Can Britain feed itself?

A community market garden in Bridport

Rising world population, switch to Western diets by the affluent and developing countries, increasing climate change impacts causing major crop failures: these are three of the major factors which have driven substantial, real price increases in most foodstuffs in recent years, all pressures which are likely to intensify in future.  If you couple this with Britain’s poor economic and employment situation, you’d think that increasing our food self-sufficiency would be a no-brainer.

As far as I know, there’s not much current debate on this topic, especially in the mainstream.  So I’m pleased to report some useful insights from The Land Magazine, a really useful twice-yearly publication giving insights into farming, planning, and many other land-related issues: I highly recommend subscribing to it: you can see more at www.thelandmagazine.org.uk.

The latest issue has a 5-page article on this topic, with helpful quantitative analyses and references.  This quotes data from DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs), who calculate the percentage of foodstuffs that could be grown in the UK, which actually are.  This ratio has been declining every year since 1988, and reached an all time low of 71.7% in 2009, recovering slightly in 2010 to 74.4%.

Ed Hamer’s article provides two detailed calculations of how Britain could be largely self-sufficient in food production.  The first scenario draws on an earlier article in The Land by Simon Fairlie, called Can Britain Feed Itself, published Winter 2007-8.  Key to Simon’s scenario is a significant change in diet, to a more (but not entirely by any means) vegetarian diet.  In particular, pig and poultry production is taken out, but beef and sheep production actually increases.  Assuming current, conventional farming methods and yield per acre, this scenario shows that we do have the land area to feed a population of 62.3 million people. 

This article also references a useful publication by Vicki Hird, published by The Food and Environment Alliance, London: Double Yield, Jobs and Sustainable Food Production, which covers similar ground, with similar conclusions.

The second scenario takes largely the same diet and production requirements, and explores whether these could be provided by entirely organic methods. The yields, labour requirements, etc come from sources which should be reliable, eg DEFRA and Soil Association Studies.  They show that all this could be produced organically on 16.7 million hectares, which compares to the current agricultural land area in the UK of 18.2 million.  The biggest difference is in the labour requirement: around 330,000 people, compared to around 159,000 currently.  This is a great example of a figure which could be good news or bad, depending how you look at it. 

Given current levels of unemployment, and the hidden costs (pollution, land degradation, etc) of conventional farming, I see this as an exciting possibility.  Yes, it does imply that food prices would be somewhat higher, but they will be anyway given the trend in world prices, not to mention the costs of oil and therefore fertilisers and pesticides.  There are also various creative ways to keep the cost of this additional labour modest.  Quite a lot of the production may come from community market gardens, volunteers, trainees, horticultural therapy and more.

How long will it be until we get an informed debate about these possibilities?