With chocolate eggs very much on our minds this week there is one question: how do you pay for yours?
New analysis from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has found that the average price per kilo of cocoa beans imported into the UK has risen 32% over the last three years. UK food inflation held at 3.1% last month, though chocolate price inflation went up 17%, according to the ONS.
Downpours and droughts in West Africa have hit harvests, including in Côte d’Ivoire, where the UK imported 84% of its cocoa – worth £135m – from last year, explained ECIU analyst Amber Sawyer. Indeed, crop losses threaten cocoa farmers’ livelihoods at the same time as extreme heat threatens their health. “We’re importing less but paying more for it – that’s hurting West African cocoa farmers, UK chocolate businesses and British consumers out buying their eggs for loved ones ahead of Easter,” Sawyer added.
The challenges are not going away, either. And the extreme weather is affecting everything from imports like cocoa and bananas to home-grown favourites like broccoli and spuds. As Sawyer noted, farmers both abroad and at home “increasingly need support to continue growing our food”.
Here the dark clouds still hang over the sector following the government’s sudden decision last month to shut the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI). Farmers this week told The Ecologist of the strain the closure has put on their mental health and the wildlife on their farms. “I don’t know why they [the government] don’t see food production and landscape restoration is worth the investment,” said organic cattle and pig farmer Amelia Greenway.
It is a theme picked up by Tim Lang, professor emeritus of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London, in a blog for the Green Alliance think tank.
“Why on earth do we maintain an economy where farmers and growers receive roughly seven per cent of gross value added (GVA) of the food system?,” Lang writes. “It’s astonishing that farming puts up with making next to nothing from growing food. What if the law stipulated that ten per cent or 15 per cent of the price consumers pay for food went to the primary producer, not today’s average of seven per cent?”
Lang – whose Just in Case report to the National Preparedness Commission suggested raising food production, not just anyhow, but sustainably, is again a matter of national security – argues that to pay farmers more “would be canny politics all round. It would rebuild burned bridges and make it clear that deals with even ‘cheaper’ US food are fantasy politics, just when we need security”.
Ah, the US. Chlorinated chicken is back in the news as concerns over trade deals swirl. This has brought food safety and standards fears to the fore (again). Maybe we should also spare a thought for the chickens. “The issue isn’t the chlorine, but the fact that the chemical has to be used in the first place because American farms and food production facilities are bigger, faster, and therefore dirtier than those in Britain and the EU,” explained James Rebanks in a (detailed) piece for Unherd.
Jessica Martin, a senior lecturer in physiology and animal welfare at the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Sciences in Edinburgh, also picked up on this theme. “A big concern is that chlorine washing allows poor practices throughout the rearing period for chickens. This includes birds being crammed in together with minimal ventilation and lighting. These birds are bred to eat a lot, and therefore they excrete a lot, culminating in poor quality litter for them to live on,” she wrote in a blog for the University of Edinburgh.
It doesn’t matter which came first – the chicken or the egg, or indeed whether the latter is ‘real’ or made of chocolate – there are crises in the food system everywhere and all at once. This is the ‘age of chaos’, as The Economist put it this week. But what was it Einstein said about crises and opportunity…?
Elsewhere in Footprint news this week we have news of government funding for low emissions food production and a concerning piece of research that found chemical contaminants in plant-based foods. The price of recycled plastic is also threatening corporate packaging commitments.
