Why is uk not more self sufficient on food?

Posted by kaydnh@reddit | AskUK | View on Reddit | 323 comments

For example most western allies countries like US and France are mainly self sufficient on food. Germany is 88% self sufficient. UK is about 60% which imo is bit dangerous and also keep in mind we are extremely reliant on over countries for energy too. From what I’ve read uk can produce more calories for its population but chooses not to.

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323 Comments

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chat5251@reddit

Labours inheritance tax change is going to make this problem far greater in future.

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Popular_Shoe_4728@reddit

Nationalise farm land then

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DameKumquat@reddit

We could be. Just it would be really boring and not the most efficient way of doing things. We are roughly self-sufficient in wheat, oats, barley, beer, root veg, meat and dairy. But our climate is better for certain varieties while similar ones are produced across Europe. We trade and get both variety and resilience in the food chain. One example is cheese - we import and export similar quantities. The Germans and Italians get Cheddar and Stilton etc, we get mozzarella and French cheeses. Everyone gets a more exciting cheese board. We could stock up on UK apples and soft fruit and go overboard with canning and bottling and drying. Or import them while exporting our top quality steaks and whisky and beers. One thing we could improve on (and have done in recent years) is processing food ourselves so the UK gets the extra profits - rather than exporting milk which is cheap, and importing posh ice-cream and yoghurt from Germany. Müller and others now have more capacity here.

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Popular_Shoe_4728@reddit

Very informative, thank you

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FumbleCrop@reddit

Huge parts of the UK are basically unusable except for light sheep farming. Pretty, but not very productive.

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PlatypusUnlikely2305@reddit

And lots of houses keep being built on land that is more productive.

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Popular_Shoe_4728@reddit

Houses are pretty important

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Big-Masterpiece-316@reddit

As seen by the farmers tax the politicians don't want us to be.

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Eggtastico@reddit

There are things we just grow. Especially fruit! Look at most British dishes & they are root based vegetables or green leaf. We also dont eat seasonal, so that 60% will be not be consistent throughout the year. Finally, there is consumer choice. Our diets are quiet different today compared to only 50 years ago.

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kaydnh@reddit (OP)

60% just seems too low to me. I get what you mean but needing to import in 40% of the calories needed to feed your population is silly.

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Eggtastico@reddit

Food used to be left to rot it fields by the French farmers. All becuase of EU subsidy as part of the CAP.

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ihatethis2022@reddit

Now its here cos they dont have anyone to pick it.

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Ill_Refrigerator_593@reddit

To add context we only produced 35% of our own food in the 1930s'. We haven't been self sufficient since the Napoleonic Wars. For the UK 60% is quite high compared to much of the past 200 years.

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ObjectiveHornet676@reddit

Importing 40% is safer than importing 0%. Zero trade and complete reliance on only local production makes a food system extremely vulnerable to local crop failures. Don't put all your eggs in one basket...

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Extension_Sun_377@reddit

We have developed a taste for food items we simply can't grow in our climate. Citrus fruits, nuts, avocados, bananas and other exotic fruits, tea, coffee, grapes. We can grow root veg, sugar beet, mushrooms, tomatoes, green leafy veg, berry fruits and many things we could grow more of, but people have become used to getting anything all year round rather than eating seasonally as our grandparent's generation did.

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Ok-Chest-7932@reddit

All of which can basically be fixed by electricity. We really ought to be chasing total energy sovereignty, ideally with plenty of room for growth too.

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silentv0ices@reddit

Most of the land is still owned by a few families, they prefer to look at parkland on their huge estates. Then you have the choice of food.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

Whilst most of the land is owned by a small number of people, 63% of all land is used for agriculture. It's the single biggest land use reason in the UK

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silentv0ices@reddit

The question is UK not England.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

But the verifiable stats are for England

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silentv0ices@reddit

The definition of agriculture is pretty broad too.

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The_Blip@reddit

OK but just because it seems silly to you doesn't mean it actually is. Britain has relied on food imports for centuries. We're one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we have excellent trade relations across the planet, we have one of the world's most powerful navies, have good relations with other countries with powerful navies, and are a military ally with most of the top lot. What exactly are you afraid will happen? What's silly is to drive food policy based on unfounded and unrealistic fears at the detriment of sound economic, military, and political reasoning.

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DismaIScientist@reddit

The UK is well over 100% self sufficient in terms of calories, production of wheat alone would meet the UK's calorie needs.

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shadowhunter742@reddit

I mean we do also export alot of both raw and processed foods, but we want other foods too lmao, but we could probably survive on domestics alone if we had to.

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thecraftybee1981@reddit

The U.K. produces enough wheat each year to feed 70m people with 2000 calories per day of just bread. Then add in eggs, meat, dairy, seafood etc… We could feed ourselves but it would be a very plain diet and there would be some areas where we do lack like fruit and veg which might lead to health issues from lack of certain vitamins and minerals. Then it gets to the reason why we’re limited to our own food, are we under naval blockade, which would also limit the fertiliser, equipment and other inputs which would limit the amount we can produce ourselves.

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XihuanNi-6784@reddit

There's some question around whether those are "needed" calories or if that's just what we want to eat. I don't know how to break it down, but I imagine things would look better if you took out things like tropical fruit and non-seasonal stuff and then judged on whether the total amount of other food produced was or could be increased to compensate.

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Status-Screen-1450@reddit

Consumer choice is massive. We don't want to eat seasonally, and we don't want to give up our imported foods, simple things like rice, bananas, and chocolate. The traditional English diet of meat and potatoes isn't so trendy these days!

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CambsGuy79@reddit

It mostly comes down to geography, economics, and policy choices rather than capability. The UK could produce more of its own food, but that would mean higher prices and less variety for consumers. The country has limited agricultural land compared to places like the US or France, and the cooler, wetter climate makes some crops less efficient to grow. The economy has long focused on services and finance instead of agriculture, and food imports are often cheaper than domestic production, especially when it comes to fruit, vegetables, and grains. For decades, the UK relied heavily on the EU single market and global trade to keep food prices low, which encouraged further dependence. Consumers also expect year-round access to foods that simply do not grow well here, and imports fill that gap. Farming itself is energy-intensive, and the UK imports much of its fertilizer, feed, and fuel, which affects how practical large-scale domestic production really is. You are right that it is risky to depend so heavily on imports, especially in a world with so many supply chain disruptions. The UK could become more self-sufficient, but that would require major changes in government policy, consumer expectations, and food pricing.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

Misleading stats there. Germany is _over_ sufficient in some foods such as meat and potatoes but has to import a lot of fruit and veg thus giving an _average_ sufficiency level of 83%

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GnaphaliumUliginosum@reddit

Same for the UK, we export quite a bit and then buy in other stuff. If we chose to eat the grains and legumes directly rather than feed them to cattle, and integrated pastures into a mixed arable rotation, we could likely be self-sufficient. People want to eat way too much meat and so neoliberal capitalism provides what the customer wants. Diets were very different when there was rationing.

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echo3uk@reddit

>Diets were very different when there was rationing. And even then, with a population of only 48 million, and everyone with a garden growing their own food, we were still reliant on North Atlantic convoys to keep everyone fed. >we could likely be self-sufficient. only if we culled 3 out of every 4 people.

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Haunting_Cows_@reddit

Citation? It's just a fact that if we are the grains instead of feeding them to animals first you'd get a better calorie yield and therefore use less land per person.

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echo3uk@reddit

what citation do you want? - just use google to get the UK population in 1940 and when we finally paid for all the support we received from the USA and Canada - ([it was 2006](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6215847.stm))

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Vegetable_Net_@reddit

You've glossed over the point The larger population wouldn't matter if you don't waste calories by feeding the feed to animals first. Bonus points cause a % of the crops are literally biofuel which means we are just burning them. So where is your citation for the assertion that we couldn't feed everyone without a population cull, given the good arable land is not all used for human food production, indeed it's plausible that it's mostly animal feed

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nickbob00@reddit

In the meanwhile, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides along with modern varieties and breeds and mechanisation have come a long long way since then.

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echo3uk@reddit

They have indeed, but the soil, after 50 years of intensive farming is shot. I'm guessing you don't work in farming.

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TheZZ9@reddit

Farming was far less efficient back then AND we had sent most farmers off to fight. An acre of farmland today can produce way more food and a huge farm can be worked by only a couple of people. (Some crops are far more labour intensive to harvest)

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echo3uk@reddit

A quick google will tell you farm work was a reserved occupation during WW2 - we did not send farm workers to fight. Why are you spreading disinformation on the internet - get a life.

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Curiousinsomeways@reddit

That was a policy decision. Britain was called a world island pre war because we exported high value and imported commodities and sat at the center of global trade. Even in ww2 we wanted most people on higher value tasks.

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Spacer176@reddit

It's funny watching crop rotation get re-invented over and over again because farmers want to use all their land *now*.

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RoamingThomist@reddit

We have too many people for the amount of arable land we have.

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Spottyjamie@reddit

Weve a net imported for hundreds of years contrary to what the right claim

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drquakers@reddit

Both the USA and France heavily distort their agricultural industries to make them viable via subsidies. We do also subsidise farmers but to a far smaller degree and typically not to over produce food (like in the USA)

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beauxartes@reddit

The US is absolutely not self sufficiant for food, huge amounts are imported from South and Centeral America, and a truly insane amount of farming is for corn (not food grade) or soy (Unsure about food grade) It's a real problem with how the country is run.

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ResplendentBear@reddit

Small island, land value high, better to do other things. Also, we've got a relatively high proportion of unsuitable terrain for farming anything except maybe sheep.

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NrthnLd75@reddit

Most of the land used for sheep is loss-making in that endeavour and they mess the landscape up something terrible in terms of eg: flood management.

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unalive-robot@reddit

And grouse. Lots of wasted land on grouse.

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lloyd096@reddit

Why do they mess the landscape up something terrible?

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Ayanhart@reddit

Same issue as any grazing herbivore (like deer, which we also have an overabundance of due to wiping out their predators). They eat or trample saplings and small plants before they can grow into larger ones, so there's nothing to replace the older plants as they die. This results in miles and miles of just grass and fast-propagating weeds, which is not what our Highlands should look like.

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jimthewanderer@reddit

In actual fact, there is a quantity of sheep a landscape benefits from in terms of ecological diversity. Excess populations for the human meat market are the issue, not the mere presence of the woolly ones.

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SnooHabits8484@reddit

This is true of cattle and horses, but not sheep

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jimthewanderer@reddit

No, that is bollocks. A prime example is Badbury Rings in Dorset.

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SnooHabits8484@reddit

Obviously overgrazed, at a glance.

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jimthewanderer@reddit

>The chalk grassland habitat at Badbury Rings is home to many nationally rare species such as the greater butterfly orchid, birds nest orchid and frog orchid. It also supports many different invertebrates including the scarce Adonis blue, the dingy skipper and the grizzled skipper. Badbury Rings is an important feeding and breeding site for red listed, ground-nesting birds such as skylark and corn bunting.  - National Trust. In the 80s it was just grass. Proper management, including the reintroduction of a carefully managed quantity of sheep, horses, and cattle, means that the grass is kept short enough for other species to thrive, supporting invertebrate populations, which in turn feed the birds. Prior, this entire ecosystem was effectively gone. If you actually learn about the details of the specific ecosystem, and how it is and isn't being managed, you'll avoid looking silly on the internet. This happened with reforestation years ago. People heard about the concept but didn't know anything about ecology and just wanted to put trees everywhere. In some landscapes, Grassland *is* the native stable biome, and pulls more carbon out of the atmosphere than an artificial woodland would. When ecologists pointed out the nuance, uninformed people throw their toys out of the pram.

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SnooHabits8484@reddit

Horses and cattle, sure. Sheep are only part of conservation grazing as a sop to landowners. Grasslands in the UK did not evolve with that sort of close-grazing pressure.

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jimthewanderer@reddit

You're literally just wrong.

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SnooHabits8484@reddit

Nuh-uh. Sheep are a Bronze Age introduction. Grasslands in the UK were natively grazed by horses and bovines.

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jimthewanderer@reddit

... Do you think a healthy ecosystem is just a mythical prelapsarian state in which humans never existed?

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SnooHabits8484@reddit

That’s *a* definition but not one I’d prefer. I’m broadly a very big fan of removing as many invasive non-native species as possible, which includes sheep and non-native deer. Ideally we’d have a functioning trophic cascade with an apex predator (don’t care if that role is filled by humans) reducing grazing & browsing pressure at landscape scale and preventing meso-predator release. 70-odd-percent of land in Wales is dedicated to sheep farming. We pay huge subsidies for almost no return in order to guarantee that the first steps in the restoration of the Celtic rainforest (which would, of course, need to be managed by humans to create clearings and a dynamic woodland edge) can’t happen.

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inide@reddit

We really should be eating more venison

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cowbutt6@reddit

And rabbit...

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auto98@reddit

No, if you eat rabbit you die.

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cowbutt6@reddit

Well, if you *only* eat rabbit, sure. But you can die of lots of things if you only eat one kind of food. Meanwhile, I've eaten rabbit a half dozen times, and can verify that I'm not dead.

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Mr-Wilson-67@reddit

We should, but it’s a little dear…

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inide@reddit

It'd probably make a nice sausage roll if you added a little doe.

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BillWilberforce@reddit

Llamas are pretty good or at least better than most other grazing animals. As they cut the grass rather than pulling it out.

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AndyTheSane@reddit

Basically, much of our uplands should be forest, but sheep grazing kills off the saplings so you get bare grassy slopes; these don't retain water as well. The landscape you see in somewhere like Snowdonia or the Lake District is very artificial.

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lloyd096@reddit

But that makes the uk even less self sufficient for food, grazing sheep is probably the most sustainable farming there is. I have grown up on a farm and from experience, pastoral farming is better for the environment than arable farming. Everyone glazes over the fact of how much fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides is used to grow food which is terrible for the enviroment

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awelles@reddit

I would have thought Cattle grazing may be more sustainable. Mainly because Aurochs are native to here whereas sheep and goats aren't. There's usually more of a symbiosis between Native flora and fauna than exotic ones.

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mibbling@reddit

I have a long-running bugbear about the reason behind the organic movement having been forgotten. It’s been shifted into a personal-benefit consumer choice - I buy organic because it’s better for ME, for MY family, etc etc. Whereas the actual reason behind choosing organic (not necessarily certified organic, that’s a whole other thing) is as a COLLECTIVE environmental benefit, reducing the harmful chemicals being released into the environment.

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Upset-Elderberry3723@reddit

Companies have been coopting peoples' movements for ages and only activists seem to really notice it. Remember 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle'? BP partially funded that project, and did so (in my opinion) to shift the public perception of responsibility for environmental pollution off of big companies and instead towards individuals. 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' made singular individuals feel terrible about their carbon footprint when the majority of the world's pollution comes from 100 major companies.

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Broad-Attention-6133@reddit

Something similar is the farcical carrier bag charges in the UK. It is utterly pointless levying a charge on the end consumer for a bag that has already been manufactured.

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auto98@reddit

Usage went down by over 90% because of the 5p charge.

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if_im_not_back_in_5@reddit

Whereas you can buy a roll of bin bags without that levy...

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Eff__Jay@reddit

Those companies are, primarily, energy companies. The pollution they generate is not separable from the way we live, both collectively and as individuals.

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930913@reddit

Which because of lower yields ironically often leads to organic food requiring more resources than intensively farmed food.

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mibbling@reddit

Yes! Basically: all your possible choices are bad ones, at this point 🫠

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Fukuro-Lady@reddit

It's almost as if mass production of anything is bad for the environment.

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mibbling@reddit

Also (and I say this as a nearly lifelong vegetarian) most people don’t realise the amount of, frankly, animal death that goes into maintaining arable land, what with keeping off pests and managing the land. It is… not uncomplicated.

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lloyd096@reddit

Correct, and because of the repeated pesticide and herbicide use, the soil is devoid of life. Then the next year the soil will need to be pumped with synthetic fertilisers imported from Russia for a chance to grow anything! Locally grown and sold livestock is IMO less damaging to the environment compared to arable farming

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TreadheadS@reddit

it's all shit to me!

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ResplendentBear@reddit

Check out George Monbiot here.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

They're really baaaaaad for it

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browny30@reddit

Dad, I hate you

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TastyBerny@reddit

Lloyd096 said to tell you that you were adopted. And you’ll be disinherited.

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ExpressTruth76@reddit

r/angryupvote

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Soft-Goal486@reddit

For sheep farming they have to clear large swathes of land to make space, which involves removing trees and shrubbery. The roots of these foliage help ensure the ground stays relatively compact, but without them it means during any heavy rainstorm, the ground is more likely to wash away and you get a mudslide. This is compounded by the reduced evapotranspiration due to the lack of trees. Where they would otherwise catch the water and it would be evaporated back into the atmosphere, it hits the ground and seeps through it, forming underground channels that head towards the local river in its watershed, which means in times of high rainfall, the river often swells and bursts its banks.

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Any-Web-3347@reddit

Less trees, which help to soak up water.

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TwirlipoftheMists@reddit

Yeah it’s an ecological disaster. Instead of any biodiversity you’ve just got mile upon mile of industrial sheep farming. Instead of forests or heather you’ve just got bloody sheep.

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lloyd096@reddit

We have a whole mountain covered in Heather in wales and the sheep do nothing but walk past it, if anything I think they encourage it to grow

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Mr-White94@reddit

Same up here in Scotland. We have to burn the Heather on the pentlands to manage it. However the north of scotland is beautiful but pretty baron. Not a lot of bio diversity when it comes to trees, mostly non native spruce

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exohugh@reddit

Scotland is mostly overgrazed by deer rather than sheep (which have no natural predators and are prized by rich landowners for hunting). So yes it is barren/low biodiversity, but that is not it's natural state - most of the highlands was the [Caledonian Forest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonian_Forest). But returning to that native woodland is impossible without solutions to overgrazing by deer, and even without the deer is extremely slow (forests only expand by meters per year). There are parts of Scotland which are being actively managed back to a healthy natural state, and they are beautiful & biodiverse.

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TALongjumping-Bee-43@reddit

Before we cleared it all away to make room for sheep, most of Wales was a temperate rainforest. This is actually globally quite a rare biome, that we have almost entirely deforested save for a few valleys. And a lot of the woodland that is in Wales is just tree plantations, not rainforest. Other places like Dartmoor also was historically covered in a rainforest.

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EntirelyRandom1590@reddit

Sheep definitely eat heather, so that's an odd observation. If the stocking levels are low or their have easier feeding then they won't keep on top of it. But Welsh landscape is full of sheep-grazed deserts.

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EntirelyRandom1590@reddit

Sheep definitely eat heather, so that's an odd observation. If the stocking levels are low or their have easier feeding then they won't keep on top of it. But Welsh landscape is full of sheep-grazed deserts.

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Aerosenin@reddit

People are an ecological disaster then

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bfresh84@reddit

Correct

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Aerosenin@reddit

Then two birds one stone people need to go then the sheep will go

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Glad-Gadus@reddit

Or we could just stop putting so many sheep everywhere

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Aerosenin@reddit

What am I gonna shout where the mint sauce at then?

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Glad-Gadus@reddit

Just shout it at your family

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UserCannotBeVerified@reddit

Mmmm, Aunty Gladys was a lovely woman, but shes even lovelier paired with some mint sauce...

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DeepestShallows@reddit

Yeah, but you know McLamb burgers are awesome and all my clothes are wool. No, wait…fuck. Maybe it’s a bit of a pointless waste of land farming sheep.

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Psittacula2@reddit

It is mildly frustrating when the propaganda comes out on this as well as tangent to food production capacity. First of all. Sheep farming arose due to the Medieval Wool trade and was very profitable and the quality of wool then was very good. In modern times wool is outcompeted by synthetic fibres which cause worse pollution in terms of plastic material vs wool but that is an aside. Today sheep are reared for meat production. On meat, subsidies are used due to a range of factors: \* Politically for affordable food (now changing due to change in gov policy eg land usage and CO2 and Environment targets eg Rewilding, reducing pollution eg effluence etc. \* Stabilize commodity prices \* Use low margin land for productive rural economies eg farming on hills turning grass into meat is a good use of land with respect to food production just a question of balancing that with OVER POPULATION of high density urban population of 87% of the 72m UK Citizens on relatively small land area of UK. Yes, I am in support of using a lot more uplands for afforestation for long term macro climate and environmental biomass and diversity benefits 100% but the propaganda has to stop or lack of information on Sheep Farming per se in context. I mean take the WEST and NORTH of UK and you enter pasture land where grass grows well due to relatively mild but wet and steep sided land hence cattle and sheep farming. Thus arable is more restricted to midlands and Eastern England and climate being more North also than say France or Spain aside from population to area differences also. Some sheep farming is beneficial for food production but the balance now is to be calculated. So the main problem is Urban Population Demand to Food Diversity over Seasons and less land for agriculture in a colder climate than Sheep for Food Security. This was already a problem in Victorian Britain when reliance on Empire imports increased and the Wars caused serious rationing issues due to lack of balance of Population to Homeland Food Supply.

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FearlessFox6416@reddit

It's all unfertile soil. Its good for growing grass but that's about it.

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Altruistic_Fruit2345@reddit

Plus we like to eat stuff at can't grow, at least until climate change really hits.

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SearchingForDelta@reddit

A lot of British farming is just a lifestyle subsidised by the government. Something like 80% of farm income is linked to CAP/ELM. For many smaller farms it was over 100%, as in they’d be loss-making without subsidies. There also seems to be a myth that Britain doesn’t do factory farming. Supermarkets have invested a lot of marketing money into the public seeing industrial levels of milk, meat, and eggs in the aisles while simultaneously thinking this was all put there collectively by small farmers waking up at 5am every morning to milk the cows by hand. Literally the world’s biggest diary factory is a huge factory in Buckinghamshire.

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flsei@reddit

Hit every nail on the head with this comment. Farmers are benefit scroungers wanting public funds to cosplay a pastoral lifestyle, whilst a significant amount of your meat and dairy comes from nightmarish industrial farms. Supermarkets adore the 'traditional farmer' look because it looks so lovely on posters in their shops, even if it's only 1% of what's on the shelves. Source - I have been to every type of farm you could imagine.

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Ok-Blackberry-3534@reddit

Have you been to a lemur farm?

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arenaross@reddit

Great fact but what does where my diary comes from have to do with farming?

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Steamrolled777@reddit

How many solar farms using perfectly good farmland? Car parks, etc should have the solar farms, not useable agricultural land.

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Haunting_Cows_@reddit

This is slightly misleading in the sense there's plenty of good arable land that grows good crops at a good yield.... But said crops are then used as animal feed because of the high demand for meat (from a purely calories per hectare point of view this is wildly inefficient, the crops are the same or related to those which could be grown for human consumption - barley, wheat, maize, turnips, beans, peas etc), for sugar production due to high demand for sugar (sure it's good on the calories per hectare but no one's going to claim it's food) and biofuel (not edible, can just be stealing good food producing land for energy, although sometimes this is more likely to be a permanent crop such as elephant grass and occupy fields which are otherwise awkward or poor). The militant hate and decades of blocking wind farms is also worsening the issue. If you build turbines in arable land you can still farm round the base of the turbine and all in very little land is lost. You know what's being built instead en mass? Solar farms. You can't farm round a solar panel, the solar panels aren't as efficient at energy production either, but crucially Nigel from number 17 can't see them on his drive to work because they're behind a hedge and of course that's all that matters. (Should caveat, some solar is being built on land which with climate change is prone to flooding, drought, crop failure and other poor performing areas of arable and is therefore land that really is better suited to energy production. But a good proportion are being planned and built on land that yields good crops at a fairly reliable volume)

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lucylucylane@reddit

Large island the ninth largest which for an island is large

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Dictated_not_read@reddit

Maybe 100 years ago but we can basically terraform now. Create greenhouses etc . So it’s more of a don’t not can’t scenario

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ResplendentBear@reddit

Terraforming isn't cheap I imagine. If it was cost effective people would be doing it.

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Dictated_not_read@reddit

I think terraforming might be an expensive investment initially but having control over your own food supply creates advantages that might outweigh the costs in the long run. I also think that as the technology develops and scales the costs will be reduced and processes and tech optimised. Therefore reducing the overall investment. A bit like green energy. It might have initially steeper investment requirements but when faced with the alternative eg not working on it. The impact could be disastrous.

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Zap_Zapoleon@reddit

The main island is one of the biggest islands in the world. Its a small country though for sure.

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djneill@reddit

That entirely depends on your definition of an island, is Australia an island?

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Zap_Zapoleon@reddit

Great Britain is considered an island. Australia, falls more in a landmass or continent, thats not me classing them, thats how they are classed if you look into it.

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gourmetguy2000@reddit

It doesn't really stop the Dutch and they have even less spare land. We could do better using technology like they do

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RoySlaterr@reddit

Netherlands has always been one of the biggest net exporters of food though. Arguably has even worse land scarcity/value situation.

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allenout@reddit

The UK is a pretty good location for Aztec chinampas.

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Richy99uk@reddit

Wales has hills, that's why we have so many sleep

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douxsoumis@reddit

Because you count all the sheep?

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Richy99uk@reddit

We have sheep?

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danddersson@reddit

A very high population density per sq.km. of habital/arable land has a lot to do with it.

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Unhappy_Region_6075@reddit

Because the far left hit anyone that earns a living like farmers

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After_Heat_4578@reddit

Cheaper to buy from abroad, that's why most things were sold off to foreign companies years ago.

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NewtTrick@reddit

It is not remotely dangerous.

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BroodLord1962@reddit

Because there isn't enough land for the numbers of people that live here. And it's only going to get worse with Labours plans to build on green land, and climate change. The UK does not come close to even been capable of been self sufficient for food

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EdmundTheInsulter@reddit

Cos we're useless Can we build homes - no Can we build a few hundred miles of train track - no. Can we grow enough food - no

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funglejunk57@reddit

Because we don't have enough food to feed who we have. Haven't for a long time. And no, that nothing to do with immigrants.

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Pooflower999@reddit

it does worry me they want to turn more fields into houses, where I live there is a battle to turn a huge field into 800 houses, how is this practical.?

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JuneauEu@reddit

Wait... isn't the UK globally one of the MOST self sufficient countries for food!?

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Erwin_Pommel@reddit

Eh? Historically we've always had a massive dependency on importing food. Part of why Made in Britain is such a big thing is the historical precedent established by things like the Corn Laws and that.

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PuzzleMeDo@reddit

[https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/food-self-sufficiency-rate-by-country](https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/food-self-sufficiency-rate-by-country) Britain ranks pretty highly on food security.

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Curiousinsomeways@reddit

Corn laws were to protect the rich and fucked over the population, not a self sufficiency policy.

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Meowskiiii@reddit

Yup!

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Another_Random_Chap@reddit

British people want cheap food, and it's cheaper for the supermarkets to get it from abroad. So the farmers stop producing that food because they can't afford to not make a profit.

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TellMeManyStories@reddit

The UK \*could\* be self sufficient on food if it needed to be. If a war suddenly broke out we could do it with nobody going hungry. We'd just all have to live off a mostly vegetarian diet of mostly potatoes and cabbage. It wouldnt be nice.

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Goldf_sh4@reddit

Because in a globalised world we benefit by engaging in international trade.

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mralistair@reddit

we aren't self sufficient because there's no real need. we grow high value things, not bulk. we grow lavendar, and a huge amount of land is given to horses and golf courses. if we ever needed to be self sufficient we could turn this around in a year. also we could all eat about 20% less, and still be absolutely fine.. and foood wast is something like 25% at the moment.

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hellopo9@reddit

England is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe while Wales and Scotland do not have much arable land due to the mountains. A lot of food is grown but not enough for the dense population. France has a population density of 122 to 124 people per square kilometer. Germany 241km2. Italy 195km2. Spain 96km2 England has 434km2. Though the Netherlands is more dense at 541km2.

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Tizwoh@reddit

Even Wales is more densely populated than Spain, France, and Poland. The fact that even people who recognise how densely populated this country is don't appreciate the denseness of less dense areas is probably the best proof of your point. Framing this discussion in terms of UK countries is pretty pointless tho. All three have more dense areas and less dense ones. South Wales and the Scottish Central belt are very high up there compared to Cumbria or the western peninsula. That logic does go for most things, actually.

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hellopo9@reddit

While wales is more dense than some countries in Europe it’s in the middle in terms of European density. I frame it around countries as country to country comparisons is best, especially as each have different governments and polices around infrastructure and land use. England is almost three times as dense as wales, and six times as dense as Scotland. That’s worth noting when talking about density.

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Tizwoh@reddit

Said different governments and most such laws were established in 1999. Unless you mean to suggest that these planning policies of the Welsh and Scottish governments are so unbelievably awful that it took only a quarter century to massively swing population density to England's favour, that means nothing in a discussion about density. In a broader sense, only laws about food importation (which don't exist) or agricultural policies so major they also don't exist would matter. The United Kingdom together is what the question was about, and it is still a quarter larger than Germany, the densest of those mentioned. I'm not saying it's not worth noting. In a long enough discussion, all information is worth noting. But in giving such an overview, framing the information in that way objectively gives off the wrong impression. Northumberland has a density of 65/km². Herefordshire 87/km². Fife and South Lanarkshire meanwhile (to specifically choose two places that aren't tiny and drawn around metro areas) are at 283/km² and 189/km². My point isn't that you can make it more complicated than that. My point is that in a discussion of population distribution on the island of Britain, there is little correlation (for lack of better phrase) between national borders and denser/emptier areas. Phrasing every discussion that way when it doesn't make sense to does nothing but legitimise pointless national division. Sorry for the rant that's just a pet peeve of mine.

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Responsible_Rip1058@reddit

Because our politicians very good at making """"deals""" for uk aka not in best interest long term

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OriginalQuackers@reddit

Weather. Not watched Clarksons Farm? You should, it’s very good.

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heroics-delta8s@reddit

As long as we stay capitalist it will be fine, there hasn’t been a modern capitalist society, not at war, that has suffered a famine for two hundred years.

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Haunting_Cows_@reddit

We grow and extremely large amount for animals feed due to high demand for meat. Fields that could grow human beans, cereals and veg are grown as fodder instead.

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piyopiyopi@reddit

We import it so we can use our buying power as a lever to get better deals on other things. Which is fine until countries no longer have food to sell us or the other commodities which the trade deals are based around are no longer priced at a point where we are getting a fair deal

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YesIAmRightWing@reddit

We hate our farmers

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Straight_Flow_4095@reddit

We can’t grow a lot of the food we want to eat like bananas and avocados. If we stuck to eating what we grow, we’d be self sufficient

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Firstpoet@reddit

British people just assume it magically appears in shops.

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jenjammy@reddit

Bull shit

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lucylucylane@reddit

Because most of Britain is hilly boggy damp outside of the south east

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rolyantrauts@reddit

We would have to narrow the range of foods and accept higher prices. Its that simple and we are happy with 60% and if things change we would have to change eating habits to be 100% but its doable, we just don't want to.

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V0idous@reddit

Coz of da tories

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FatBloke4@reddit

Our self sufficiency peaked in the 1980s but started falling after the allocation of quotas under the EU's CAP and for fish, under the CFP. Additionally, the structure of subsidies under the CAP was unfavourable to the smaller farms of the UK, by comparison with those on the continent. Despite bad experiences with food imports during COVID, nothing seems to have changed. Aside from the issues of food security, it would be much better for the environment if more of our food was locally produced, rather than being shipped from around the world.

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SentenceSad2188@reddit

The UK can't even house it's population what makes you think they care about feeding them?

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VandienLavellan@reddit

Not sure if this is 100% accurate but I was taught in geography that the UK tried to become self sufficient in food after WW2 / during the Cold War and were too successful. They ended up with mountains of food, and to get rid of it, sent a lot of it to Africa. This had the unintended effect of bankrupting a lot of African farmers, since they couldn’t compete with free food and led to a spike in suicides

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TheZZ9@reddit

That happened with the EU and their farm subsidies producing "butter mountains" and "wine lakes" etc. And yes it caused huge damage to African economies by destroying their home production industries. (The EU also f*cks Africa today with coffee tariffs. Green, raw, beans have no tariff. Roasted beans, ground beans, instant coffee all have high tariffs. Meaning no African country can build their own coffee roasting and production industry, or build their own brands. All they can sell is the cheap raw beans and European companies make all the money in the roasting, grinding business.

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Prudent-Level-7006@reddit

We make a bottle of wine and it's either dirt cheap with the worst art design ever, which mega puts you off, or ten self congratulatory pounds. I heard there was a mega retarded veg thing too where sent them off, to buy them back but it sounded too stupid to be real

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Derfel60@reddit

We keep fucking over farmers to the point they quit and sell their land for development. We should be incentivising huge greenhouse projects like the Netherlands has to allow us to grow more produce more efficiently for longer, forcing wholesalers and supermarkets to pay profitable prices for produce, and disincetivising imports. Instead, we force farmers to pay inheritance tax they cant afford, give inconsistent funding (partly due to leaving the EU but that was 10 years ago), and regulate them to death.

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Any-Web-3347@reddit

We couldn’t be self sufficient under any circumstances, unless the population was to decrease drastically. In the second world war, every garden, park etc was dug up to grow extra food, we also had rationing, and were relying on some boats to get through with more food. The population then was at least 20 million less than it is now. The improvements in food production technology couldn’t bridge that kind of gap.

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TheZZ9@reddit

"The UK produces most of the cereals, meat, dairy, and eggs that it consumes. This figure is lower for vegetables (55%) and fruit (17%) due to climate, seasonality and consumer and producer choices. " https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-food-security-index-2024/uk-food-security-index-2024 We also currently export a lot of food. If world trade ended we'd lose the imports but we'd get to keep the stuff we currently export which would make up half the loss in one go. We'd have less out of season fruit and veg and maybe have to eat some cheaper cuts of meat. Food output per acre has increased vastly, and back in WWII most farm workers were sent off to fight reducing output even more. With mechanisation a huge farm can be worked by a couple of people, though some fruits and veg are more labour intensive.

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WowzersTrousers0@reddit

I can't find anything that backs up your numbers - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/food-self-sufficiency-rate-by-country Embarrassing the Usual Suspects seems to be taking your assertion at face value. One of the great problems of social media - Post a question as if it's a fact and hope nobody double checks and the thread becomes filled with people attempting to "answer" something that doesn't need to be considered anyway...

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OldEcho@reddit

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-food-security-index-2024/uk-food-security-index-2024 I don't think you read your own source. Which is an arbitrary score. The government itself is claiming the UK only produces about 60% of its own food.

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OrangeBeast01@reddit

>The UK maintains domestic production of all food available in the UK at around 60% of consumption and indigenous food at 73% (2022 figures) and continues to see rising productivity, It's as low as 60% because things like year round fresh fruit and and some vegetables is impossible, and things like rice are impossible at any point (both of which were are big consumers of) If you'd kept reading just past the point you mentioned, you'd see it's 73% for indigenous foods, which I think is more the point that the source you replied to it talking about. A 27% shortfall wouldn't be that difficult to make up if the shit hit the fan, so OP claiming it's **dangerous** is a little exaggerated.

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TheZZ9@reddit

And that report also points out we export a lot of food as well. If world trade ended for some reason we'd lose the imports but we'd get to keep the food we currently export, which would make up half the loss in one step. And the main loss would be out of season fruit and vegetables, mainly fruit. At worse we would have to eat some cheaper cuts of meat, lose strawberries in February and have to give up all the avocado toast we're eating. No danger of starving.

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These_Honeydew_8720@reddit

The responses to this comment made me giggle at you

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Terrible-Group-9602@reddit

Thank you for posting the actual statistics

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bolivlake@reddit

It’s worth noting that _full_ self sufficiency is not merely a case of ‘do we grow everything we eat?’, but also how dependent domestic agriculture is on imports (e.g. fertiliser, pesticide, animal feed, veterinary pharmaceuticals, etc). If you’re imagining a scenario where there’s some kind of severe, WWII-style disruption to imports, the amount of domestic production isn’t going to matter much if farmers can’t get any fertiliser.

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pirategospel@reddit

Good point but surely this just highlights the weakness of industrial agriculture and monocropping rather than the weakness of U.K. sufficiency? There’s no reason that in an emergency situation like this, with economics aside, permaculture systems could be scaled to support U.K. farmland rather than single extract fertiliser components. Eg a national compost scheme to turn domestic food waste, animal manure and other biomass. Nitrogen, potassium and carbon etc that make up chemical fertilisers can also be extracted on a smaller scale if push came to shove. Farming has been done for thousands of years without importing nitrogen from Russia.

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TALongjumping-Bee-43@reddit

With the kind of farming done for thousands of years, it took about 10 hectacres to support a family. The UK has 17 million hectacres of farmland. At that rate, the UK could support maybe 9 million people at most. And by support, you'd be eating bread, dairy and potatoes with meat maybe 1-2 times a week. So, we would have to kill 61 million people or 87% of the UK population to be self sustaining without modern technology.

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Ok-Chest-7932@reddit

At this point we just plain have more people to feed than the land can naturally grow. The entire world is dependent on fertiliser and no farming technique can substitute for it, because all animals including humans reproduce until we're at our ecosystems' max capacity. The fact we control our own ecosystem doesn't change that. There are some experiments being done in alternatives, but frankly from what I know of them they really don't seem scalable to an entire country, they're very much a luxury option for organic producers. What we're probably going to end up having to do is pour a bunch of electricity into synthesising fertilisers. Either that or wait for a famine to drop the population down to a level we can feed without fertiliser.

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WinHour4300@reddit

Partly food choice. We grow and export *a lot* of dried broad beans (166000 metric tons) to countries like Egypt where there is demand.

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batch1972@reddit

We import low value basics and export high value cash crops

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cougieuk@reddit

Germany has more land per person than we do. So there's that. But in the past it's been cheaper to import food. People rarely want to pay more than they have to. I don't believe we are over reliant for our energy on other countries. We are adding renewables every day. It's good to have capability to sell to Europe and buy as well v

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thecuriousiguana@reddit

We could. But it's more expensive if we did. We lack farming labour. We are also cold, wet and dark for half of the year, so stuff like salads, soft fruits, loads of vegetables etc would have to be grown in heated greenhouses. What do you want? Affordable food variety or an expensive limited selection?

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nickbob00@reddit

Netherlands is one of the largest food exporters in the world, in a similar climate, with high density and similarly expensive labour. Granted they do have extremely excellent soils.

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kaydnh@reddit (OP)

Good point.

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anorthern_soul@reddit

We're very good at grass - we do that well.

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ObservantOwl-9@reddit

"Why does the small and extremely dense island not produce enough food?" 🤔🤔

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Halbaras@reddit

If it came down to it the government would take control of what farmers produce and make lots of tough decisions. The easiest one would be banning using arable land to grow animal feed. Meat would become very expensive but we'd produce far more cereals/vegetables.

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wscottwatson@reddit

Because an all UK diet would be boring!

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jimthewanderer@reddit

Skill issue. Learn to cook.

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wscottwatson@reddit

Just had a Chinese meal that I cooked. Most of it wasn't made in the UK. Just cooked here.

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jimthewanderer@reddit

Not the point being made.

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wscottwatson@reddit

He replied to me and said "learn to cook". I can and do

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jimthewanderer@reddit

Then you ought be capable of making good food with local growing ingredients. Obviously more variety is better, but there are quite a few forgotten mystery veg, herbs and spices that grow natively, and are quite fun to work with. No one is saying don't use imported stuff, but locally grown stuff has great potential too, and we do tend to neglect some of it.

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Effective_Taro4601@reddit

Been the case for years and years, hence the importance of the Atlantic convoys in WW2.

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delpigeon@reddit

If we all wanted to eat beetroot, apples/pears, potatoes, assorted root veg, meat and cabbage forever, with nothing but, I think we'd probably be okay fairly quickly - it would be a quick if sad conversion. I guess we'd still have strawberries and raspberries in the summer. But I think one reason we're not self-sufficient is because our tastes are so wide (and obviously economically you're not going to max out on something that's not worth it). Goodbye rice, goodbye pasta, goodbye all spices and other similar nice things :')

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Ulysses1978ii@reddit

Northern Ireland is 355% self reliant in terms of beef if that helps. Problem is there is so much slurry spread we have algae blooms and soils are saturated with phosphorus.

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Psychological-Fox97@reddit

I think part of your mistake is to see it as need not want. The uk could feed itself but many of us choose to have a broader diet that includes foods that arent efficient to produce here and others thay are only seasonally produced here. Also I don't think you're considering all that we export. For example we export quite a bit of fish and seafood as they are in higher demand and therefore fetch a higher price elsewhere. Should circumstances change we could of course not export the food that we do and choose to eat it ourselves.

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olivinebean@reddit

I prefer a satsuma to an apple I eat olives every single week but rarely cabbage I eat tofu and never beef The list goes on for a while...

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Impossible_Theme_148@reddit

It's also weird to compare it to France in particular as France has about the same population but is 2 and a half times the physical size of the UK

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if_im_not_back_in_5@reddit

To be honest, I'm shocked we're as high as 60% Personally, I doubt we produce that much food.

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Lt_Muffintoes@reddit

The government is paying farmers to stop farming and let their fields return to forest

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LordJebusVII@reddit

If the time ever comes when we don't have enough allies to buy food from, the population will probably be a lot smaller. Mankind has become a lot more efficient at killing people since the last time we had to be self sufficient

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Vintage_Winter@reddit

As long as we can grow potatoes and cabbage, I’m good. 😂 you can survive on that sh!t and cook it so many ways.

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Fit_Manufacturer4568@reddit

Have a look at the Green Parties population policy. In short too many people for the land.

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EpochRaine@reddit

Bottom line: food security for the masses isn’t a priority. The wealthy assume they will be able to just fly or ship their supplies in, so there’s no real pressure to fix the system.

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Murka-Lurka@reddit

When I took an Animal Science degree in the late nineties we had a guest lecture from a representative of the ministry of agriculture on food security. (I forget the details it was a long time ago). The government created this project during the second world war to see if Britain could be 100% self sufficient and at the time it was still was possible. However, the food we can produce in the amounts needed don’t match the consumer’s preferences. We are eating less red meat which can be produced by hill farms (poor quality soil and places where you can physically put the machinery needed to grow crops). Dairy, pig and chicken farming requires better quality soil or arable crops to feed the animals. We consider bananas and oranges to be staple foods, yet can’t grow them. We have also grown used to all vegetables to be available all the time. Even U.K. grown foods such as berries and soft fruit have a high carbon footprint to if they are sold out of season.

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Eastern_Guess8854@reddit

Can’t easily farm avocados. But also farm land is bought by the 1% to park their money so farming/farmers are priced out by rich people who want to avoid inheritance taxes. It’s too expensive to make lots of money farming now and the types of food we want in a supermarket aren’t always possible to grow here due to our climate.

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QuirkyRoyal2@reddit

The UK is a green and pleasant land but it’s not a fertile one. About 70 per cent of the UK is farmed land with just over a third of it able to grow crops. That totals about a quarter of the UK. Most of that’s in England (Wales is in single digits and Scotland’s about 20 percent). The rest is dedicated to animal farming as often that’s all it can sustain. We just can’t produce the food necessary to feed ourselves (it’s a huge shortfall ranging from 25 - 40 per cent shortfall over the years). It’s been that way for a long time. Famines were common in the 19th century (when our population was a lot less) and that only really started to change when we started mass importing food from the mid to late 1800s (there’s a reason why we were pro free trade amongst other things). Our farmers are really efficient and good at what they do. It’s why we used to get a rebate from the EU. But there’s a problem in order to maintain the levels of production we do have we are killing our arable land. At current rates, the soil has less than 100 (poss close to 90) harvests left. Not something that’ll affect me but our children will start to feel it.

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Gold_Tutor7055@reddit

Have you ever tried to grow a banana in the UK?

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Alert_Salamander420@reddit

we could be. just look at dyson's famr.

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Crowfooted@reddit

My uneducated guess is that it's less to do with us choosing not to be self-sufficient but rather choosing to eat foods that are not seasonal. We can grow plenty of things in-season, but the consumer market wants to be able to buy strawberries all year round, tomatoes all year round, everything all year round. Sure, you *could* grow strawberries in the UK all year if you used the right equipment, but why invest in that equipment when you could instead import cheap strawberries from Spain in the colder months?

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theModge@reddit

We haven't been self sufficient since the start of the 19th century: in the early 1800s, during the napolonic wars even the upper classes were reduced to eating rabbit caught on their estates. Fortunately none of the people we're particularly likely to have handbags with in even the medium term could deny us access to the sea to import food: Whilst China \*does\* have a large navy it's a long way away and if it's at war with us it's at war with the USA too. The Russian navy has hardly covered itself in glory of late and the Iranian navy occasionally topples over on it's own in port, so I think we can discount that.

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cmfarsight@reddit

You want bananas.

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Tumeni1959@reddit

The climate limits what can be grown here.

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YetAnotherInterneter@reddit

Really? The Netherlands has a very similar climate to us yet it has one of the largest surpluses of domestic food in the world.

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noir_lord@reddit

Livestock and "under glass" horticulture also they are the 2nd largest by *value* not volume (they lump in flowers as well) and have a strong meat/egg industry. Devils in the detail.

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YetAnotherInterneter@reddit

Fair point

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QVRedit@reddit

Because it’s cheaper to import - so that holds back native farm development in the UK.

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sgt102@reddit

The issue is that the UK can produce much more food, but it can't produce it competitively with places like Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Argentina. The problem is that we are now in a situation where the skills, machinery, and infrastructure that would be needed to expand UK food production simply don't exist. We wouldn't have the seed or fertilizer, or breeding stock. So, if we lost contact with the rest of the world, perhaps because of naval action in the Atlantic, or sanctions (if it can happen to anyone, it could happen to us) we would be buggered. What action are the UK government taking? Fuck all. Expect rapid surrender.

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Citizen_DerptyDerp@reddit

There's plenty of food for the rich and if they used the land to feed everyone they wouldn't be as rich.

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LogicalNecromancy@reddit

We are better at money laundering than the production of absolutely anything.

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DeepestShallows@reddit

Uh, it never has been in its entire history? Before food imports people used to periodically starve in bad harvests. It is only due to international trade, fast transport of goods and refrigeration that this problem has been solved.

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Chimpy20@reddit

It's cheaper to import many foods rather than grow it. Makes prices on the supermarket shelf lower, which I'm sure most people appreciate. Growing or farming more food in the UK would mean much higher prices for consumers.

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jmac1138@reddit

I think this is an underrated comment. How many households on minimum wage or even the national average shop exclusively at farmers markets or local butcher/fishmongers where your going to be more likely to buy locally grown/fsrmed produce?

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Nudation@reddit

Is there something to be said for currency recirculating back into the UK economy? As a household that does hunt for deals, over ‘British grown’, I do consider the meat farming industry in Switzerland and the security it provides to farmers that inevitably spend money earned, into the Swiss economy. Not a critique, just a point of conversation

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RiccusDiccus@reddit

Believe me, I’m sure we’d love to be self sufficient. I’m sure there’s a very rich man somewhere who decided it would be better for their wallet for us not to be.

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Pauczan@reddit

It was rich and sufficient when it was stealing from all over the world. These days…well

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NeedCake707@reddit

If we didn't waste so much, we'd be able to produce a higher diversity of stuff.

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Truewit_@reddit

Capitalism dictates it’s more important to use the land to house people that can create value as workers rather than use the land for actual stuff like growing food.

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OldEcho@reddit

Housing people is critical and probably more important than food self sufficiency in any reasonable world. The only reasons for the UK to produce 100% of its own food would be if we were expecting a famine and/or a blockade. We can trade for food, we can't really trade for shelter. I wish capitalism was housing people. Capitalism neither efficiently houses people nor efficiently produces food. There are huge numbers of empty homes in areas where the cost of living is through the roof because it makes the most money to hold onto those homes as investment properties. There are also huge numbers of homeless people. It is, fundamentally, a complete failing of capitalism and the government both that I can say both of these facts and be correct. Someone's sleeping in the rain today while an empty house sits around for years. Huge, latifundia-style farms are also horrendously inefficient and have been proven to be so for ages. Also, environmentally destructive, because the only way to sustain continuous mono-crops is with massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides which cause massive algae blooms and decimate the insect population. (And since the insect population is close to the bottom of the food chain, it decimates the everything-that-isn't-human population.) But of course breaking up the latifundias into smaller farms or food forests would lose some people some money, so good luck getting that to happen before the sun explodes.

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kaydnh@reddit (OP)

Good points. I agree

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

So where do we house people in your world view or should they all be living and working on the collective farm?

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Truewit_@reddit

Please just google enclosure.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

Put them in an enclosure? That sounds barbaric

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Truewit_@reddit

The enclosure act.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

I'm aware of it. Over 63% of land in England is agricultural. It's the number 1 use. 91.1% of _all_ land in England is undeveloped. Doesn't really support your "more important to house people" argument

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Truewit_@reddit

Never made that argument, you have invented that completely.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

Your first post made exactly that argument when you said capitalism dictates that housing for workers is more important than using land to produce food. Housing makes up a tiny part of our land use.

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Truewit_@reddit

Almost like you can build up as well as out.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

Therefore keeping more land for other uses, such as farming.

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Truewit_@reddit

Or as I talk about elsewhere in these replies: keeping empty for land appreciation which is what most of our land actually is. Privately owned empty space.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

>most of our land actually is. Again, no. 63% of our land is used in agriculture.

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Training_Durian_6026@reddit

I don't know who to believe

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

[https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2022/land-use-statistics-england-2022](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/land-use-in-england-2022/land-use-statistics-england-2022)

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Unique_Agency_4543@reddit

Only 2% of the land in the UK is built on. There isn't a shortage of land because of housing.

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Truewit_@reddit

Read the other reply I made. I know housing isn’t the problem.

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Unique_Agency_4543@reddit

I did and to be honest I have no idea what you're talking about or what your point of view is. Say what you mean.

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Truewit_@reddit

The desire for profit means we cannot use our land for agriculture to its fullest extent because that land is worth more empty without tenants. Using the land for housing, as is often touted almost exclusively, is half a solution to the broader crises faced and created globally by our need to consume goods, food amongst other things, that are imported from all over the world. If we fill our land with housing alone, we continue and exasperate the exploitation of the people and environment of the rest of the world for short term gain as our population keeps growing regardless. To answer OPs question directly: capitalism is the reason we are not self sufficient.

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non-hyphenated_@reddit

>capitalism is the reason we are not self sufficient. So if I go look up the figures, non capitalist nations will top the list for sufficiency?

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Unique_Agency_4543@reddit

>our population keeps growing regardless. Our population isn't growing except due to immigration. For better or worse the birth rate in the poorer countries in the world is very high, much higher than in the west. You can say you want a stable or decreasing UK population so no immigration or low immigration, but you can't then say you care about the rest of the world suffering. Yes, lots of these people are suffering and they want to come here for a better life. Most of the land in the UK that can be farmed is farmed. Very little is built on. Very little is sitting empty. Capitalism is not the problem it's population density. The extent to which you deal with that problem depends on how accepting of immigration you are.

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Carrente@reddit

I mean I'm pretty sure "using land to house people" is actually very important given housing is a basic human right, that's not a capitalist imperative it's using limited resources to meet a basic need (shelter). And in fact we don't build enough housing *or* use land efficiently for farming! So that's great isn't it!

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Truewit_@reddit

Well population growth is also a capitalist imperative because labour is correlated to value. These issues are intertwined to the point that they’ve become almost invisible and indivisible. Housing people is important yes, but so is feeding those people. If we’re playing the game of what’s most important we might even say that the unsustainable nature of our food stock means we’re not only reliant on exploiting people in the global south for that food, but we’re also destroying their environment and the global environment as a consequence by having to travel all of that food and grow it unseasonably. Then we have to consider than not only is housing people densely ideal for capitalism, but keeping swathes of our unused land empty is also good for them because it is simply value appreciative as an asset on its own. Most of our empty land is privately owned. It could be used to feed us or house us but it isn’t. Capital is the fundamental underlying problem.

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TuMek3@reddit

Have a look at google maps and report back to us.

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Swift_Rz@reddit

I've been watching some farm YouTubers and they are paid by the government to not grow on a certain amount of acres and instead plant wildflower for the environment.

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McLeod3577@reddit

In a global economy, free market economies produce to what's called "economic advantage". Countries with warm climates can produce fruit and vegetables cheaper and more efficiently, for example. Global trade enables countries to specialise and then trade their goods for others produced cheaper elsewhere. This is how the global economy has worked for at least 100 years. Although we are reliant on many other countries, the system is probably more resilient than producing everything at home. We would only need one bad growing season and we'd be pretty fucked, since we wouldn't have developed global supply chains. The only way to provide all food from homegrown sources would be to completely industrialise farming, rip out all the hedgerows and have efficient field several square kilometers big. If you've ever driven past these in other countries, they are very boring and bleak. We would also not be able to let ground go fallow, so overuse of pesticides would be a big problem too.

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brilliantinemortal@reddit

I'm just finishing reading 'The Death of Grass' by John Christopher at the moment so this feels like an especially prescient question lol

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caeciliusinhorto@reddit

France has slightly less population than the UK but more than twice as much land; there's significantly more land available for agricultural use. It also has a better climate for growing things, and French people tend to stick more closely to their traditional food culture so I suspect there's less demand on exotic ingredients which cannot be grown in metropolitan France. Even if we grew enough calories to feed the population it would be incredibly difficult to produce e.g. the variety of fruits and vegetables year-round that British people are used to eating (and even in-season there are some exotic fruits that we simply wouldn't be able to grow in quantities anywhere near big enough to fulfill demand). Similarly, many spices would be much less available; we wouldn't have any coffee; tea would be a luxury for the very richest; wine would be much harder to obtain...

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OkThereBro@reddit

This is just a wild assumption and rambling. But surely it has some historical relation to kings, methods of control and power. The land wasnt always so barren, these days its like they've built the perfect prison island. If they wanted to they could cut off the food and we would all die in a week. Sounds too awfully convenient to be a coincidence. Given the nature of our landscape, it feels really intentionally desolated W

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Ok-Chest-7932@reddit

Small country big population. There are more people in the UK than the UK's amount of land could feed even if operating at high capacity. This is common in city states, they become dependent on global trade and prone to collapse if major catastrophes shut down said trade (see the bronze age collapse).

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Decimatedx@reddit

I am not convinced the UK is anywhere close to 60%. Years ago, experts were saying 40% and that is massively bulked up because importing raw food and packaging it counts as UK food production for the stats.

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Significant-Leek8483@reddit

Is 60% that bad? Considering we do export a lot.

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BarNo3385@reddit

Growing 90% of your food domestically means 90% of it is exposed to a single bad harvest or season. Getting 50% of your food from the world market means as long as its okay *somewhere* you have the infrastructure to procure and ship at least half your food supply. High domestic food production isnt a security or resilience benefit, quite the opposite.

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MattDubh@reddit

Because it has too many people. It relied on imported food 100 years ago, when the population was around half of now.

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LeastInsurance8578@reddit

Make that 200 years, the UK could produce enough food to feed the population but the diet would be pretty boring with not a lot of variety

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SillyDeersFloppyEars@reddit

Well we keep selling our established farmland for new build estates for one thing. Source: Just moved into a new build estate on farmland that's next to another farm now being built on, which itself is next to another farm earmarked for development. Same story up and down the country.

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KelticOrigin@reddit

The goverment are actively making it hard for farmers to make a profit so more farms are being sold for development.

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dwair@reddit

Most of our agricultural land is too flood prone, too steep or the earth is nutritionaly depleted to do much with. It's certainly not economically viable for the most part to do much with which is why we excel at pasture because grass is the only thing that will grow.

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krokadog@reddit

Because people don’t want to eat turnips all year.

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Future-Pomelo4222@reddit

Small island, most land unsuitable for crops, large population.

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CognitiveIlluminati@reddit

Climate, geography and land type/amount/quality. I doubt we’ve been self sufficient since 1700s. It’s more economical to sell other countries cars, services and electronics while we buy their bananas. We are completely self sufficient in wheat, oats, lamb, cabbage and milk. Perhaps the better question is what would improve food security, stability and resilience for the UK. Perhaps being part of some sort of international body that reduces trade barriers and helps protect from international food price shocks.

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Master-Trick2850@reddit

If you have a heavy focus on self grown food then bad harvests pushes up your price and inflation like mad. Japan is one example one example where repeated bad rice harvests have pushed their prices up and squeezed supplies

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Pop_Crackle@reddit

Bad harvest can have an impact if you import food too. Japan can survive on other agricultural products but the citizens really want to eat one type that has bad harvest - rice.

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RevenantSith@reddit

Because we is a teeny island. Unless we start bulldozing housing estates there isn’t really much more suitable land going. A lot of our farmland is in stuff like the moors where pretty much you can only use for sheep grazing. We produce lots of stuff like seafood, but unless people move to a fish only diet or something that’s not really going to work out

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ArapileanDreams@reddit

The Netherlands is tiny though, has 18m population and is one of the largest food exporters in the world.

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SoggyWotsits@reddit

There’s plenty of farmland at the moment. Whether it remains that way in the future is another question. The government’s [compulsory purchase](https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/compensation-for-the-compulsory-purchase-of-land/) below market value policy (their idea of a fair price is not a fair price), and inheritance tax changes will see more and more farmland being built on.

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saccerzd@reddit

A very small percentage of the UK is covered in housing. In one of the counties in the south east, there is more land used for golf courses than housing, IIRC

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surreyade@reddit

Surrey.

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drplokta@reddit

We like to support small farmers, who don’t have the capital to be productive. Also, people don’t like seeing the countryside covered with greenhouses, which is what you need for high yields and to grow a good range of produce north of 50°.

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NuclearCleanUp1@reddit

Calories is not what farmers sell or consumers sell. They sell and we buy food. People like meat, milk, cheese and butter. Most of our land and imported food is for meat and dairy products. At the start of WW2 the UK produced 60% of the food it consumed. The department of food pushed people to eat more vegetables and potatoes. Carrots, potatoes, cabbages, peas and turnips all grow well in the British climate and soil. Potatoes are the most efficient food stuff to grow, calories per acre but people cannot eat that many potatoes. They can eat a lot of potatoes but not THAT MANY. People want fresh milk, cheese, butter, pork, chicken, beef and lamb. Animals are a very inefficient way of making food. They do a very bad job of converting calories into meat and dairy, so they require a lot of land, grass, soy and more.

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Biene2019@reddit

Something I haven't seen mentioned in other comments yet: we produce a hilarious (sad) amount of food waste. Around 10 million tons of food gets thrown away each year in the UK alone, enough to feed 30 million people. According to the statistics I just googled, 6.5 million of that would have been fine to eat still. The UK doesn't have a food production issue but a throw away culture issue. https://www.wastemanaged.co.uk/our-news/food-waste/food-waste-facts-statistics/

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lankyno8@reddit

France is roughly double the size of the UK for roughly the same population for one

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SchoolForSedition@reddit

It’s rather cold. We used to grow a lot of root veg but now we fancy aubergines.

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Acrobatic_Extent_360@reddit

I guess nobody loves turnips

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RecentTwo544@reddit

Just to pick up on this as no one else seems to have done so yet - >we are extremely reliant on over countries for energy too Are we? [https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/](https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/) We have our own wind, solar, nuclear, and gas (most of which comes from the North Sea). We even burn biomass (Drax) and have limited hydro. As I write this, we're importing 5% from France (mainly excess nuclear as the French have loads and they run flat out) and 3% from Norway (mainly excess hydro) but we're currently *exporting* to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Ireland. And that's with no solar and high demand, being 6pm in winter.

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tegularius00@reddit

Why do you think 60% is too low? Too low for what? Why would we suddenly stop importing food? Of course we \*could\* produce more food, but what would we have to stop doing instead? And would it be cheaper or more expensive to produce that extra food, instead of importing it? France and Germany are also much bigger countries with a higher proportion of land suitable for agriculture.

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inide@reddit

Overpopulation.

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SkarKrow@reddit

Because all the agricultural land is dedicated to fucking sheep

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MeghanSOS@reddit

were a smaller country than those countries also the British government doesn't care about farmers

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Trowsyrs@reddit

I would be interested to know if the UK does have enough food production capacity if a) we ate to a sufficiency level and b) we had a diet based on what we can grow in the UK. Either that or Solyent Green

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TheRadishBros@reddit

I suspect if we shifted to a heavily potato-based diet we might be able to feed everybody.

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Jetstream-Sam@reddit

I think if major changes were made, like all available land was converted for growing food, we minimise animal feed and grow as many calories as possible, have a rationing system so it's fair, have a "Dig for victory" campaign where anyone who still has a garden grows what they can, and maybe there's something like chickens distributed for them to forage in gardens and provide free eggs from insect protein, we might pull through. Fussy buggers who can only eat iceland hot dog crust pizzas and chicken nuggets are probably going to have to make some changes though I volunteer at a food bank and I've always thought there should be a national food stockpile like in the US. The supermarkets near us throw away full untouched pallets of canned food just because they're doing a shop reorganisation so just mandating the government keeps those and stores them in a salt mine or something would end up with tons of food saving a week for basically free. Granted some of those cans are of really weird stuff but calories are calories, and in an apocalyptic scenario people would be glad for anything, even if it is a meal of Smash, Sweetcorn and canned meatballs.

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Calm-Treacle8677@reddit

I’m sure it could be self sufficient, seafood alone could probably pick up the slack

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fundytech@reddit

Our country doesn’t have the resources to be self sufficient in almost any sector. The truth is we are only in the place we’re in because our country looted half of the undeveloped world. We are a relatively tiny country with little natural resources. Add on top of that a huge population for a country our size and you get somewhere that’s unsustainable on their own.

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Own-Helicopter-5558@reddit

Awful political policy over several decades - If there was a significant naval conflict the UK would be in famine.

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dazedan_confused@reddit

Have you seen the shit we can produce here? You want potatoes and beans?

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External-Bet-2375@reddit

Look at a map to compare size and topography/climate of these various countries and then compare to the population of those countries. It's true we could produce a lot more fruit and veg by farming much more intensively under glasshouses/polytunnels like in the Netherlands or parts of Spain but people don't want the countryside to look like this. https://maps.app.goo.gl/6QYWCQpZYuoj7ErU6

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Front_Mention@reddit

Very anecdotal, but a farmer near where I grew up used to have an orchid of plum trees, one year he had a bad harvest due to frost the supplier he sold to bought from anorak with more reliability on yield. Those plum trees have now been cut down and turned into a grain field. Variability with globalisation seems to punish risk taking with variable yields for reliability

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Boboshady@reddit

We're a tiny island so will always be a net importer, we're also not able to grow a lot of stuff in huge quantities due to our climate. We're good at seafood and root vegetables though, so maybe we could all just swap to fish pie for every meal (though we export a lot of our seafood). We've also been deprioritising farming for decades, and things like leaving the EU have removed subsidies that propped up a noticeable amount of farming, as well as allowing big corps to basically swallow up all the profit from what our farmers produce, it's becoming more and more unprofitable a job that remains as backbreaking as ever. Then you have governments like Boris Johnson's Conservatives, who were so anti-farming that he actually went on record suggesting farmers should diversify into offering glamping instead of growing food, if they wanted to make money. When the government itself wants the country to be an importer of food, and an exporter of services, there's not much change a industry that depends on subsidies can do to survive, really. There are benefits to what's happening, of course, and you could look at places like Singapore which imports over 90% of it's food, though it's aiming to use extremely modernised farming methods to hit 30% of domestic production by 2030, presumably as it recognises the risks around being too dependent on external sources.

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Azyall@reddit

Most simple answer: not enough free land to produce the food we need to feed the people we have. Additional factors: people criticise farmers for complaining about how little return they get for the products they produce, but it's true. Therefore there is little or no incentive to take up farming if it isn't already the family business.

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Pockysocks@reddit

Small island. Lots of people. We could be self sufficient if we stuck to just the food we can produce here but that's boring and more expensive than importing.

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Independent-Try4352@reddit

The UK hasn't been self sufficient in food since at least the Napoleonic wars, hence rationing and 'dig for victory' in WW2. It's a mix of things being cheaper to import, consumer preference for fruit etc all year round, lack of support for UK farming, lack of decent wages and hence labour in the agricultural sector, unproductive land and poor weather, plus development of farmland for housing and solar farms.

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myblankpage@reddit

Part of that choice is prioritising Net Zero. I have some of the most productive arable land in the world. Currently not being cultivated for crops as eco-subsidies pay better. And yes, we're just importing instead, so it's expensive greenwashing.

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greatdrams23@reddit

Germany has more land (even after accounting for their greater population). They also have more land suitable for farming, and have vast fertile plains that are great for farming.

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stig316@reddit

Its just simply cheaper to import food and we have great variety and low cost food options in the UK. Otherwise we would be mainly eating classic 'British Foods' seasonally.

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deafandyy@reddit

Because every farmers field we build fucking houses on.

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ProfessorChaos213@reddit

Every single bit of fresh meat you buy and eat is reared and killed in this country

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optimo_mas_fina@reddit

We eat lots of stuff not native to the UK. So we import. If we all wanted to live on beef and potatos then sure we could, but we are a varied bunch with varied diets, and demands for produce out of season..

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Unique_Agency_4543@reddit

It's basically down to population density. We're more densely populated than any of the other countries you listed. There's only so much food we can grow on our little island and a lot of people to feed. 60% is quite low but if there were a war and we had no imports then we could probably survive by eating slightly less and eating more vegetarian food. Of course any war that close to home might turn nuclear quite fast and then food will be the least of our worries.

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mcf74@reddit

Absolutely. The fucking internet will be down. Hungry and no content.

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IhaveaDoberman@reddit

Germany is almost 50% larger than the UK, but the population is only around 9% larger.

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Varrich92@reddit

I wouldn’t worry about it much. The last time the UK was self sufficient in food was about 200 years ago.

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matomo23@reddit

We don’t focus on that. UK supermarkets mostly look at price, and they’re a decent amount cheaper than supermarkets on the continent for that reason. They just get the cheapest food they can.

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Emergency_Summer_397@reddit

We were self sufficient in medieval times, oh apart from about 1 year in every 4 when harvests failed and there was a famine. Fancy going back to that? It’ll be even more fun in a world of climate change. Self sufficiency at the individual country level is a pipe dream and doesn’t make sense. It’s why we have global food trade networks. On a larger scale, eg European scale, it could work - enough landscape diversity and good harvests in one region might just about balance out bad in other regions most years. Sell any surplus internationally. Now, if only there were a kind of European trading block we could join to get this set up…

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Meowskiiii@reddit

There are only 8 countries with a higher score than us, what are you on about?

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No_Promotion_65@reddit

We haven’t been for a long long time a lot of which was to do with both the empire and our use of Argentina as a market garden tbh

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luala@reddit

It’s probably cheaper to pay (for example) polish agricultural wages + a polish lorry drivers fees and petrol to bring (for example) wheat here rather than pay UK agricultural wages. We’re also one of the most densely populated countries in Europe so theres lots of competition for land, and not all of it is particularly for farming. Our energy costs are also high so energy-intensive foods may not be as economical to grow here compared to shipping them from a country with cheaper energy or just more sun/heat. I understand that we COULD feed the population of either England or the UK (I can’t remember which) from Lincolnshire’s output alone. But that would mean potatoes not avocados, which isn’t to modern tastes.

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Top-Spinach-9832@reddit

Because people who throw a tantrum about food prices and cost of living.

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ToManyTabsOpen@reddit

The simple answer for a lot of food it is more economical to buy it from the Netherlands and Spain.

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Exact-Put-6961@reddit

Uk is an open trading economy, it buys from the world.

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MisterD90x@reddit

Farmers are not getting as much support and grants as they used to back in the EU days, the land is valuable to developers and farmers can't sustain costs so they end up selling parts (at least that's what my farmer friend has said about the issue of rising costs etc)

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Early_Enthusiasm_787@reddit

Because land is too valuable and our food is plain

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SlimyBone@reddit

We sell a LOT of our seafood.

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CasticSpunt@reddit

The UK is a failed state as of now, the current and previous governments have been shambolic.

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DaveBeBad@reddit

We’ve not been self sufficient for food since the Industrial Revolution - and possibly not since the Bronze Age.

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