Just in Case: 7 steps to narrow the UK civil food resilience gap

Back in February, the National Preparedness Commission published a report on the resilience of the UK’s food system. It is a substantial, detailed piece of work, an Executive Summary plus the main report that runs to 340 pages plus Appendices. The Executive Summary boils down the research to 7 main recommendations for action, while the main report has 11 chapters, grouped in four parts, the last of which - “Recommendations and Conclusions” - proposes eight “Reorientations” necessary to build civil food resilience.  One chapter explores the food security situation in 10 other countries.

The report starts from the position that the UK’s food system is vulnerable, with little thought having been given to a resilience strategy.

Current policy

There is at present no statutory requirement for people to be fed in a crisis.

The official 2022 Government Resilience Framework has “next to no focus” on food. It does have sound principles that could apply usefully to food, including support for a ‘whole of society’ approach and a ‘prevention is better than cure’ ethos.

Out of 89 risks, the 2023 National Risk Register only conceives of one direct food impact: food supply contamination. NRR apparently judged that food risks are not sufficient in scale and range to raise state concerns. Local Resilience Forums created two decades ago have next to no engagement on food matters.

The 2022 Government Food Strategy was light on coming shocks and silent about known risks and fissures within the UK food economy, such as rising food poverty and inequality.

 On 22 May 2024, the morning the recent general election was called, the Deputy Prime Minister suddenly advised the public to store 3 days’ worth of food at home, but no support or further advice was available.

The NPC’s research into 10 other countries reaches the conclusion “Other countries offer different and better directions for civil society and the public than the UK presently does.”

There is a top-down approach that sees food security as a matter of trade and supply only. This ignores the experience of millions of people already finding household food security a real problem – should we not see resilience as protecting ALL the population?

The world has been changing

In recent years, the UK food landscape has changed radically. Diets and tastes have become more varied, and there is an expectation of plentiful, diverse and a-seasonal food. Access to food has become dependent on fewer, larger suppliers and food inequality has if anything become worse. There is no longer an Empire to feed us, nor a powerful navy with capacity to protect long supply routes.

When the UK left the EU in 2016, UK-EU food relations became strained, not least due to trade barriers and delays from the political choice of a ‘hard’ Brexit. Post-EU, the UK still has no coherent food policy – yet nearly a third of its food still comes from Europe.

Risks

The report distinguishes between ‘chronic’ food shocks to society such as obesity and deep inequalities with ill-health as a consequence of already poor diets, on the one hand, and ‘acute’ shocks, exemplified in recent events such as the impact of Russia’s invasion of food-exporting Ukraine, the economic disruption from Covid-19, the ‘unexpected’ trade route disruptions, such as the Black Sea being mined or Houthis attacking ships in the Red Sea. The poor weather reducing UK home harvests – the worst figures since 1983 – does not help. More acute disruptions are anticipated, piling pressure on policymakers to resolve chronic problems.

The interplay of these difficulties makes the current lack of policy attention to civil food resilience more surprising. The Covid pandemic showed how different parts of society could be differentially affected depending on their underlying health.

Confidence that even a rich country such as the UK can maintain supply in all circumstances is weakening. Food sits at an intersection point for the polycrisis of economics, health, environment, geopolitics and societal divisions. It is more than likely that the demand on civil food resilience would take different forms in different circumstances.

 The report identifies an extensive list of threat conditions that could affect UK civil food resilience, including:

• Military aggression – disrupted supply chains, energy outage, cyber-attack;

• Economic - rising prices (including sudden price shocks), over-reliance on a small number of suppliers, breakdown in food logistics;

• Political – rationing, loss of trust in authority, black markets, food riots;

• Health – pandemics and zoonoses, accelerated health inequalities;

• Environmental – flooding, pollinator decline, pollution;

• Social – food waste, disinformation, fake news.

There is also consideration of the potential dynamics of multiple crises, notably consumer mass psychology with the possibility of riots, looting and ad hoc stockpiling. This echoes some of the work on Risk Scenarios that SAMI has previously done for HM Government.

Developing strategy – recommendations and reorientations

The report provides many recommendations for action.

If people are to be well-fed before, during and after crises, the Government must put more effort into preventing food crises and protecting the public. The report strongly advocates that the public needs to be engaged as part of preparation – a “whole of society” approach. The current Just-in-Time approach to food distribution and logistics should be altered towards a Just-in-Case approach, planning for food shocks and the case for civil food resilience.

The report recommends that a special National Risk Register study should be conducted into possible food threats. 

The “Seven Steps” recommended are:

• Learn from other countries:  provide advice to households and communities on stockpiling, co-ordination between different levels of government;

• Assess the public’s mood, perceptions and engagement: manage attitudes to rationing, paying attention to different income groups, with an emphasis on community support;

• Map the community’s food assets – ‘prepare, share, care’: multi-level audits of food resources, encourage responses that move away from extreme individualism (“preppers”) towards socially cohesive collective response;

• Local authorities are key to building civil food resilience;

• Create local Food Resilience Committees to co-ordinate resilience preparation – or add to role of Local Resilience Forums;

• Create and maintain a coherent food policy at UK level;

• Re-set the Government Resilience Framework for food – apply principles of ‘whole of society’, ‘prevention better than cure’ and ‘shared understanding of risk’ for national resilience.

Conclusion

The report convincingly describes the lack of a coherent Government approach to food resilience. The lack of planning for predictable shocks to the system (“acute” issues) and continuing trends (“chronic” issues) is disturbing – but somehow not that surprising.

The second- and third-order effects of shocks need to be explored through Futures Wheels, as runaway consequences seem to be very possible, with potential dystopias easily imagined.

Written by Huw Williams, SAMI Principal

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of SAMI Consulting.

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