It shouldn’t take a war for Britain to wake up to the need for food security | Tim Lang

Everyone has a part to play in reducing our reliance on imported foods, but ministers must provide incentives

• Tim Lang is professor emeritus of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London

The British state has form on food security. It ignores it until there’s a crisis – and then it’s forced to do rapidly what could have been done better, if only food had been taken more seriously in the first place. We’re revisiting this truth today as the food system’s oil dependency is revealed by the US-Israel war on Iran. Oil transports the food from farm to fork. It’s turned into the fertilisers that have allowed food production to rise since the second world war. It takes us to the shops (unless we walk or cycle).

This dependency was also revealed when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and when oil hit $100 a barrel in 2008, and in the 1970s oil shock. When the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, called the big food retailers in last week, it showed they were aware of this impact but weren’t prepared for what to do.

Tim Lang is professor emeritus of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London