.
Thousands of consumers, on the other hand, have come to understand the benefits of short supply chains, and of dealing with local, independent retailers and suppliers. The word has got around. Some of those retailers I have spoken to have been almost overwhelmed by the volumes they have been doing.
I would like to think that that level of patronage will continue once we reach the other side of this crisis – as a survey released only this week suggests will be the case. I hope consumers will remember who kept them supplied when the supermarkets couldn’t and how good it was to discover that fresh, homegrown produce and meat from properly – and carefully raised – animals all taste infinitely better than the inferior imports they have been used to being fobbed off with.
More than that, I hope the switch to that kind of shopping will become a strong trend which will lead not merely to those in the independent sector justly benefiting but to the sector itself expanding because at the end of the day the shorter the supply chain, the fewer middlemen’s hands dip into the cash, the more there is for the farmer.
And who is going to argue with that being anything but a highly desirable outcome?
Yours ever,
Ian