The government’s response to farmers’ warnings on food security is staggeringly complacent

We’ve already had egg rationing in supermarkets. What next? Is the government hoping the cost of living crisis will reduce demand through people skipping meals, asks James Moore

The National Farmers’ Union has warned that Britain’s food security is under threat (PA)

The most troubling thing about the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) warning that Britain risks “sleepwalking into a food crisis” was not the statement itself or even the press conference where it warned of the risk of (more) empty supermarket shelves. It was the government’s response to it.

“Our high degree of food security is built on supply from diverse sources; strong domestic production as well as imports through stable trade routes,” a spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said.

In other words: move along, nothing to see here. But, tell you what, we’ll trot out a minister to go and chat to egg producers. You may recall that supermarkets recently limited the number of those that customers were allowed to buy. It’s a strange sort of “high degree of food security” when grocers start imposing rationing on staples.

When I read the government’s statement, I was at first struck by a feeling of deja vu. That line, it is strikingly similar to what we used to hear when people raised issues of energy security before it became fashionable to talk about it.

To whit: “Chill out. We’re good”. The government has everything in place and, look, have you seen how much better prepared we are than, er, Andorra? Grab a special adviser for me and get them to look at what Andorra does for energy would you?

Of course, Vladimir Putin then decided to invade Ukraine and the world changed. Things look very different today, with prices having gone through the roof while ministers, civil servants and the National Grid wargame blackout scenarios all the while trying to offer reassurances that sound increasingly hollow. Suddenly everyone’s talking about energy security. Hell, we might even see the (stupid) ban on onshore wind farms lifted.

You would think, given what went on during the Covid-19 pandemic, with all those pictures of empty shelves, and people panic buying before medical staff could get to their local supermarkets after 16-hour shifts, that the lights would have been switched on somewhere in government. But the attitude seems to be that it was the pandemic. Unprecedented circumstances and all that. A one-off.

But was it? A one-off, that is? The NFU states that there are 7,000 fewer registered agricultural companies before the pandemic, input costs, obviously including energy, have surged to eye-popping levels and the trade deals the government has been loudly touting as the super-duper alternatives to being members of the European single market look set to hurt rather than help Britain’s battered agricultural sector.

The NFU has spoken to my colleague, Adam Forrest, about the issues around Brexit – which includes the problem of worker shortages (Brexit related). The red tape that leads to snarl-ups at Britain’s ports, meanwhile, complicates everything (and adds to the cost of getting in vital commodities such as fertiliser).

I know people would like the debate about Brexit to just go away. I’d love to be able to stop writing about it. Trouble is, it’s there wherever you look. Just when you think it’s safe to go back into the water, it emerges like Steven Spielberg’s shark to bite down on something else.

The British government is full of people who bought into and disseminated Brexit falsehoods about it turbo-charging the British economy. Their response to the problems it is creating is inevitably to resort to gaslighting. Trouble is, gaslighting doesn’t get fruit picked so it can find its way to the grocers or the market.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but no less than Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, recently stated that homegrown food production is integral to our national security. She’s right, about that.

The government has made a big fuss about increasing defence spending because of Russia and national security and so on. Yet when people raise the issue of food security – which is causing problems right now – they are airily dismissed because, look at our “robust supply chains” and blah blah blah.

So here we are with (much) more expensive food, record inflation and, in the case of eggs, lower availability. What are they going to ration next? Pretty please with sugar on top, let it be windy ministerial statements. Wait, can you still get sugar?

I’d be half wondering if the ministers weren’t cynically relying on the cost of living crisis to fix the problem by reducing demand through people skipping meals, except it doesn’t even seem to recognise that there is a problem to be fixed.

That may soon change.