“Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had”

– A Lewis, 1896

Alfred Henry Lewis was an American investigative journalist who had this famous quote published in the New York Journal in 1896. The quote, written over 130 years ago, epitomised how important food is to society.

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Anyone who hasn’t eaten for a day is a different person to someone who has, and anyone who hasn’t eaten for three days is capable of doing anything to feed themselves.

The first world war brought about a food crisis that Europe hadn’t seen before. A depletion in animal numbers across Europe, coupled with a scarcity of inputs like fertiliser, led to food rationing and tough times for a number of years, with Europe turning to South America for its wheat and some of its meat imports.

This was especially evident in Britain, which was importing about 70% of its food in the post-World War I era.

World War II hit European farms and food production even harder, with governments having to order farmers to switch to crops in order to feed its population.

There will be people reading this saying it is a farfetched scenario and you could argue that Europe, with its abundant supply of food and farmers, will never find itself in that situation.

In 2019, nobody had a global pandemic, Russia invading Ukraine or the USA/Iran war on their bingo card.

History is written in the struggle for food security, and there have been numerous occasions in the past where the very essence of food availability has sparked war, both within and between countries. Most recently, the spike in grain prices in 2008 and again in 2011 is seen as a leading cause of the “Arab Spring” unrest across North Africa.

Strayed away

What changes will the next decade years bring, and how will Europe prepare for them? It could be argued that Europe has strayed away from those guiding principles of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as priorities changed.

Food systems are now being seen as an integral part of hybrid warfare. Russia has deliberately targeted agricultural infrastructure in Ukraine, and trade sanctions have restricted fertiliser, fuel and feed exports, affecting prices globally since 2022.

The blocking of the Strait of Hormuz has also directly impacted fertiliser supplies and in turn food production. In 2026, over 350 million people across the globe will face food insecurity, and within that, nearly 38 million children under the age of five will be acutely malnourished according to the World Food Programme 2026 global outlook.

Last Friday’s Nuffield Triennial conference made for some thought-provoking discussion, and a number of topics were fleshed out including using food production as a form of defence. I came away thinking that it should be our first line of defence.

During his term, former Polish Commissioner Wojciechowski said food security should be a theme of the next CAP, but the scale of the budget would not suggest that Ursula von der Leyen is as worried.

Food security was one of the backbone principles of the first Common Agricultural Policy in 1962, when providing sufficient food for the European continent was at the top of the list of CAP objectives.

Those 1962 objectives now extend to beyond the European continent, with the potential displacement of millions of people due to food shortages being one of the next great challenges for wealthy continents like Europe.

We live in a world where countries’ dependencies double up as vulnerabilities.

Energy, raw materials and food production should be centre stage in any form of defence strategy that Europe adopts, and we need a rethink about how we ensure that food production and Europe’s farmers are supported and protected in the production of that food.

A 22% cut to a CAP budget is not the correct place to start in 2028.