News that a drop in domestic food production due to the extreme weather in 2018 will eventually raise UK shopping bills by £7.15/month for each household highlights a “critical point” for British food policymakers, according to a leading academic in food policy.

Commenting on a Cebr report, published at the start of this week, Professor Tim Lang of City of London University said: “British food policymakers have to get their head around [the point that] we are gradually producing less in Britain when we should be producing more.”

Consumers are starting to feel the pinch in their pockets of 2018’s cold start and hot dry summer, according to the Centre for Economic and Business Research, with UK farmgate onion prices rising 41%, carrots 80%, lettuce 61%, wheat for bread 20%, strawberries 28% and butter 24% from March to July 2018.

Supply chain

Lang said that British consumers have been ‘cushioned’ from food price volatility by EU membership. “We are going to replace Europe with what? Florida, Australia, China? Is that sensible, sustainable, ecologically good? That’s the politics of food, and removing us from Europe removes us from the webs of supply chain which we currently benefit from,” said Lang.

UK food prices have remained relatively static for the past 14 years: from 2004 to 2016, consumer spend on food and non-alcoholic drinks was between 10-12% of household income, rising to between 14-17% for the 20% of households with the lowest income, according to Defra and the Office of National Statistics.

Professor Geoff Simm of Edinburgh University’s school of agriculture and global food security said that there was “something wrong” with the way that UK consumers value food: “Consumer spending on food and non-alcoholic drink has dropped from about a third of disposable income in the 1950s to about 11% in 2015. Production has become detached from health and environmental externalities and does not automatically mean that the poorest in society have access to the cheapest food – there has been a rise in food banks at the same time.”

“There is a fundamental disconnect between what consumers and all of us are willing to accept about volatility in price, climate and international trade on the one hand and how we behave in supermarkets. Farmers are right in the eye of the storm […] but we still have marketing campaigns which pitch one supermarket against another and people are lured by a low price.”