We need buffer stocks of essentials built up for when the supplies, now much more erratic than before, start to fall away.
England has suffered its second-worst harvests on the official record as the result of its cold, wet, miserable summer.
The wheat harvest is down 21 million tonnes on last year, or 21 per cent on last year, whilst barley was down 26 per cent and oilseed rape down 32 per cent, according to an analysis provided by the inestimable Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
Listen to this story at James Meadway's podcast, Macrodose.
Worst-hit of all was England’s burgeoning wine industry, where, depending on the region, grape harvest were down between two-thirds and three-quarters on last year’s crop.
Unpredictability
This was more than just bad weather. Attribution studies is a new field of research that uses scientific modelling to say with much greater precision if, and by how much, some specific weather events can be attributed to climate change.
For the UK over 2023 and 2024, scientists at World Weather Atrribution estimate that storm rainfall was made 20 per cent worse by climate change, and the total volume of rain was made four times more likely by climate change. So with a high degree of certainty we can say the grim English summer of 2024 was due to climate change, rather than bad luck alone.
Those poor harvests have real consequences. Farmers themselves are the first to lose out – ECIU estimates that, just on the five crops they looked at, farming incomes across England will be down £600m as a result of poor harvests.
With many smaller farmers already on a knife-edge, facing rising costs and growing unpredictability in the weather, this could be enough to tip them into bankruptcy.
Consumed
In 2022, a third of British farms made no money, and agricultural insolvencies have soared in the last couple of years. There is growing support for the idea of a Basic Income for farmers, with the BI4Farmers campaign launched in April.
This would guarantee a level of income for farmers, smoothing out the increasingly dramatic swings in their farm earnings and enabling them to carry on operating.
This matters, because on the other side of the deal we all need to food to eat. And that’s where Britain’s model for its food system is coming under increasing strain.
For decades, the country has relied on meeting its food needs through imports, with the total amount of food consumed here that is also produced here falling from about 80 per cent in the early 1980s under 60 per cent in 2023.
Drought
There were solid arguments for importing food from elsewhere: the expansion in variety in what we eat has been dramatic, with one-time exotic luxuries like olive oil moving close to staples – retail sales of olive oil overtook all other cooking oils as far back as 2004.
We need buffer stocks of essentials built up for when the supplies, now much more erratic than before, start to fall away.
And by buying food from huge global markets, even if there were disruptions to growing and trade in one part of the world, somewhere else could step in. Food security could be improved, in theory, through this diversification.
The problem, as the foreign policy think tank Chatham House has pointed out in a recent report, is that climate change upends all this.
First, it has made some of those staples massively more expensive – olive oil, notoriously, is up 150 per cent in price over the last two years as a result of drought across the Mediterranean.
Coordination
And second, because it tends to affect everywhere all at once, the argument for diverse suppliers is weakened – everywhere is getting clobbered by this. Farmers across Europe and well beyond are suffering the effects.
So a new approach is needed. It’s here that the argument from the economist Isabella Weber and others is critical – we need buffer stocks of essentials built up for when the supplies, now much more erratic than before, start to fall away.
This isn’t about financial solutions – which is always the UK government’s preferred response to a major crisis, look at covid where billions was spent – but about actual preparedness with real things we need.
This is partly happening anyway – English grape growers and wine producers are somewhat insulated from the disastrous harvest this year because they have stocks from last year’s relatively good harvest – but ideally it needs the much bigger resources and coordination of the state to provide.
This Author
Dr James Meadway is an economist and former political advisor. This article is based on a transcript of an episode of Meadway's podcast, Macrodose.
