This week has seen a slew of new reports and papers published on a subject that we’ve been warning about for the past few years: Food Security. It’s a growing chorus of voices from across the industry and beyond, all warning that the UK is slowly but surely weakening its resilience and ability to feed its inhabitants should a serious disruption to the food supply chain occur in the future due to war, climate or geopolitical factors beyond the UK’s control.

It paints a picture of a UK where a combination of government policy and fierce consumer price wars is now actively discouraging farmers from producing food by making it economically un-viable and making us more reliant on imports.

As we’re considering government policy (including the current system of subsidies and incentives many of which are driving farmers away from food production), it’s instructive to look back at the original aims of the Common Agricultural Policy back in 1962. Article 39’s objectives were to increase agricultural productivity; achieve a fair standard of living for the agricultural community; stabilise markets; have security of supply and have reasonable prices for consumers. Somewhere along the line, the UK has struggled to reconcile all these objectives.

We’d like to draw your attention to just some of that chorus of voices warning about UK food security so you can judge for yourself, and see that most of the calls for change ultimately end up at the government’s door because the legislative and regulatory environment is what’s driving commercial decisions.

This week, Minette Batters delivered her Farming Profitability Review to Defra which, according to a speech she gave contains 57 recommendations for a radical re-think of how our food system works. We hope to see the full report within the next couple of weeks and suspect it might chime with many of the issues we’ve been raising.

Also out in the last few days was a report from the All Party Parliamentary Group on Science and Technology in Agriculture which warns of a potential 32% decline in domestic food production by 2050 and calls for a target of 75% self-sufficiency in food production.

McCain this week added their inaugural UK Farmdex Report to the body of evidence showing a looming crisis in farming. It suggests that 51% of farmers are considering leaving the industry.

Closer to home, we’ve had Inside Track (a group of concerned but anonymous food industry insiders) publish thier latest memo: An Insiders’ Guide to Meat and Dairy, which sets out their perspective on where the challenges and risks lie for the industry going forward.

We’ll have more to say on this in the coming weeks as there’s a lot of complexity to account for in our food supply chain and the forces that act upon it.