Strengthening Food Security for Wales
Jenny Rathbone MS
Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warns that the Coronavirus global pandemic must force countries to focus on shorter supply chains. He emphasises that self-sufficiency in food and energy would make countries less vulnerable to future attacks [1]. This warning comes on top of the uncertainties we already faced around Brexit — the threat of no deal with the EU at the end of this year looms over us — and the impending global climate crisis is ever present.
Wales already produces more energy than it consumes so we are in a strong position there. Self-sufficiency in food is a bigger challenge. Though Wales produces an abundance of meat and dairy, we import half our vegetables and most of our fruit. Today a mere 0.1% of Welsh land is dedicated to commercial horticulture.
The immediate lockdown exposed the vulnerabilities of Britain’s centralised just-in-time food distribution system, dominated by the demands of supermarkets. My sole trading master butcher was unable to meet the demand for lamb of all things at Easter. The extra carcasses he had ordered never arrived. This, in a country which produces enough lamb to feed our population 100 times over. The supermarkets came first in the queue in the disrupted farm to fork supply chain.
Producers of food originally destined for cafes and restaurants found that their wholesalers temporarily failed to divert their produce to supermarkets all for want of the bespoke packaging required by the retail giants. Eggs did not reach the shops because of a shortage of branded egg boxes. The idea of putting trays on shelves so shoppers could help themselves was never considered.
More tragically, hundreds of dairy farmers were forced to pour their milk down the drain because their milk processing company refused to collect it. Freshways, a west London-based dairy processor, had specialised in bagging milk into strong plastic pouches for their closed cafe and airline customers but it never occurred to them to divert surplus supplies to nourish the one third of Welsh children living in food poverty.
Leaving aside the scandalous discarding of fresh milk, — milk that the taxpayer had already paid for through the Basic Payments Scheme to farmers — a lot less food has been wasted under lockdown. Many more people have been cooking from scratch rather than relying on processed food laced with sugar, fat and salt; the recent outbreak of Covid-19 infections in at least 4 meat processing plants in June will have reinforced that message. Some, however, do not have this luxury, living in inadequate housing with only a kettle and perhaps a microwave to prepare food.
Many local authorities — certainly the case with Cardiff Council — did a great job making sure that nobody starved during the lockdown. Food bank usage doubled and an army of volunteers delivered food parcels to the doorsteps of those unable to leave home.
As we emerge from the first phase of this unprecedented public health emergency, Wales now needs to plan for a more resilient food future. If a second Covid surge occurs across Europe, we cannot know whether the fruit and vegetables normally imported from southern Europe and further afield will continue to reach these shores. To guard against this insecurity of supplies, Wales needs to ramp up home produced fruit and vegetables to fill the gap.
Most of the 200 commercial horticulture growers in Wales are operating on less than 5 hectares of land which meant they have been excluded from benefiting the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Whilst the CAP has kept many marginal farming businesses alive, the concentration on meat and dairy production relegated horticulture to niche enterprises. This chimed with the CAP objective to deliver European economies of scale for a Europe-wide market; hence the dominance of Dutch and Spanish produce in what we buy. Now we are leaving the EU, there is clearly scope for rectifying this distortion.
Starved of CAP capital investment, Welsh commercial horticulturalists have struggled even to meet the increased demand for fresh veg boxes delivered to people’s doors. And the supermarket conglomerates’ obsession with continuous supplies of produce of a uniform size and look has proved a powerful barrier to the organic growth of small scale successful horticulturalists . It requires a bigger shift in attitude by consumers to get the supermarkets to pay more attention to taste and freshness.
Puffin Produce based in Haverfordwest has successfully broken through the barriers created by the just in time diktats of just nine supermarket conglomerates. Puffin’s network of 25 producers already keep Welsh supermarkets supplied with potatoes, cauliflowers, leeks and brassicas for most of the year in line with the supermarkets’ obsession with uniform size and appearance. Puffin does not rely on gangmasters supplying casual labour from Eastern Europe. It has a permanent team of 30–40 pickers to support its highly mechanised harvesting operations.
Puffin’s founder and Managing Director, Huw Thomas, assured me[2] that its growers could increase production by at least 25% An audit of horticulture producers by Amber Wheeler for Tyfu Cymru, an alliance of horticultural expertise funded by the Welsh Government, estimated that Puffin producers could double their potato production and grow ten times more vegetables[3] as long as they had some assurance that supermarkets would not then drive down the prices they were prepared to pay.
Huw Thomas agrees that, across the industry, it would be perfectly possible to double the production of Welsh vegetables within the next 18 months. But a lot depends on the attitude taken by the Welsh Government; both the strength of its commitment to procure more of the food needed to supply schools, hospitals and care homes from Welsh producers; and the financial capital required to accelerate this expansion.
The Landworkers Alliance Cymru[4] calculated back in April that a modest grant of up to £100,000 per enterprise could have enabled their 100 Welsh horticulture producers to double production this year. Now, with the growing season half over, attention should be focussing on the resilience of our winter vegetable supplies.
This is not just about food security; it is also about bridging the gap in life expectancy. There was already a well-established link between poor diet and poor health which explains a 20–30 year gap in healthy old age. But the concentration of Covid-19 disease and deaths in more deprived communities should redouble our resolve to tackle the health inequalities arising from poor diet.
Amber Wheeler argues that Wales needs to multiply horticulture production 29 times in order to meet our ‘5 a day’ fruit and veg needs. Arising from the Tyfu Cymru audit, she calculated that this could be achieved on a mere 2% of our land.
The Well Being of Future Generations Act tasks our 44 public bodies to address this inequality. Now is the time to start making better use of our £6 billion public procurement muscle to purchase good food for schools, hospital and residential homes[5]. Instead of always going for the cheapest food, the top priority should be freshness and nutritional value. A modest investment in horticulture would strengthen local economies rather than spending the Welsh pound on propping up multinationals based outside Wales.
Jenny Rathbone June 27th 2020.
[1] Guardian 23 April 2020
[2] Virtual meeting April 28th
[3] Amber Wheeler Wales Fruit and Vegetable Production Study 2020 for Tyfu Cymru
[4] Letter to Lesley Griffiths MS April 22nd 2020
[5] Professor Kevin Morgan Good Food for all. IWA discussion paper. 2015