The British government should be stockpiling food, according to a leading expert on food policy, as it is not prepared for climate shocks or wars that could cause the population to starve.
Prof Tim Lang of City St George’s, University of London said the UK produced far less food than it needed to feed itself, and as a small island that relied on a few large companies to feed its giant population, it was particularly vulnerable to shocks.
Was on a radio show with Lang once. His ability to be wrong in service of gaining publicity for Tim Lang is unmatched. The Spud of food policy.
Lang’s report for the National Preparedness Commission, published last year, found that the UK’s food system is extremely vulnerable to attack due to its concentration with a few large companies.
It found that the 12,284 supermarkets around the UK are “fed” by just 131 distribution centres.
These were a “sitting duck” for drone or cyber-attacks by malign states, he said: “The nine big retailers account for 94.5% of all retail food. That’s nine companies, using just 131 distribution centres. In drone war, that’s a sitting duck.”
See?
And in Lang’s mind the locations of the government stockpiles would somehow be immune from drone or cyber-attack? I would certainly trust Aldi to have better cyber security than most parts of HM government.
This self sufficiency lark was all part of Cold War paranoia, a lesson learnt from the last big shooting match. The population is a lot more diverse than 80 years ago and rationing might be a tad tricky on many of our more modern citizens.
Indeed, it is rarely actual dearth that is the problem, rather the distribution of goods. This was the problem that Germany failed to solve in both world wars. Britain is small enough to obviate this pissue.
If it is possible to fly roses to the UK from Kenya. I reckon Canadian grain should make it across the Atlantic in boats, even if chased by drones.
Otto, have you coined a new word for an issue that is just too stupid to worry about?
Yes, handing out the bacon and lard rations s going to be fun.
Didn’t some Labour MP, obviously an expert on food production, after the Lady from Complaint’s IHT assault on farmers, explain to us that the UK doesn’t need farmers? Perhaps he’ll be headhunted by Ed to join the Energy Security team…
Are distribution centres particularly vulnerable to attack?
As far as I know, they’re just giant warehouses with racking and people moving stuff around on pallets with FLTs etc.
Hardly the most vulnerable thing.
Sure, a missile or drone might kill a few people and put a hole in the roof, but that’s relatively quickly patched and they can carry on.
Factories and refineries etc have bottlenecks of equipment that will bring the whole line to a standstill and may not be repairable for a long long time.
When farmers blockade the distribution centres (as they have been for weeks, largely unreported) it doesn’t take long for shelves to empty. But the system adapts so the produce finds another way in a day or two. Invisible hand at work. Nobody outside the process needs to tell them what to do.
I went to see Dominic Frisby’s show the other night ( at Lincoln’s ‘university’, but no young people showed up!). He has a long song/poem about how a ppineapple got to his local supermarket and he could buy it for £1.25. With all the things that had to happen, all the chain of things which had to be used. Refrigeration, ships, trucks, farms. At every step someone makes a profit and the pineapple gets to London SE4 for £1.25. Markets will sort irt all out, pundits need not worry.
ORRRR, it’s not a problem of not enough food, just too many people?
Sounds like a retelling of I, Pencil.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that if it gets the basic message across that markets work and central planning doesn’t in complicated systems.
It’s not really complexity. It’s more motivation. Mr Pineapple Grower cares a lot about making money. If he doesn’t sort out transport, his pineapples rot. If the ship sinks on the way there, he’s going to quickly think about what to do with thousands of pineapples. Maybe he finds another boat. OK, has to pay some more as it’s short notice, but he still gets a bit of money.
if you don’t own the pineapples, how much do you care?
Like trains are far more empty than coaches are. Coach companies will just lower the price to try and fill them. Make £6 for a seat instead of £15. Better than £0. But that takes effort. If you see nothing of that £6, why bother?
Yarp ..
That’s nine companies, using just 131 distribution centres. In drone war, that’s a sitting duck.”
131 distribution centres (large warehouses full of non flammable products) across a massive island off the NW coast of Europe isn’t a sitting duck for drones. They might as well be aimed at the stars.
You’d need to get several hundred drones across a sea and past UK and NW European radars without them just being harmlessly EWed into the ground or shot down with proximity fuzed cannon shell.
Then they’d need to have enough explosive nastiness to do serious damage to large warehouses. So very large drones, or a huge swarm – either reduces the likelihood an adversary can succeed. Shaheds would just annoy us. You’re unlikely to still have remote control of the drones as they approach targets on the UK, so you have to rely on preprogrammed coordinates and easily spoofable GPS/GLONASS or a poor man’s DSMAC running on a smartphone (yet to be demonstrated, but AI chips will allow that type of edge compute).
We’re not short of lorry drivers and distribution centres, the Royal Mail alone employs a reserve army of men who could help move food around the country if required.
So no, no, no, trying to take down Britain this way won’t work at all. If it conceivably could work, you’d think they might try it in Ukraine but they don’t.
Drones aren’t some kind of magical unstoppable future technology, the types Iran and Russia are firing at their neighbours are considerably weaker, slower and easier to shoot down than the good old Nazi V-1 with its pulsejet.
Also I am astounded in the brain that another supposed professor thinks the solution to centralisation is another big centralised government expense. The government shouldn’t be stockpiling so much as a lentil – that’s what families are for.
<i>non flammable products</i>
baked beans
Only after processing through a digestive tract!
Ah, here’s an idea; why don’t we try out all these stupid government-controlled food proposals on vegan food first? Makes sense test it out on a small portion of the market, and most vegans are also socialists who should approve of things being government-run.
Then we can eat beef burgers while watching vegans panicking because their government food supplies aren’t supplying.
“large warehouses full of non flammable products”
Most food actually burns pretty well. It’s why we eat it after all, producing energy for the body requires oxidation which is another word for it.
Especially preserved food. Much of preservation is removing water, which makes the remainder burn more easily.
The containers for the food (e.g. cans or glass) may make it more difficult of course.
However, this doesn’t change the fact that the scenario where they smuggle a bunch of drones in to burn the warehouses and cause Britain to starve as a result is stupid and silly. For all the reasons you mentioned.
This is a final destination centre i.e. replaces the supermarket. I am sure they are vulnerable to all sorts of things war could bring up. but jesus i’m pretty sure all that automation and centralisation makes us more wealthy.
https://youtu.be/ssZ_8cqfBlE
Oh Tim, please
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans
First of all, cui bono? Why does someone want to go to war with Britain? OK, there was Adolf, but that was because we declared war first and were trying to blockade the Baltic. Battle of Fishguard, which was purely diversionary. Spanish Armada was about overthrowing Elizabeth to stop us interfering in the Spanish Netherlands. No-one has cared much about taking British land since 1066, because it’s shit land. Go back to the Romans they didn’t care about anywhere north of York.
Secondly, a distribution centre is mostly a warehouse. Even if someone managed to get decent size Bayraktar-size drones with explosives into the country, and launch over 100 attacks in a night, it would take a few days to have something reasonably good in place. People could live on emptying their freezers and cupboards for the few days it would take.
“The UK is one of the least food self-sufficient countries in Europe. The Netherlands, for example, which is densely populated, is at 80%, and Spain is at 75%.”
It’s not about population density, it’s latitude and geography. Roughly speaking, the places you can grow food in England are the old 18th century Province of Canterbury. The Province of York was about industrial non-conformism. Can’t make much money growing food up there, so do something else. Roughly speaking, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and below are where you can grow food. North of that it’s basically pigs and cows. And Northern point of the Netherlands is roughly the same latitude as Nottingham.
Southern England could probably get closer to that, but there’s another factor in this which is location. The Netherlands doesn’t have a sea border, so it exports lots of food to the rest of the EU. If you want to sell tomatoes to Hamburg, it makes sense to do it from the Netherlands rather than Sussex.
We have all that land only fit for pigs? Well, how about banning all meat except pork?
Despite all that we could still be self-sufficient in food but it doesn’t make sense, with the opportunity cost of doing that when our economy is geared to use those tasty imports.
The Netherlands doesn’t have a sea border? Oh, I see! It was obliterated by all those dykes for reclamation.
The Netherland does have a lot of dykes. Of both kinds.
What about fairies?
What I mean is that to trade with the rest of Europe is mostly by land, but to get our food to Europe requires a sea crossing.
Dykes for reclamation? Is that a new left-wing political party that I’ve not heard of?
Cui bono brings to mind the old joke about the IRA buying a thousand septic tanks.
Not quite correct. There are plenty of food crops produced in the north, whether that is Cheshire potatoes, Yorkshire wheat & barley or Scottish strawberries & raspberries. But yes, more livestock.
“The Province of York was about industrial non-conformism. Can’t make much money growing food up there, so do something else.”
Nonsense. The Vale of York is some very productive arable land.
Have you heard of the North Sea?
Don’t worry, thanks to Mad Ed we’ll run out of the means to cook food long before we run out of actual food…
No doubt Lang supports the Greens or Labour Party that are both in favour of unlimited migration. Cognitive dissonance is almost baked in with these people.
Perhaps he thinks you should adopt cannibalism??
Well it never did the Maori any harm. Or at least the eaters rather than the eatees.
It seems to have left some nasty marks on their chins, though.
All this handwringing about imaginary foreign forces (and even more imaginary “climate shocks”), when we have a million fifth columnists in situ and some of them in Parliament.
Who are these foreign enemies we must fear? Iran – having its arse handed to it; Russia – bogged down in the fourth year of a two day war; the EU – very much a threat but not a military one and finally China. Why on earth would China bother invading, when it has a UK government which does exactly what it wants and a huge network of suborned grifters?
In a way we’ve discovered the answer to the great question “How many traitors will we have now that the flow of Moscow gold will presumably stop?” The answer appears to be “A number determined by the flow of Peking gold”.
Why would China bother invading anyway? A country thousands of miles away that has not particularly good land, in the post-Haber era. They’re far more likely to go after Thailand or Indonesia if they want resources.
Or Oz for that matter.
Is he saying that sitting ducks are not edible?
“Let them eat Anas,”
Yup, a National Food Service run by the government is just what we need!
We wouldn’t need a war to starve the population…
It would have been magnificent during Covid.
You forgot the “/sarc” tag… Or at least I hope you did! 🙂
so to solve this problem:
If 9 companies and 131 distribution centres is too concentrated to be safe, I’m not quite sure how relying on a single government agency instead improves matters.
Commie talk. They want to take control of UK food supply. All their stated reasons are juvenile. But sufficient to make people think they actually care. They don’t.
Yeah, it is quite the joke that nine companies isn’t granular enough, so they should be replaced with ONE government.
This is zactly like the government’s BESS solution to weather dependent power generation. The government stockpile of food means you starve in 4 weeks, instead of 3. But, again, commies don’t care if you starve.
It’s probably less evil masterplan and more a consequence of the complete, B-Ark uselessness of the lanyard class. The “national preparedness commission” sounds like a sinecure for twats who enjoy the sound of their own braying.
Like our recent “strategic defence review”, written by the mongoloid George Robertson, some dopey cow academic, and one of our boss eyed confident bluffer staff officers. The purpose of a strategic defence review isn’t to improve our strategic defence, it’s to create work for people who’ve never had a real job in their lives.
These are not serious people. The only thing they’re serious about is consuming taxpayer money.
So, “food expert” Tim Lang.
I wonder how many hectares he’s harvested, how many tractors he has driven, and how many cows he owns.
Want to guess the answer is none?
But he’s a “food expert”. Right.
I think the purpose of a strategic defence review is to trick adversaries into thinking you have a strategic defense.
Trick your own citizens, too.
Sun Tzu called. He said, “Keep you plans to youself, stupid!”
At the start of COVID the food industry was something like 70% retail and 30% wholesale in to restaurants, cafe’s fast food and the like. (May have been 60/40)
There were cries from the usual suspects that we would starve because the two channels were incompatible because of packaging regulations and product size (not many families could get through a huge tin of beans before they went off) and distribution was all wrong (delivering to lots of Prets rather than one big supermarket for example).
It took a few days for the food industry to rewire itself and nothing more was heard from the usual suspects.
I feel confident that left alone they will deal with the problem outlined here.
I feel confident that left alone they will deal with the problem outlined here.
My point is that government takeover is to PREVENT that. Insuring people have food is not their intent.
Most of the usual suspects have never worked outside of academia, government or cartels like law. They have no idea how fast the rest of the world can do things if it’s urgent. And it’s not about pulling all-nighters, but figuring out solutions that do the job quickly.
Yes, the toilet paper industry took a bit longer to retool. Or possibly there was rather more in the distribution pipeline.
(1) Stock up on prunes.
(2) Do not store your tins of baked beans in the attic – they’ll go rusty. Under the bed might be a good spot. Put them on trays and they’ll be easy-access.
tinplate doesn’t go rusty unless you scratch it
scores of years after Scott and his tean died explorers found the cache of food that they could not reach due to blizzard and proved that the tinned food was still edible (someone ate the contents of one tin).
Yep. Expiration dates on canned goods are government mandated nonsense. As long as the can stays intact, the food CAN’T go bad.
Don’t stick cans of beans under your bed, if they are the sort that have the peel back lids. I had some like that in the back of my cupboard, and one day I fancied beans on toast and discovered an opened can, will mouldy bits left in the bottom ‘Why on earth did I put a half empty bean can back in the cupboard?’ I asked myself. Then I realised – the can wasn’t put back opened, it had been full but air had got in and it had gone bad and exploded. There were congealed bits of baked bean sauce all over the back of the cupboard……
Don’t I recall that clown of a New York mayor saying he’d set up government food shops? Let’s see how that works out, shall we?
The idea is still alive:
https://www.supermarketnews.com/grocery-trends-data/readers-react-nyc-mayor-s-70m-request-for-city-run-grocery-stores-is-a-wasted-effort
So it’s another 70 million (so far) to the people who brought him votes.
Tammany Hall never died.
We are an island nation. Didn’t we once have a fishing industry? Maybe reinstating that might help a little with food security.
I think there might now be a dearth of people under 60 prepared to take on the rigours of deep sea fishing. A bit like reopening the mines: even if it were technically possible and financially feasible, who would want to do the work?
Bastiat addressed all of this in the 1840s in Who Feeds Paris?