We must accept that Britain cannot rely on world food supplies
To describe Britain's attitude to food security over the past couple of decades as cavalier is a serious understatement it. In the grand new globalised world you didn't have to grow apples because you could ship them from New Zealand or South Africa. You didn't have to worry about peas or beans , they came from Peru or Kenya. Chicken from Thailand; fish from wherever the latest ocean-hoovering operation was destroying future stocks – no cause for alarm there. All you needed was a fistful of pounds, and the food would be there to be bought.
There had been the green revolution from the late 1960s that had saved the world from starvation. If supplies ran short, we'd just have to crank up the technology again and all would be well. Food was cheap for Western consumers, and it was assumed that it would keep getting cheaper.
In fact, we never actually were in any kind of global food utopia – even at the best point around 1995 there were nearly 800 million people going regularly hungry in the world, and obesity from inappropriate nutrition, closely linked to the rise of high-fructose corn syrup, trans fats and fizzy drinks, has just kept growing and spreading. And it's become increasingly obvious that agriculture based on petroleum inputs – for cultivation, spraying and harvest; for fertiliser; for global distribution – is going to have to change, fast.
But mostly that's been regarded in the UK as an unfortunate global problem, something for the Department for International Development to worry about – and sometimes as almost a positive, as one of the driving factors of the Arab Spring.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/oct/15/rely-world-food-supplies
