Britain should consider a major shift to organic and low-impact farming systems to help correct a national “food resilience void”, says the country’s preeminent food policy expert. 

Professor Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at City University London’s Centre for Food Policy, made the comment during a discussion with Matthew Stoughton-Harris, head of resilience at the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD).

Lang did not pull any punches in the discussion (the first in a new series of IGD podcasts on the theme The Future of Food), asserting that national emergency and resilience planning “just goes silent when it comes to food”. He warns that the country’s major food distribution centres, on which 94.5% of retail food depends, are far too few in number and increasingly vulnerable to the sorts of attacks that are becoming ever more common in an era of hybrid warfare. “Food defence should be part of total defence,” he says.  

Lang believes too much confidence is still being placed in Britain’s current food retail system. The 30-year-old just-in-time model that it’s built around, and remains locked into, has created vulnerabilities because it “got rid of storage, got rid of flexibility and got rid of diversity”. 

“Twenty years ago, I made an off the cuff remark that UK food policy was a case of ‘leave it all to Tesco et al’.  But I don’t see how Tesco et al – or the wider retail industry – can resolve the fertiliser crisis, or climate change impacts.

“Yes, people might say, if I walk into a supermarket I see 30,000 product lines – what’s the problem? But all those products are coming from a very concentrated system that’s easy to knock out.”

Lang wants to see the development of a national food resilience framework, which would in turn would form the basis for a Food Resilience Act. He says current “complacency” over food resilience has its roots in “British exceptionalism” and a historical reliance on imported food, dating back to Empire. He contrasts Britain’s lack of urgency on the issue with other countries in Europe – France, Sweden and Finland among them – who have brought food resilience into their national defence strategies. Lang also wants to see more powers on food resilience planning devolved to the regions and city mayors. 

Companies’ sober analysis 
Lang acknowledges that good work is being done on resilience by companies within organisations like IGD. But he says it exists only in pockets. “I see it in big, thoughtful firms and I see it in at-risk small companies. And I hear very stark and sober analysis coming from all of them, and they’re actively ‘asking what can we do about it?’. I want to see that creativity of thinking everywhere. At the moment we don’t have a framework that allows this serious thinking to go from some board rooms to all board rooms.

“You can subsidise the cost of fertiliser, so pay the higher price.  But you also can start basically weaning people off these inputs and move to organic and other lower impact, lower fossil fuel dependent systems, like regenerative”

Asked about the effects of both the Ukraine crisis and the US-Iran war, particularly shortages and sharply rising costs of fertiliser, Lang said it was “time to think the unthinkable” about a whole range of climate and conflict-based shocks to food production and supply. “As regards fertiliser, we have a short-term issue. So, in six month’s time, ordering fertiliser is going to be paramount. But beyond that, we are left with very limited options. You can subsidise the cost of fertiliser, so pay the higher price.  But you also can start basically weaning people off these inputs and move to organic and other lower impact, lower fossil fuel dependent systems, like regenerative. And we may need to have a very big commitment in going down that route for all of UK land use. 

Time to come off the NPK fertiliser treadmill
“Now that is a huge thing. And government doesn’t want to to say that. It prefers to say, ‘we’ll leave it to farmers to decide what they want do’. But I think that the model of farming ushered in by the 1947 Agricultural Act, which was all about producing more food for Britain, and which locked us into NPK fertilisers, is probably coming to a end. And I think we’ve got to start getting off that fertiliser treadmill. So, in the short term the government will probably have to throw money at the problem. Medium term, I think we’re probably going to have to go down a more low impact, lower input farming route.”

Tim Lang is author of Just in Case: narrowing the UK civil food resilience gap