Our situation is far more serious than you know
For my first post proper, I reprise this little essay I wrote in one afternoon sitting, just itching to get thoughts and worries into writing. I sent this text to a local civic society as a possible article for their magazine. I've heard not a peep from them, hardly surprising since it could make their delicate sensibilities heave as it mentions starvation (notwithstanding what the British Empire did in India).
But that is the reality we face in this country.
But that is the reality we face in this country.
AND WE ARE DOING HARDLY ANYTHING ABOUT IT!
"Last year I started writing an article titled 'Heat, Drought and Deluge'. It was mostly finished, and to round off the story I was going to list things we can do to deal with our multiple climate and pollution induced crises. Our main crisis, believe it or not, is a food crisis. This is because without food, civilization fails. And in the UK, the near future could be one that sees rationing at best, mass starvation at worst. Why should I think this? Because we only grow 60-odd percent of the calories we need (I say 60-odd, the figure varies over time, the current number from DEFRA is 62% last time I looked in 2022). The rest is made up of imports. To exacerbate this barely acknowledged problem, because we left the EU, we are now classed as a 3rd country to every market on the planet (I'm ignoring the useless trade deals made by the Tory government).
The last month (July as I write), and the start of this August has seen incessant waves of wet weather pass over the UK. One can notice much when riding the top deck of a bus (but most passengers don't even bother looking at the passing landscape). What I noticed lately are huge fields of wheat waiting to be harvested. Farmers can't harvest damp wheat - it needs a good spell of warm, dry weather to dry-out the heads. So these fields, all golden for weeks now, sitting there, getting rained on almost daily. We are mostly self-sufficient in wheat, I read in the DEFRA report. As I write (today is August 3rd) the wheat currently awaiting harvest might end up as animal feed, because it won't be good enough for flour. Our bread might soon go up in price again.
So what point am I trying to make, you might be asking (if you haven't already turned the page)?
The point is that we don't produce enough food to feed ourselves from our land alone (historians may know it was ever thus for quite a long time - our Empire once starved India in order to feed this nation).
The point is that the UK does not have food security, in fact, we should think ourselves as *food insecure*.
We take food in our shops entirely for granted. Go in, get what we need, or fancy, come out, repeat. By the way, this is not a question of waste, though reducing that will help regardless. No, this is about there being food *of any kind* being available in the first place.
If there is a reason to write this for Go, it's because I've been trying to address this issue locally. For sure, there are a couple of community gardens and Incredible Edible, little projects dotted around, home gardeners. But we need a much bigger plan, a grander vision.
A few years ago I tried to restart a transition group and open a community hub. Food production was part of the original plans. I got nowhere with that, but since the Sustainable Futures Forum has arisen, it's kind of taken its place instead.
I continued by offering to do something useful at Westbourne Gardens and create a community garden. That got nowhere with the developer-owners. For my next step, I'm going to the top. I will be writing a carefully worded missive to the Radnor Estate, Lord Radnow himself, and argue that those great big greens shouldn't just be empty space that hardly anyone uses for leisure. I know this for certain - my former room overlooked Trinity Gardens. Used much? Hardly, even on sunny days.
I can use some help with this, and somebody with a long memory might be able to tell me what Folkestone was like during wartime. I don't mean all the usual stuff to be found in books. I once saw an aerial picture of Hyde Park during wartime - it was full of vegetable growing plots. I'd like to know if the Radnor lawns were ever used for that purpose during WW2.
WW2 was a national crisis of the highest order, and for the UK it was also a food crisis. The climate crisis, is also going to be a food crisis, and is approaching that level of severity.
~Written 3rd August 2023
"Last year I started writing an article titled 'Heat, Drought and Deluge'. It was mostly finished, and to round off the story I was going to list things we can do to deal with our multiple climate and pollution induced crises. Our main crisis, believe it or not, is a food crisis. This is because without food, civilization fails. And in the UK, the near future could be one that sees rationing at best, mass starvation at worst. Why should I think this? Because we only grow 60-odd percent of the calories we need (I say 60-odd, the figure varies over time, the current number from DEFRA is 62% last time I looked in 2022). The rest is made up of imports. To exacerbate this barely acknowledged problem, because we left the EU, we are now classed as a 3rd country to every market on the planet (I'm ignoring the useless trade deals made by the Tory government).
The last month (July as I write), and the start of this August has seen incessant waves of wet weather pass over the UK. One can notice much when riding the top deck of a bus (but most passengers don't even bother looking at the passing landscape). What I noticed lately are huge fields of wheat waiting to be harvested. Farmers can't harvest damp wheat - it needs a good spell of warm, dry weather to dry-out the heads. So these fields, all golden for weeks now, sitting there, getting rained on almost daily. We are mostly self-sufficient in wheat, I read in the DEFRA report. As I write (today is August 3rd) the wheat currently awaiting harvest might end up as animal feed, because it won't be good enough for flour. Our bread might soon go up in price again.
So what point am I trying to make, you might be asking (if you haven't already turned the page)?
The point is that we don't produce enough food to feed ourselves from our land alone (historians may know it was ever thus for quite a long time - our Empire once starved India in order to feed this nation).
The point is that the UK does not have food security, in fact, we should think ourselves as *food insecure*.
We take food in our shops entirely for granted. Go in, get what we need, or fancy, come out, repeat. By the way, this is not a question of waste, though reducing that will help regardless. No, this is about there being food *of any kind* being available in the first place.
If there is a reason to write this for Go, it's because I've been trying to address this issue locally. For sure, there are a couple of community gardens and Incredible Edible, little projects dotted around, home gardeners. But we need a much bigger plan, a grander vision.
A few years ago I tried to restart a transition group and open a community hub. Food production was part of the original plans. I got nowhere with that, but since the Sustainable Futures Forum has arisen, it's kind of taken its place instead.
I continued by offering to do something useful at Westbourne Gardens and create a community garden. That got nowhere with the developer-owners. For my next step, I'm going to the top. I will be writing a carefully worded missive to the Radnor Estate, Lord Radnow himself, and argue that those great big greens shouldn't just be empty space that hardly anyone uses for leisure. I know this for certain - my former room overlooked Trinity Gardens. Used much? Hardly, even on sunny days.
I can use some help with this, and somebody with a long memory might be able to tell me what Folkestone was like during wartime. I don't mean all the usual stuff to be found in books. I once saw an aerial picture of Hyde Park during wartime - it was full of vegetable growing plots. I'd like to know if the Radnor lawns were ever used for that purpose during WW2.
WW2 was a national crisis of the highest order, and for the UK it was also a food crisis. The climate crisis, is also going to be a food crisis, and is approaching that level of severity.
~Written 3rd August 2023
Post edit 6th September 2023
~J~
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