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Comment on Waitrose hit by middle-class vegetable shortage

tal@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Liz Webster, head of campaign group Save British Farming, told The Telegraph in February: “We live on an island in a particularly difficult climate with a very short growing season. If we don’t have any food security in a world which is chaotic, we know what happens because it happened in the last two World Wars – we are exposed to a food crisis.”

You can trade for food. You are part of the wealthy world and can outbid just about anyone else. Even in the event of a global famine, it's not gonna be the UK at the bottom of the food chain.

But the World Wars!

You were blockaded then.

Who is able and willing to blockade the UK today? That'd require a hot war. And what is the kind of insane scenario can one produce in the present world where the UK would be need to be facing down a blockade, and can then militarily pull out ahead after doing so?

The UK is one of the more potent naval powers in the world. Trying to cut the UK off from the ocean is something that only a few countries could even realistically attempt.
The UK is in NATO. Virtually all of the world's major naval powers are in NATO. You'd have to have at minimum NATO breaking up for this to even be conceivable.
The UK is a couple miles offshore of France and even absent the Royal Navy, the UK has extensive ability to do anti-submarine warfare, knock enemy warships out of the area, shoot down aircraft in the area, and generally keep the English Channel Open. So at least mainland Europe is going to have to be in opposition, since it's very dubious that anyone is going to have an easy time interposing themselves between the UK and mainland Europe.
Even absent the entire rest of NATO and absent the entire Royal Navy, the UK and the US are allied. As things stand today, the US would reasonably be expected to win a naval war against the rest of the world combined. China is the closest thing to a peer today, and trying to fight a naval war against the UK and US concurrently in the Atlantic (a) sounds pretty unlikely and (b) probably one of the worst battlefields that China could possibly choose for something like that.

So, what is the scenario that one is trying to hedge against? A scenario in which NATO has broken up and the UK is concurrently fighting France and the US at least? Because that scenario really seems like one where there would be rather larger military concerns than running low on food. I also think that if that is a realistic concern, then the UK would probably not be doing the military collaborations that the UK does with either, for starters.

But then why would the head of the campaign group Save British Farming say such a thing?

Well, maybe because they're an industry advocacy group, and it's in their interest not to be competing with agriculture from abroad?

Let's hypothetically say that there is an actual, real national security threat involving food shortages. Okay. Let me suggest a few things:

Probably a lot of the UK's military strategy needs to be redone, since it is probably improperly relying on alliances if it's needing to hedge against this route.
Second, I'd want to understand what combination of enemies the UK is going to be facing that can impose a blockade on the UK but cannot otherwise defeat the UK militarily.

[continued in child]

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HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

You can trade for food. You are part of the wealthy world and can outbid just about anyone else.

Yeh. Didn't help with us with tomatoes etc this spring when tehy and other salad crops were in short supply. Much simpler for Spanish syppliers to sell into the EU

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- Mr_Blott@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It wasn’t that it was simpler for them, it’s that your average Brit is a tightfisted cunt and won’t pay more for a tomato what they think it’s worth.
  
  Supermarkets knew this so stopped buying certain veg when the price went up, because they knew their average customer is so tight they squeak when they walk
  
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  - NuPNuA@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Are people tight, or are their wages balanced for a low wage low cost economy that’s suddenly taken some massive shocks putting inflation and wages hugely out of whack.
    
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    crispy_kilt@feddit.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Por que no los dos?
    
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  - Tweak@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Not quite, it’s a little more complicated than that.
    
    Supermarkets stopped buying veg when the price went up because they knew they could blame it on other factors, rather than people thinking the supermarkets were tight cunts. Customers are generally accepting of prices going up (they have no other option), it’s the supermarkets who want to charge as high a price to customers while paying as little as possible themselves. The supermarkets then use this whole thing as a negotiating tactic to try to bring down their cost prices.
    
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  - HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I was just pointing out that ‘you can outbid anyone’ doesn’t really work in practice- particularly when many people in the uk are living paycheque to paycheque
    
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tal@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Third, I'd ask why British farmers are permitted to do things like raise meat. If there is truly an overriding concern about the population starving due to lack of ability to trade, then one wants to maximize the caloric output of existing British farmland, and one of the most-effective way to do that is to produce grain rather than meat; producing meat requires a lot of wasted potential calories. I remember once reading a statistic that if the US did nothing other than become vegetarian, that the surplus generated alone could feed all of Europe. Similarly, maximizing the ability of British agriculture to feed the British public involves shifting over fully to grain -- and more-generally, plant production. One could obtain meat from abroad, and meat would be a pleasant, but unnecessary luxury that could be readily foregone in the event of our highly-implausible blockade. Now, I guarantee you that British agricultural associations are not going to like that approach at all, because it will make British beef farmers unhappy, but if there truly is the danger that Save British Farming is proposing, then that is a more-effective solution than the one that they are proposing.

But maybe Save British Farming is just grain farmers? Let's look at their website. Ooop, it's complaining about the Australia-UK trade agreement. And looks like they've got pictures of sheep next to their "being flooded by foreign cheap food" bit. And Australia is a huge sheepmeat producer. And it looks like the major concern about that trade agreement was from beef and sheep farmers: "The National Farmers' Union (NFU) has warned that freeing up the UK-Australian trade in meat will lead to hundreds of British cow and sheep breeders going out of business."

The woman complaining is Liz Webster. If we look at her Twitter (well, X) feed, she's complaining about competition for British beef producers: "Wonder why Australian beef is cheaper than British beef? The video on the left is 🇦🇺 govt funded feedlot houses 70,000 animals fed only grain to fatten quicker. Our British cattle on the right graze across acres with plenty of trees for shade. Each has a passport."

She's not worried about British food security. She might be worried about the economic viability of her business, but that's a different matter.
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- palordrolap@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Who would embargo Britain? Let me tell you: People with vested interests inside Britain. They then choose the most ideal scapegoat at the time in order to try to make the people think a certain way in order to further the agenda of the embargo creators.
  
  Sometimes those with vested interests cock things up completely rather than achieve their goal, but it doesn't matter much to those of us outside that club.
  
  Things go missing, sideways, backwards or get more expensive regardless.
  
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- HeartyBeast@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Third, I'd ask why British farmers are permitted to do things like raise meat.
  
  Because British consumers rather like buying British meat and we aren't in a centrally planned economy.
  
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- Tweak@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Farmers would rather there was some amount of food scarcity, that way they could fulfill as much as possible for as high a price as possible.
  
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midgephoto@photog.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
@tal @Mex
One can trade, if one has something others want as much as what they have that we want.
If the food supply in the world becomes insufficient for the people in the world, then yes, some may eat and others may starve. Solutions which avoid that have more merit than those that rearrange the queue.
Note that considerable of the food production in the UK is dependent on the Gulf Stream.
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