Briefings for Britain, May 1 2022, Catherine McBride
Does the UK need to be self-sufficient in its food supply?
George Eustice wrote an op-ed in the Telegraph on Easter Saturday entitled We will help British farmers fill British fridges. The subtitle was ‘Domestic production will be at the heart of the Government’s new food strategy’. Maybe Eustice wanted to plug his new Sustainable Farming Incentive and thought that tying it to self-sufficiency would be a good idea but unless the UK Government has commandeered this year’s harvest – food grown by private farmers could be sold to any user or country that is prepared to pay for it.
The lack of a wheat crop in the Ukraine and Russia, sanctions on Russian wheat exports and shipping costs is not just a problem for the Ukraine and Russia, it is a problem for the world. The two countries produce roughly a quarter of the world’s wheat exports most years. While the world’s other big suppliers: the USA, Canada and Australia combined produce about 40%, provided that Australia isn’t having a drought. On the bright side we do have a ratified trade agreement with Canada although not yet one with Australia.
Eustice claimed in his op-ed that the UK is ‘largely self-sufficient in wheat production growing 88 per cent of all of the wheat that we need here.’ This statistic probably comes from Defra’s Agriculture in the UK 2020 (AUK) survey, the latest version says that figure was only 81% for milling wheat used in bread. The UK’s wheat harvest in 2020 was the smallest since 1981 at only 9.7 million tonnes, the UK had to import over 2.1 million tonnes of wheat, of which 1.13 million tonnes was milling wheat.
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