EMPTY SHELVES - THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG?

FOUR MEALS FROM ANARCHY?

MI5’s maxim is that society is “four meals away from anarchy.” The saying is based on the premise that it would only take a handful of missed meals before civilised British society became… uncivilised. It’s the rule the security agency uses to assess the level of any threat to the food supply system - a threat, such as a cyberattack, strikes, natural disasters - or a pandemic.

There is evidence to suggest a breakdown of order could be caused by the first stomach-rumblings of civilians who are unable to access food, but, according to The Times, “more likely by panic.” This statement will ring true for those of us who traversed the dystopian wasteland of empty shelves at the beginning of lockdown, feeling - for the first time in most of our lives - insecure about our food supply.

Thankfully, within weeks normality was restored - the issue was supply, not shortage, according to John Perry, managing director of supply chain logistics consultancy SCALA, who said there was “in nearly all cases stock in the system somewhere.” Once suppliers worked out what was happening it took only a few weeks to catch up with the unprecedented accumulation in demand.

"I suspect the shortages were the tip of an iceberg"

But the empty shelves left nagging doubts about how secure our food system really is. Professor Ian Boyd, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) from 2012-2019, thinks we may have got lucky this time, but that a deeper crisis could have led to much bigger shortages. He said: “I suspect we were quite close to not having the flows of food that we needed… I think that the shortages that existed were simply the tip of an iceberg.”

According to Boyd, global food security is heading into increasingly rocky territory, with risks including future pandemics, climate-related shocks, and geopolitical security. He said “there’s a big list… and when you actually scenario-plan through all of those, the first thing that tends to fall over is the food system.” He worries that the stability of our food system remains untested, which is a risk when you’re dealing with a dynamic network, because if it is less stable than we think, “it could fail quite quickly, and quite suddenly, if it’s given that significant external shock.”

A recent report on resilience in food systems by Prof Tim Benton, who is research director for emerging risks at London think tank Chatham House, says zoonotic diseases like Covid-19 (arising from wild animals) will become increasingly common with climate and environmental change, on top of rising incidences of extreme events which will undermine the stability of agricultural yields, and the ability to transport them around the world.

In the shorter term, ask any ecologist, logistics expert or food security strategist what poses the biggest risk to the food system and the answer is always the same: Brexit.

But who is responsible for food security? Benton thinks the government need to take more action: “People want assurance that if something else went wrong: Brexit, a different climate shock or whatever, the food system will be able to cope.” Meanwhile, according to Boyd the narrative playing out within government is that “the market deals with all of that, and the market would not allow the food system to fall over.”

"It's going to take us a decade to get out of this."

For CEO of food redistribution charity UK Harvest Yvonne Thompson, the “four meals from anarchy” quip is already obsolete: “I actually think we’re kind of beyond that now. Because some of the families we’re working with at the moment, have no meals - nothing.” This shows the importance of acknowledging that food insecurity doesn’t end at smoothed-over supply chains and restocked shelves; Covid-19 has hugely increased food poverty, albeit less visibly - the Trussell Trust reported an 89% rise in foodbank use in April - and Thompson says the full impact is yet to be felt: “it’s going to take us a decade to get out of this.”

Professor Simon Potts, a specialist in sustainable agriculture and food security for the Global Food Security’s UK programme, thinks whether we’re exactly four meals away from anarchy is “moot". What’s important, he says, is that it’s “a really good way of conceptualising the risk we’re at… whether it’s overplayed or underplayed I don’t think it really matters,” he said, “it kind of makes us think as a society actually we are quite vulnerable.”

WHEN DEMAND OUTSTRIPS SUPPLY : EMPTY SHELVES AND JUST-IN-TIME LOGISTICS

What actually happened?

So if there wasn’t any actual shortage of food, what happened in mid-March to cause the system to fail, leaving empty shelves and anxious customers?

Managing director of logistics firm SCALA, John Perry, said the sharp spike we saw in sales can mostly be put down to what he called “customer cautiousness,” rather than a concerted effort to stockpile. According to Perry, “no-one individually thinks they’re stockpiling, but what happens is it’s just an accumulation of everyone going ‘oh I better just make sure, I’ll take one extra pack” which leads to a massive increase in demand, which is further exacerbated by reports of shortages creating an illusion of scarcity.

Indeed, Data from 100,000 UK shoppers in mid-March, interrogated by market analysis firm Kantar Worldpanel, found that only 3% of the population engaged in full-blown panic buying. The remaining increase in food sales over the previous month – an extra £1bn in the first three weeks of March – could be put down to consumers adding just a few extra items each.

Leigh Sparks, Professor of Retail Studies at the University of Stirling, said the closure of restaurants and cafes also had a huge impact on sales. “There were 503 million extra meals that had to be prepared in the home that would’ve been eaten out, per week,” he said, “Which is a remarkably huge figure.”

And how did suppliers react?

Perry explained that stores only hold a couple of days worth of stock, relying on distribution centres (who hold a couple of weeks worth) to supply them within 24 hours, which in turn are supplied by the manufacturers - so the whole system relies on the links between these points, “whether it’s people in the warehouse picking the extra demand, or whether it’s vehicles to move it.”

He said suppliers “reacted really well” to the increase in demand, in part by rationalising the range of products on offer - stocking fewer core products led to reduced consumer choice but improved the efficiency of processing and transportation.

How resilient is just-in-time?

"The just-in-time system sorted itself out in this instance"

As Perry points out, “the just-in-time system sorted itself out in this instance.” But is it time we considered moving away just-in-time logistics, if we want to ensure our supply system can withstand future shocks?

Sparks thinks we should hesitate to build a system based on such “extreme factors” as we saw in March and April. He said just-in-time ultimately gives consumers a better price and a better product flow, and there’s a trade-off to consider between the risk of another big shock to the food system, versus the cost of storing huge amounts of stock in case of emergencies.

"Efficiency and low-cost come at a cost"

However, risk expert Tim Benton warned that “efficiency and low-cost come at a cost to fragility, and given the uncertainty increasingly facing the world, prioritising resilience a bit more seems wise.”

Perry thinks the bigger worry lies beyond our domestic supply chains. “We are heavily, heavily reliant on imports in terms of feeding the nation,” he said, adding, “we take the attitude that we’re a rich country and we can buy food from other nations quite easily, but if the pandemic had stopped food crossing borders then we’d have had a massive problem.”

Fraser Jones, a dairy farmer in Powys, thinks localising domestic supply networks would make the system more resilient, as well as improving farmers' livelihoods by reducing the monopoly of big companies over the supply chain. He said supply chain issues at the beginning of lockdown left farmers “literally tipping milk down the drain” in the time it took for the produce to be redirected from hospitality to retailers to meet the change in demand.

So whose responsibility is it?

Perry says the government “have left it to the market, the major retailers, the food manufacturers,” to sort out the food supply chain during the pandemic, but as Sparks points out, “that’s not to say you might not get an outcome that’s reasonable.” He believes big businesses would see it as a responsibility to their shareholders to find solutions in order to minimise disruption to their source of saleable product, “but I don’t think it’s altruistic, I think it’s motivated by the money.”

LASHINGS OF LAISSEZ FAIRE: THE POLITICS OF FOOD SECURITY

In July, the government published part one of a National Food Strategy - the first major review of our food system in 75 years - led by Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of Leon Restaurants and the Sustainable Restaurant Association.

The strategy focused on a need to address the “worst cracks” the pandemic has revealed in the British food system, recommending short-term actionable policies to combat food insecurity, including extending free school meals and holiday hunger schemes for children from all households on universal credit, as well as calling for an overhaul of the entire system in the longer term, to prioritise diversity and the environment.

The Report stated in no uncertain terms that “food insecurity undermines any serious prospect of improving social inequality,” and said “one of the miserable legacies of COVID-19 is likely to be a dramatic increase in unemployment and poverty, and therefore hunger.” It recommends the government “move quickly to shore up the diets of the most deprived children.”

Luke Pollard, Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, described the report as a “wake up call” for the parts of government who don’t understand the gravity of the challenge. However, Pollard added, “for all that good work that he has done – unless we see action from it, all it does is create a new report that can gather dust in a government department somewhere - that doesn’t feed anyone.”

Pollard is worried that the government don’t have a plan at all to address food security, but view it as “a commercial issue, a privatised issue… it’s for supermarkets to set prices, it’s for competition to drive lower prices, and it’s for families to haul themselves out of difficulty.”

A spokesperson for the department for environmental, food and rural affairs (DEFRA) said the UK has a “high degree” of food security, built on producing over half of the food we eat in the UK (55%), and sourcing the rest from a “highly resilient” global food supply chain. They added that the UK has “a food industry that is well versed in dealing with scenarios that can impact food supply.”

The spokesperson for DEFRA outlined action the government have taken to address food security during Covid-19, including a hardship fund for farmers, a £3.25 million fund for food redistribution organisations, food parcel deliveries and local support systems for shielding people to ensure they received basic groceries, and relaxing competition laws for retailers so they can keep shelves stocked.

But Pollard lamented a “lack of urgency” from the government, calling them “far too slow to intervene in empty shelves, panic-buying, and the supply chain problems behind many of those issues,” and too slow to cope with people being unable to afford food and access emergency food.

He said after ten years of austerity the conservatives seem “quite comfortable with the idea of a kind of Victorian, charitable approach where people donate food to those who don’t have food,” which he said locks people into cycles of poverty without providing sustainable routes out.

A report for Emerald Open Research, on inequalities in the UK food system exposed by Covid-19, found a 26-fold increase on the number of food parcels distributed by the Trussell Trust’s network of food banks from 2010 to 2019. It concluded: “The salience of food inequalities prior to COVID-19 and, especially, the widespread use of food banks, can largely be attributed to the £30 billion of cuts in working-age social security initiated by the Coalition government in 2010.”

Pollard said: “I would much prefer ministers to cut and paste labour’s policies today, to address and help these poor kids, rather than sit on their hands and hope that somehow Tescos, Sainsburys shareholders will see fit to spend their dividend on government social policy.”

“If the only output we see from this is a reliance on charitable giving, and a determination to push responsibility away towards the supermarkets, then ministers will be failing in their job to ensure that our nation is fed.”

"You have no voice, you have no opinion, you have no control - you’re expected to just constantly beg"

“YOU’RE EXPECTED TO JUST CONSTANTLY BEG” - ON THE FRONT LINE OF FOOD INSECURITY

Milly Graham is a single mum from Leeds, who found herself suddenly “at the mercy” of food aid in January 2019, after a change in circumstances forced her to access universal credit.

Universal credit waiting times mean it can take weeks to receive your first payment. “I basically had no money at all for the first few weeks,” said Milly. Shocked at how quickly her life had been turned upside down, she went into survival mode: “I do disclose this publicly, that in the first two weeks I stole food - I stole food to feed my son.”

"I stole food to feed my son"

Shortly after this a support worker at her son’s school took Milly to her first food bank. “I walked in, and I just remember thinking how quickly I’d shifted from having my own money, being able to manage my own budget, being quite resilient as a lone parent in a low-income household… then suddenly I’m sat in the foodbank, with no food in my cupboards for weeks ahead.”

Milly said she’d always been able to make her budget go “a long way food-wise,” taking pride in the fact that her 16-yr-old son always had a healthy, nutritious, home-cooked meal, but that trying to make meals out of spaghetti hoops and mystery tins of meat in the foodbank parcels was impossible.

Increasingly destitute, Milly became totally reliant on various forms of food aid for most of 2019 - it’s not a period she looks back on fondly. She recalled the intrusive questioning she endured in order to qualify for her first food parcel; an occasion when a volunteer asked her to “pray to god” for her food parcel; and one week during the school summer holidays when she got to the foodbank to find it had “been emptied - they literally had no donations left,” and she was turned away empty-handed.

By March 2019, Milly was “in a bad way,” and her mental health was at breaking point - after a traumatic experience at a job centre, during which she was forced to disclose her background of domestic violence and sexual assault, Milly hit rock bottom - she went home and attempted suicide.

Milly was referred to a psychiatric unit, where she spent the next two months - emerging to find herself immediately back in the grips of food poverty. “The day I left the psych unit I had to go to a food bank,” she said, “and looking back I don’t even know how I did it.”

"These people - they're there because of austerity. They're there because of tory policy that have failed them. They're there because they have not enough income to pay bills and buy food"

After that Milly said she “got into the swing of things,” using twitter to connect with other foodbank users, which formed a vital support network for her. She used the social media platform to try to break down the stigma around foodbank use, challenging stereotypes that people who go to foodbanks are homeless, abuse substances, or are alcoholics, and condemning the tabloid media’s indulgence in “poverty porn.” She said “these people - they’re there because of austerity. They’re there because of tory policies that have failed them. They’re there because they have not enough income to pay bills and buy food. They’re not there because they’re ‘needy’ or ‘vulnerable.’”

Milly said it was interesting to see how conversations about food aid changed in March. She said the narrative went from food bank users being “long-term-unemployed, lazy people,” to all of a sudden we have a “deserving poor,” who are the furloughed families, and the service industry workers who were reliant on food aid as they waited for their universal credit to be processed.

"You're never free from that reality of how your circumstances can change so quickly"

Milly’s circumstances only changed in January 2020, after a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) assessment recognised her disability and increased her allowance for mental health support. Your dependence on benefits leaves you feeling totally powerless, said Milly. “You’re never free from that reality of how your circumstances can change so quickly - when you open up your statement you think, what am I getting this month…” Milly said her goal is to be back in work next year, but, “until then, if they look at my assessment and decide they think I’m fit for work now… I’ll be back at foodbanks next month.”

"After five more years of tory rule, we'll be using foodbanks like supermarkets"

Milly thinks the “victorian” charity model of foodbanks has become too normalised as the crutch of the welfare state. She said the food bank is meant to exist for emergency use, but she had to go “to get my weekly shop,” adding, “after five more years of tory rule, we’ll be using foodbanks like supermarkets.”

Milly thinks this dependency on food banks is inevitable as long as all surplus food continues to be allocated to charities, with no scope for individuals to collect surplus directly from supermarkets. “You have no voice, you have no opinion, you have no control - you’re expected to just constantly beg, and explain your circumstances as to why you should have some free food,” she said. “You are so reliant on charity, you will put up with whatever you have to, to get your food parcel home.”

“A CONSTANT CHALLENGE” - THE CHARITIES TACKLING FOOD INSECURITY

The voluntary and community sector has played a key role in many food access responses during Covid-19 - much of this happened at a local, grassroots level with existing organisations adapting their services and new groups forming to support people in need.

Andrew Forsey is the National Director of Feeding Britain - an organisation set up 5 years ago on the back of the all-party parliamentary enquiry into hunger in the United Kingdom, as both a charity and a research base, aiming to “bridge the gap” between policy and on-the-ground projects like supermarkets and food clubs.

Forsey described the “constant challenge” of trying to keep hunger and food security high on the public and political agenda. He said: “every day there’s that bittersweet feeling of seeing the effectiveness of our work in meeting need in our communities, balanced against how appalled I feel at the extent and severity of need that sadly makes these projects so essential.”

Forsey said too many families don’t have the basic income needed to both pay the bills and put food on the table - he said research done by Feeding Britain found that it was the households “most vulnerable to hunger, who were also the most likely to be budgeting carefully, planning their weeks food most carefully… basically living as frugally and as sensibly as they could – but just finding that their income was insufficient.”

CEO of UK Harvest Yvonne Thompson described how food banks struggle to scratch the surface of the exponentially growing levels of food poverty, which she said have been exacerbated by Covid-19. She said UK Harvest runs a holiday hunger programme, which was started to provide school holiday meals for children from low-income families - “we’re now feeding the whole family,” said Thompson, “it’s bad.”

Rene Meijer works for Foodworks Sheffield, an organisation with the mission of creating a fair and sustainable food system for the city. Foodworks sources and redistributes surplus food from supermarkets through its warehouse shop, as well as running two cafes.

Meijer thinks it’s completely wrong that huge volumes of food go to landfill in the UK every day while people are going hungry.

He said Foodworks receives roughly a ton of food into the warehouse 7 days a week, which equates to 4 or 500 tons per year - around 2% of the food which is wasted in Sheffield, “and at the same time we exist in a world where one in six families don’t always have enough to eat on a given day,” he said. “That existing in the same city is ridiculous – that can’t be right.”

But Meijer said Foodworks is against the idea that “food waste and poverty are two problems that neatly solve each other and that nothing has to change,” and it’s unethical “to just say poor people can solve our environmental problem by eating our waste.”

Instead, Meijer thinks a top-down approach of prioritising food policy reform could be the “single biggest and easiest thing we could do” to meet our carbon targets and improve social justice at the same time.

He suggested “moving the ethical goalposts” within the food system as one way for the government to improve food policy. He said “companies generally are not going to take steps that they feel are going to put them at a competitive disadvantage, and so what you need is a level playing field whereby certain ethical decisions are the same for everyone.”

_{BELOW: A VOLUNTEER SORTS PRODUCE AT ONE OF FEEDING BRITAIN'S COMMUNITY SHOPS, AND INSIDE A COMMUNITY SHOP}

"It’s about the land being able to sustainably produce into the long term, not just next year, but still having that capacity to produce, for children and for children’s children…”

100% SELF SUFFICIENCY - “A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY” OR “COMPLETE FICTION”?

A green recovery from Covid-19 could provide a “golden opportunity” to place food security at the centre of our food system, according to the National Farmers Union (NFU).

NFU President Minette Batters said food security “should be placed at the heart of wider government policies” in order to drive towards UK self-sufficiency, and called for an annual reporting system to “ensure we do not allow our domestic food production to diminish.”

The comments came on 21st August, the notional date in the calendar that would see the UK run out of food if it relied solely on UK produce, according to the NFU, who put the nation’s self-sufficiency at 64%, a figure which they said has “remained stagnant for a number of years.”

Sam Newington, an organic beef farmer in East Sussex, agrees we should be driving towards 100% self-sufficiency in UK food production: “The only sensible way of a sustainable system is to be looking at the whole of the UK and seeing how the UK can feed the UK.”

Newington thinks we should take a leaf out of New Zealand’s book and remove the government farming subsidy - which he said skews the system and creates a false economy - where he said they have been forced into more efficient farming, with increased production and better profits for farmers.

In his recent report on resilience in food systems, risk expert Tim Benton said self sufficiency “is not the same as resilience,” pointing out that there is “an academic question” to be answered about the optimal balance of local vs global risks, and the degree to which we should enhance our local supplies of food.

Ex chief scientific advisor for DEFRA Ian Boyd went further, describing the narrative that higher food security comes from producing 100% of our own food “complete fiction.”

Boyd said the UK should be aiming to produce enough food that “if international markets fail it would be able to sustain itself nutritionally,” but said the economic and sustainability arguments for balancing crops which grow efficiently on UK soil with good global trade are “very robust.”

FARMING FOR LONG-TERM RESILIENCE

Sam Newington believes soil degradation is the biggest long-term threat to UK food security, but said there’s a growing number of farmers, like himself, adopting more regenerative practices to mitigate this - largely due to consumer pressure.

He said: “The main difference is we spend more time observing what happens in nature, and see how we can apply that and work with that rather than against it” - changes Newington has made include planting more trees, encouraging hedgerows, and allowing more rest period for the ground between moving cattle.

Lisa Norton, an ecologist at the centre for Ecology and Hydrology, works closely with farmers like Newington, studying interdisciplinary approaches to land management and resilience.

Norton said some of our arable areas are “at real risk of being unable to sustain fertility,” due to soil degradation and dangerously low carbon levels in the soil.

She suspects this is something that “can be reversed quite quickly” once farmers appreciate the importance of ecological systems within agriculture - she said “as an ecologist, we believe that complexity makes you more secure,” and encouraging a variety of species in and about the soil leads to robust, sustainable agricultural systems.

Norton believes we should be aiming to keep land producing for many years to come rather than to “get as much as we possibly can out of this acre of land.” She said, “for me it’s about the land being able to sustainably produce into the long term, not just next year, but still having that capacity to produce, for children and for children’s children…”

Charlotte Hollins manages Fordhall organic farm in Shropshire, which has been run by her family since 1929. Her father turned Fordhall organic shortly after the Second World War, after “seeing for himself the detrimental effect that chemical fertiliser was having on the land.”

Hollins thinks a return to small-size family farms instead of big agri-business would hugely improve the long-term resilience of UK agriculture, describing how family-owned farms approach the land differently “because they’re actually looking to nurture the land to pass on to their children.”

_{BELOW: SAM NEWINGTON ON HIS FARM, PHOTO CREDIT: INDIE FARMER BELOW THAT: PIGS AT FORDHALL FARM}

“A MENU OF OPTIONS” - HOW WOULD THE EXPERTS TACKLE FOOD INSECURITY?

With a growing number of British people relying on charities for their next meal, an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape threatening global supply chains, and the looming threat of climate change threatening dire consequences for global agricultural systems, it’s clear a complex problem will require complex solutions. Here are the experts with what MP Luke Pollard described as “a menu of options” to improve our food system.

Prof Ian Boyd says: modernise the system by putting new technologies to better use, and take some personal responsibility.

Ian Boyd highlighted the need for effective use of new farming technologies as part of a total overhaul of the food system. “It’s about transitioning our whole thought process about how we produce food, from one which frankly hasn’t really changed much for well over 100 years,” he said, to one whereby we’re “really using new technology properly, and not in a very small and incremental way to farming systems that are really probably very outdated.”

Boyd also said there is a level of self-responsibility individuals can take in ensuring their own food security, but argued the government must “take the lead” on providing sensible guidance for individuals. “If you’re like me and you’ve worked on food security for a long time you actually have a store of food in your house,” said Boyd, suggesting that maintaining a “two or three week” stock of basic foods can avoid an over-reliance on just-in-time culture.

Tim Benton: diversify our system to minimise the impact of potential risks.

Tim Benton, however, thinks food security is impossible to combat as individuals, “other than for the very well off who can keep a well-stocked larder and grow their own food or buy premium artisanal produce.” He said government intervention is vital, pointing out that the best thing you can do as an individual is to let politicians know food security matters to you.

Benton said food security on a national level is about “diversity, modularity and de-centralisation.” He said we should “never aim for self-sufficiency,” but “it is clear we should do more to boost local production as a hedge against supply chain disruption,” particularly when it comes to growing more of our own fresh fruit and veg.

Angelina Sanderson Bellamy leads the T-Grains project within the Global Food Security programme, exploring what happens when you build relationships back into the food system. She says: diversify our means of procurement.

Angelina Sanderson Bellamy recommends both diversifying and localising our means of procurement - she said demand for local veg box schemes already soared in lockdown, indicating that Covid has forced people to stop relying on “the same eight companies for 85% of our purchasing,” which, “isn’t a sustainable or resilient model.” She described how government funding of community-based food initiatives through local authorities could help redistribute the power-balance and tackle different local food needs: “the system needs restructuring so that a few powerful actors aren’t benefiting disproportionately from the way it’s structured.”

Jess Davies leads Rurban Revolution, an interdisciplinary team looking at how urban agriculture impacts lifestyles. She says: “rurbanise” our cities to change our relationship with food and improve the resilience of the supply chain.

Davies believes accessible urban agriculture, from grassroots community growing projects through to high-tech urban agriculture programmes, can create the “ecosystem of change” needed to solve multiple problems in our food system, by shortening supply chains, increasing our overall food production, improving urban ecosystems, and enhancing our quality of life. She described how urban food growing has been a natural resilience response in other parts of the world, such as Cuba, where government-encouraged urban growing provides a substantial amount of the country’s food since their international trade was cut.

Simon Potts says: we need genuine co-development with farmers to develop agricultural solutions which ensure our long-term food security, and the government must use more evidence-led solutions.

Potts said genuine co-development is needed between farmers and academics, rather than “crazy ecological solutions” pushed upon farmers by “meddling boffins.” Potts works with champion farmers to advocate farming for “functional biodiversity” - in other words, stabilising agricultural systems by managing habitats, reducing pesticide and fertiliser use, and employing natural enemies of pests to support pollinators and soil fertility.

He said “farmers want to increase production and profit, but it’s also about stability and predictability rather than the ‘boom and bust’ caused by unstable systems,” explaining how they are happy to sacrifice a bit in actual production level - tons per hectare - if they can guarantee 90% of the same yield year after year. He said that once you get the economics right, “farmer’s are like, I don’t care if it’s biodiversity or magic, I’m gonna do it.”

Potts urges the government to take the initiative over the coming months to integrate agriculture and the environment into a cohesive set of policies. He said: “experts and scientists and so on will provide some recommendations and suggestions, but ultimately these things are always a political decision.”