How prepared is the UK for food shortages?

An MP has warned that “food security is national security” as concerns grow about the risk of food shortages in the UK.

Sharing photos of empty supermarket shelves in his Shetland constituency on social media, Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael said they were “your handy cut-out-and-keep guide to food security and why it matters”. He told his followers that “the next time someone tells you that we can rely on imports for our food needs, show them these pictures”.

Why has the alarm been raised?

“Food policy across much of the world is changing. But not in Britain,” said The Guardian. As the “prices of essentials rise”, this approach “may be a costly mistake”, because the “climate emergency, geopolitical tensions and the fragility of just-in-time supply chains” are putting huge pressure on food supplies in the UK.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Elsewhere, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Germany are “rebuilding stocks dismantled after the cold war”, Egypt and Bangladesh are “boosting similar programmes”, while Brazil and Indonesia are "also expanding their reserves”. But the UK has “no substantial public food reserves”.

In a letter to The Guardian, farmer Richard Harvey warned that we could face “economic and political breakdown and anarchy”.

What measures are in place? 

Britain’s current strategy “rests almost entirely on global markets and private intentions”, said The Guardian. This approach, “shaped by decades of liberalised trade”, means that even if there’s a war, official advice “focuses on households stockpiling essentials”, because in Britain, food security is about “prices, not scarcity of supply”.

Things might change, however. Last summer, the government launched a new food strategy, aiming to build “improved resilience of the supply chain” with “reduced impact of shocks and chronic risks on access to healthy and sustainable food”. It wants to make “nutritious, locally grown” British food “more accessible and affordable for all”.

What more could be done?

But the national food strategy is “only the first step [in] tackling this problem”, said the Economics Observatory. “Fortunately, there are several useful ways to calm the coming storm”, including modelling food systems on computers or deploying “serious games” – a policy tool that “tests potential interventions that increase the resilience of the food system”.

Public buffer stocks can serve as shock absorbers, steadying prices and ensuring physical supply, argued a 2024 paper published in the journal Industrial and Corporate Change. Countries without buffers can become vulnerable to inflation, so food reserves “make sense”, said The Guardian.

Stocks can be “accumulated when prices are low” and released when “inflation spikes” or supply is limited. The short-term losses "should be understood as the price of resilience”, like flood defences.