In 2023 the UK was 62% self-sufficient in food, which means that If we were only to eat UK-produced food, it would have run out by 14 August.

The NFU has lobbied for greater self-sufficiency; for as long as I can remember; our home-produced proportion has been creeping ever lower as our consumption grows.

Every day I see the health impact of not enough food, healthy or otherwise. I see the damage to people and communities and I hear about reports that will make you fear for our economic stability in the future. Farming UK’s headline on 14 August was UK’s self-sufficiency in fresh vegetables hits record lows. Depressing.

Professor Tim Lang spoke at a City Harvest event at the beginning of last month. I’ve written at length about my admiration for his work and clarity of thought. In his book Feeding Britain he reminds us about the precarious situation we faced between the first and second world wars.

In 1935 an independent inquiry by Viscount Astor and Seebohm Rowntree was published detailing the poor diets of people in York, against a backdrop of falling productivity in farming, which, following the depression, was providing only a third of national food. Their report also detailed the state of British farming and its importance for security.

The Astor and Rowntree report also focussed on food poverty and health, the appalling state of the ‘working class’ diet – poor housing, poor food at work, an impoverished food culture and ill health. Rowntree also championed the plight of women who lacked kitchens and the means to earn money to feed their families.

The medical world weighed in, denouncing the state of diet-related ill health. There is a study from 1936 called Food, Health and income which detailed how bad the diet was. Almost word for word, its finding are echoed in recent work by the College of Midwives and the Department of Health and in recent Food Foundation Reports.

The reports of the day were used by Sir William Beveridge as he produced briefs during the second world war on social policy; we are still in his debt for his influence on constitutional policy on food, housing, food security, health and education. He was part of an extraordinary generation of academics and social policy analysts who viewed food as a national scandal but one which could be addressed and resolved.

We are at a Beveridge moment; we need to change our food system. Just think, when Henry Dimbleby left government, his enormous resignation letter, his book entitled Ravenous, detailed the almost one million homes that don’t have a cooker because they cannot afford one.

When Beveridge wrote his report, the pressures were economic and technological. Massive advances have been made in farming and the potential of the UK industry is sizable, but the current dual economic and environmental challenge is going to take a seismic chunk of constitutional change and a very brave government to tackle it.

The World Economic Forum has released a report stating that the amount of water we have extracted from deep aquifers has tilted our planet by almost 80cm so far. This contribution to the climate crisis, coupled with a national reliance on food from water stressed nations, is a compelling reason for a shift to a food system that supports home grown above anything else; restoring a thriving British farming industry, supporting a healthy national diet and decreasing our reliance on environmentally bankrupt imported products.

I’ll step off my soap box, but now is the time to jump on yours. Despite the horrendous start to the farming year, I am hearing good things about this year’s crop. Go and shout about how significant it is, shout about how good you are at delivering the healthy diet people need, how you are caring for the environment in which it is produced. And yes, demand proper money for it, because that needs a reset too, doesn’t it?

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