Brexit imperils the health of a nation whose food supply was already under threat from climate change and shifting global markets. Here, the Observer’s restaurant critic outlines how we might avert disaster

A few weeks ago, I was approached by an official at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She told me the secretary of state, Michael Gove, was holding a round table discussion for ‘innovative thinkers’ on 25 July to give him ‘food for thought in the early days of the new job’. He had asked for me to be invited. I have explained on my blog that I have a low opinion of Michael Gove for a number of reasons. So I chose not to go.

But God knows Gove needs advice, because our whole food supply chain has been imperilled by the Brexit vote. I have therefore decided to put my thoughts into a written submission. Gove can read the report, which has been emailed to his office. And so can you, if you like. I have chosen not to receive any payment for this article, which is, I hope, a worthwhile contribution to a vital debate.

Agricultural decline



During the early 1990s Britain’s self-sufficiency in food reached its highest in modern times. We were producing just over 70% of all the food we were eating. Since then the story has been one only of decline. We now produce 60%, but because of exports only about 50% of the food we eat is actually produced here. There are a number of reasons for this, but key among them is the dominance of the supermarkets.

In the late 80s and early 90s a series of changes to the planning laws allowed for the building of large out-of-town hypermarkets on greenfield sites, which in turn encouraged the boom in the supermarket sector. That created the food retail landscape we have today in which fewer than a dozen companies control more than 90% of the food retail market.

The supermarkets used that dominance to drive prices ever lower, and with drastic results. This is no knee-jerk negative response to the concept of supermarkets. They have their positives. They have kept pace with social change, shortening the length of time it takes people to get the shopping done, thus enabling the two-job households now required to keep pace with the cost of living. They have been a prime driver of food culture in the UK, providing a ready source of the ingredients consumers have been introduced to via the media. They have enabled huge economies of scale.

However, they have also imperilled whole sectors of agriculture, including the dairy and pig business. Enormous numbers of food producers have either gone bust or simply left the business because it was no longer viable. We are no longer in a position to feed ourselves adequately. And all of this is against a swiftly changing global situation.

The global perspective

The huge expansion of a vibrant middle class in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere has challenged the conventional wisdom on the flow of produce around the world. For many years the British supermarkets had free range over the produce from the southern hemisphere. However, many of those producers have increasingly chosen to trade with China and India.

In 2000, 14% of the world’s middle classes were in Asia; by 2050 that will be 68%. We no longer have unfettered access to the global larder. Given the fall in our self-sufficiency, this means we are now at risk from global shocks, including exceptional weather events (which, courtesy of climate change, are becoming less exceptional), disease, war and disturbances in the commodity markets.

So now the UK sits with dwindling self-sufficiency, in a stormy world in which food has become one of the great economic battlegrounds. Added to that is the appalling folly of Brexit, forced through by a cabal of ideologues happy to trot out falsehoods about the sunny uplands of economic joy that leaving the EU would bring. Instead it has resulted in a devaluation of the pound, making imports more expensive and the exporting of our food more attractive.

If, as many fear, a bad deal is done for Britain, resulting in huge tariffs and penalties on trade, food price inflation is going to be in double digits for years to come. That’s if we can get hold of food at all. The people who will suffer the most, of course, are those who already have the least. For them the buying of food will use up a massive proportion of their expendable income.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest After Brexit, Britain will be forced to import more meat produced at a much lower animal welfare standard. Photograph: Fred Tanneau/AFP/Getty

Improving productivity and environmental impact

There is an imperative for Britain to become more self-sufficient, not for reasons of petty nationalism or to fulfil some agrarian fantasy of localism but because, without it, in the current political climate, we risk not being able to keep ourselves fed. There are a number of levers that can be pulled.

Prices British consumers have become too used to food being sold too cheaply. In an age of austerity, when many are struggling, it is a tricky argument to make but the fact remains. We need an agriculture sector in a position to invest in its base to help improve our productivity and therefore our self-sufficiency. The 10% of income (down from 20% in 1970) that we spend on food does not enable that. Many may find this unpalatable, but the fact is this: unless we improve our self-sufficiency, we will be at the complete mercies of those international markets. Unless we pay a little more now, we risk paying vastly more later.

Subsidies The EU farming subsidy regime is extremely flawed. The same view is held all over Europe, and the common agricultural policy was always going to be reformed, regardless of whether we stayed or left. It is a mystery to me why farmers voted in such number to leave Europe. I assume they believed the false promise that the money based on acreage would just keep rolling in after Brexit. I also assume they hoped it would free them from environmental protection legislation. Certainly, both parts of the regime are flawed.

Environmental protection We pay farmers not according to outcomes but based on what they have done. It doesn’t matter if buffer areas around farms haven’t encouraged greater biodiversity; it just matters that farmers have created buffers. A new set of environmental protections are needed in which farmers are paid on outcomes: cleaner water, better soil quality, higher biodiversity. They are custodians of our landscape; more of them need to be encouraged to follow best practice and behave as such. There could be a series of front-loaded grants to pay for work needed to produce the outcome, but what is required is the outcome not the activity.

Included in this should be an encouragement away from mono-cultures and into as diverse a range of agricultural activity as the landscape will allow. Too many of our calories come from too few a set of crops.

Single farm payment This is the greatest blight on British farming. It has enabled inefficient farms to stagger on and, as a result, blocked a new generation of entrepreneurial farmers from coming into the sector. There is anecdotal evidence that single farm payments based simply on acreage have encouraged the rise of the “slipper farmer”, which is to say farmers who put their feet up, slippers on, and simply do not farm but collect the subsidy.

The single farm payment was designed for a postwar Europe that wanted to secure a continuous and stable supply of food as a way to stave off conflict. It was there to even out the risk faced by farming, be it through disease, weather issues or price fluctuations.

As risk in agriculture is the issue, resources should be directed at managing that through the sort of state-backed insurance scheme used in North America. Farmers should get the support when they need it, rather than in some chronic manner that embeds poor practises and inefficiencies.

Carbon footprinting In food policy circles the oft-repeated mantra is the need for “sustainable intensification”: the ability to produce more food while having a smaller impact on the environment. It’s an exceedingly tricky bit of calculus. Gains made in one corner can lead to losses elsewhere. Large-scale livestock farms can, for example, have a much smaller carbon footprint per kilo yield than bespoke organic farms, but the impact on the water table can be dire.

So carbon footprinting is a blunt tool, but it still has much to recommend it (when combined with environmental subsidy based on outcome, as per above). Anecdotally, producers have told me that the process of engaging with it, and therefore of trying to enable a smaller carbon footprint, has led to greater efficiencies across the food chain. Examining one element of environmental cost leads to an engagement with all of it.

The expertise behind carbon footprinting is now widespread. The government should introduce a wide and easily accessible set of grants for producers, both big and small, wanting to engage with the process.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sourcing food can help support the local economy, but doesn’t always shrink the carbon footprint as much as people think. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Sustainability and the consumer

As ever the agricultural sector will, in the end, be led by the consumer. And for the consumer what matters is knowledge. It is my firm belief that, over time, some form of sustainability rating should be introduced on food. We expect to see energy ratings on white goods like fridges and washing machines; why not on our food, given that we spend so much more on it?

Such ratings would need to cover two points: the comparative sustainability of a product within its own category, and against others. You need to know which chicken product is the most sustainable AND that chicken is more sustainable than beef.

Producers would be incentivised to get as good a rating for their food as possible; part of that would be a reduction in waste, and that has to be a good thing. Extending sustainability ratings to retailers themselves would again be an encouragement to reduce waste. It need not be mandatory, but those who refuse to participate would be telling their own story when it comes to the environment and their commitment to it.

Localism

Many in the food world, embracing a committed anti-corporatism, will argue for a food policy that encourages localism. There are arguments in favour of sourcing your food from as nearby as possible. In rural areas it is a way of supporting your local economy and your neighbour’s. It also ensures short supply chains. It provides a strong and engaging narrative.

However, do not be fooled by environmental arguments around localism. What matters most when judging the environmental impact of food production is the full life cycle: you need to look at the carbon (and other inputs) not just of the trucks getting produce from field to fork, but in the farm buildings and machinery, the fertilisers and the workforce. It involves a large and complex set of metrics. When you do that the proportion of the carbon footprint caused by transport falls to between 2% and 4%. What matters is not where food is produced but how. The example I always give is of potatoes. In the right soil you will get 20 tons an acre; in the wrong soil you will get 16 tons. So, in the latter, you will need 20% more land or shed loads of carbon inputs to get the same outcome, even if it happens to be closer to you.

(The same arguments extend to both urban farming and “grow your own”. They are interesting educationally. Allotments are good for mental wellbeing and general fitness, but the carbon footprint of the food produced tends to be appalling.)

The supermarkets

Light-touch regulation has, in effect, allowed a set of huge corporations to become custodians of our food supply chain. Scandals like that involving horsemeat suggest it is one to which they are not suited.

In July 2013 I interviewed Philip Clarke, then chief executive of Tesco. He made serious and compelling commitments to openness and to his suppliers, recognising that he was running more than just a business. At the same time, the public was unaware that a criminal investigation was underway into gaping holes left in Tesco’s accounts and the way it dealt with its suppliers. In short, the supermarket sector still has to prove it is up to the job it has been given.

That year a grocery code adjudicator was appointed, but only to police the relationship between a small number of supermarkets and their direct suppliers. However, farmers are often at the mercy of the supermarkets at second or third hand (or more): their produce often becomes the raw ingredients for manufactured products supplied to the supermarkets by one, two or even more links in the chain. And all of those links can be victims of supermarket pressure on price, which pushes down to the farm gate, exacerbating the crisis in British self-sufficiency.

It makes no sense. If we are going to protect farmers from short-termism then the remit of the groceries code adjudicator should be extended to the entire food supply chain: ie whoever farmers sell their produce to and upwards from there − not from the supermarkets down.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Less than a dozen supermarket companies now control more than 90% of the UK’s retail food market. Photograph: Clive Dixon/REX/Shutterstock

Food culture

Even allowing for the horsemeat scandal (which affected the UK food supply chain more than any other), the EU has provided a strong regulatory system that has ensured safer food and higher animal welfare than elsewhere in the world. By leaving the EU the UKwill be forced to open itself up to food production practices far less healthy, palatable or even safe. Likewise, we may end up importing much more meat produced at a much lower welfare standard than we are used to. In short, Brexit risks exposing UK consumers to much lower food standards than we have come to expect.

Access to a labour force from elsewhere, is also a major issue. Industry experts, including Ian Wright of the Food and Drink Federation, estimate we will need somewhere in the region of 500,000 worker permits a year if we are to keep our current food production active. However, there is evidence that increasing suspicion of xenophobia in the UK, encouraged by the toxic rhetoric in support of Brexit, is dissuading migrant workers from coming here. Why come to Britain when you could go to Spain, and be paid in euros, a much stronger currency that is only likely to become increasingly so?

Conclusions

Brexit is implicated in every single aspect of our food supply chain and risks imperilling the very health of the nation.

A few years ago, when discussing food security in the UK, Lord Cameron of Dillington − a farmer and first head of the Countryside Agency − said Britain was just “nine meals from anarchy”. It would take just three days of empty supermarket shelves, just three days of meals missed by hungry children and despairing parents, for the country to descend into massive civil unrest.

When I first heard that statement I regarded it as an interesting and diverting piece of hyperbole. Now it feels to me like a prediction. Of all the things that were said to me when I was researching my recent article on the importance of migrant labour to our food supply chain, the one that stayed with me most came from Ian Wright: “If you can’t feed a country, you haven’t got a country.”

Amen to that.

Jay Rayner’s A Greedy Man In A Hungry World can be ordered at bookshop.theguardian.com or by calling 0330 333 6846