This week’s Digest has a head for figures, and not all of them (or indeed any of them) are especially positive. Regular Footprint readers will need no reminding of the value in eating more fruit and vegetables for a healthy, sustainable diet, yet new data released by Defra this week showed that domestic production of both food types slumped last year. The volume of home-produced vegetables decreased by 4.9% to 2.2 million tonnes in 2023 compared with the previous year, while the volume of home-produced fruit tanked even more worryingly by 12% to 585,000 tonnes.
Inclement weather conditions played their part causing issues with germination, disease and harvesting, but the data – consistent with a long-term decline in UK horticulture production – points to deeper, structural issues within the sector that growers have consistently warned of yet successive UK governments have failed to adequately address. These include labour shortages, high production costs and supply chain pressures exerted by big buyers like supermarkets.
The Defra statistics also raised further questions over the affordability of fruit and vegetables. Despite the fall in volumes, the overall value of home grown vegetables grew 10% to just under £1.9bn while the value of fruit has risen to just over £1bn, an increase of 3.1% compared to 2022. This implies that the average price of products rose significantly between 2022 and 2023. It’s little wonder therefore that survey data from the Veg Power campaign shows that 53% of people feel priced out of healthy foods and 55% say they struggle to eat their 5-a-day.
Low-income households have been especially hard hit by the high levels of inflation seen in recent years. New research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has found that low-income households paid more for their foodbetween 2021 and 2023 than high-income households due to so-called “cheapflation”. This occurs when the prices of cheaper brands of food, drink and other grocery products – disproportionately consumed by lower income households – rise much faster than more expensive varieties. The IFS found that grocery products sold that were initially among the cheapest 10% in each spending category, for example the cheapest types of pasta, butter and milk, rose in price by 36.2% compared to 15.8% for products that were initially in the 10% of most expensive products over this period. This cheapflation led to the poorest households experiencing inflation rates 5.6 percentage points higher than the wealthiest, adding around £100 to the annual cost of a shopping basket.
Another number causing murmurs of discontent among campaigners comes from a BBC investigation into the number of “megafarms” in the UK. Freedom of information requests by the BBC showed the number of larger-scale UK beef and dairy farms, housing at least 700 dairy or 1,000 beef cattle, has increased from 756 to 802 in five years. Campaign group Compassion in World Farming said the rise in large-scale cattle farming was “deeply concerning” as many would be intensive farms housing cattle all year round. In response, the National Farmers Union (NFU) said it was neither farm size nor whether cattle were kept outdoors or indoors that dictated welfare but how livestock were managed.
We end with by far the biggest figure of all – $36bn to be precise, which is the price Mars has agreed to pay to buy Kellanova, the Kellogg’s spin-out company that owns the Pringles and Cheez-It brands. The deal is the biggest in Mars’s history and allows the confectionery giant to strengthen its grip on the global snacking market. “In welcoming Kellanova’s portfolio of growing global brands, we have a substantial opportunity for Mars to further develop a sustainable snacking business that is fit for the future,” trumpeted Mars CEO Poul Weihrauch. It’s fair to say some observers are rather more sanguine about the deal with Michael Moss, author of the bestselling book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, writing on X: “When salt (cheez its) marries sugar and fat (snickers).”Perhaps the Mars Wrigley Foundation (mission: ‘Nurturing wellbeing to improve lives and inspire happiness in our communities’) might throw some loose change towards rebooting the UK horticulture sector as part of its philanthropic activities? We can live in hope.
Also featured in this week’s Footprint news coverage is a call from UK supermarkets for a new deforestation law to be fast-tracked; evidence that businesses are failing to assess and measure their impact on nature; and research showing how a global transition to plant-based diets can help cut greenhouse gas emissions.
