Our food price inflation crisis won't be solved by cheap imports: Andy Brown

Serve it accompanied by a once cheap staple such as bread, pasta or potatoes and you’ll find the price of those has also rocketed. A white sliced load has gone up by 21 per cent in a single year.

Overall consumer prices are still rising by over 10 per cent a year at a time when many working people are being asked to accept pay rises that are way below that number and so represent an effective pay cut.

For quite a number of teachers, nurses and care workers those pay cuts have been happening for over a decade and patience is running thin.

There are, we are told, some grounds for optimism. The rate of inflation might start to slow in the next few months.

It is, however, important to be absolutely clear about what is being hoped for. No serious economist expects the price of food to actually reduce in the foreseeable future. The best that can be expected is that prices will rise more slowly relatively soon.

In other words the scarily high prices of basic necessities are probably here to stay and will continue to get worse. It will just happen at a slightly slower pace. If things go well.

In a world full of risk it is not always wise to base government policy on the hope that things might not get much worse. There are strong long-term forces at work which mean that relying on cheap food imports to feed the country may not be a secure strategy.

Putin’s war in Ukraine could go on for a long time or escalate and that will impact on global food supply. Then there is the problem of more frequent droughts and floods as the climate becomes increasingly severe and erratic and the impact that is already starting to have on crop yields and reliability.

The biggest long term cause of rising prices may, however, turn out to be the fact that there are increasing numbers of affluent consumers in the world and their diets are changing in ways that place increasing pressure on the price of food.

It simply isn’t possible to feed billions of extra people on a diet that is high in meat and dairy. If everyone eats the same diet as the average US consumer then it has been calculated that we will need two extra planets to feed them all.

That, of course, can’t take place so what will actually happen is that either markets or governments will determine who receives the benefits of scarce resources. If markets do the job then a lot of land will be used to feed the richest on a diet that gobbles up resources whilst the poorer nations and the poorer consumers struggle to find enough to eat. Britain can no longer rely on being amongst the most affluent.

When it comes to feeding our own nation properly it might be a better strategy for our government to think carefully about what we can produce locally. Increasing our food security means increasing the amount of planning we do to ensure that there are reliable supplies.

During the worst stages of the Second World War the British government managed to keep our population well fed by taking action to ensure we produced as much food as possible, that we wasted little of it and that people ate a sensibly balance diet that followed the seasons.

No one wants to return to an era of rationing, shortages and intense government scrutiny over what each individual eats but there is much we can learn from the positive aspects of that experience.

We need to be producing a lot more of our food locally, eating what is currently coming off the land, wasting less and supporting our farmers better. If that takes serious subsidies for local producers, more controls to prevent supermarkets dominating markets, and limits on what gets imported then that may be a small price to pay for being able to be confident that we can feed as many people as possible from our own efforts.

The worst of the current food price crisis may pass sometime soon leaving many with bitter memories of working hard only to find that they struggled to put food on the table.

If we don’t want to repeat the experience on a larger scale further down the line then we need to see a significant strengthening of our food security and a government that is prepared to plan for a more reliable future.

At the moment government policy is going in exactly the opposite direction to what is needed. New trade deals have been signed which will see Mexican chicken producers, Australian intensive beef rearing factory farms and pesticide soaked grain being allowed easy access to British markets. Local farmers are being asked to reach higher environmental standards but are being expected to cope with fresh competition that risks leaving the country even more dependent on food imports produced by unpleasant methods.

That cannot be right. We have to get serious about building our local food security whilst there is still time to make the adjustments relatively painlessly.

Andy Brown is the North Yorkshire councillor for Aire Valley from the Green Party.