The UK food system is not resilient to the kind of shocks that will increasingly present themselves over the next decade, according to the author of a seminal report on the subject.
Speaking at this week’s Cold Chain Live conference in Telford, Tim Lang, Professor emeritus of food policy at City St George’s, University of London, said shocks to the food system linked to issues like climate change, the covid-19 pandemic and global conflicts, are being normalised “but we’ve got a creeping breadth of shocks that is going to be even more than normality within the next 10 years”.
In February, the National Preparedness Commission published a report by Lang which highlighted a lack of government engagement with questions of food resilience. The report identified 20 possible threat events and conditions that could affect civil food resilience including military weaponisation leading to blockades and destruction of food infrastructure, commercial malware and ransomware attacks resulting in reduced food supply, and major flooding events that impact food production.
Speaking to a roomful of logistics professionals at the conference organised by the Cold Chain Federation, Lang said the threat from shocks to the food system requires “cool analysis and big thinking”, but warned his report found “gaps between the theoretical framework for resilience and what is actually happening” in the UK.
Lang said the food system for the last 50 years has been driven by a very narrow version of efficiency. “It seemed very sensible to get rid of storage, to have just-in-time logistics [and] no slack,” in the pursuit of cost savings,” he said. However, Lang warned “the food system is finite, the food system has limits. Focusing just on efficiencies in supply is not the same thing as feeding people in a crisis.”
He called for greater effort in engaging the public in questions of food resilience, including via local resilience frameworks and forums, as is already happening in countries like Sweden.
He also suggested that diversity in areas like agricultural production and food distribution, rather than consolidation and concentration, was a key characteristic of a more resilient system.
The Cold Chain Federation has been calling on the UK Government to give the cold chain critical national infrastructure status. Sectors that achieve this status can receive greater government support in recovering from and anticipating critical incidents. Over 50% of all food travels through the UK cold chain via 100,000 temperature-controlled vehicles and around 470 temperature-controlled warehouses.
