Let’s rewind 22 years to a boardroom coup and my departure from Mulberry – the company and brand which I had co-founded and devoted my life to.
I found myself surrounded by 300 acres of rich farmland, so what else is a man to do but decide to grow an obscure grain, known for its gentle, life-giving properties – spelt.
Fast forward another 20 years, to yet another financial crisis (I have weathered six in my life so far) and I now must sell the family’s manor house, home of 47 years; close down Sharpham Park in Somerset – my dedicated spelt cereal business with a £2m turnover at peak – and strip out the first-ever organic spelt mill in the UK.
During 53 years as an entrepreneur, I have experienced all the vagaries of the international marketplace: dealing in currency to hedge the company’s bets; working with every culture and nationality whilst developing products to satisfy fashionistas and foodies alike. I swapped handbags for flour bags, quickly discovering that profit margins were wafer thin in comparison.
So, my current anxiety at the state of our country’s food chain is possibly worth considering.
I find myself cheering for Jeremy Clarkson, who has done more for the general public’s understanding of farming and food production than any government initiative could have ever achieved. We both share the growing fear that Britain risks the sheer stupidity of failing to feed itself.
Remember those empty supermarket shelves last year when Valencia was hit by flooding? Suddenly our staple tomatoes and cucumbers were nowhere to be seen, due to the Spanish export ban.
Of course, their own country’s needs came first, but as in the Second World War when Wimbledon dug up its tennis courts to plant vegetables, what happens to the UK in the next crisis?
Meteorologists pointed to climate change as a key reason for the gravity of the event, as climatologist Freiderike Otto told Radio 4’s Today programme at the time.
As a nation, we import 42 per cent of the food we consume, the vast majority from our ex-partners in the EU. In comparison, Italy, the Netherlands and France all import less than 30 per cent of their food needs.
With further safety and security declarations due on 31 January, and the long-delayed import checks on fruit and veg imported from the EU coming into effect on 1 July, our food system has never been more fragile. Why is this not front-page news?
We have heard a great deal recently about the farmers’ inheritance tax and their threatened supermarket blockades. Now, with overwhelming support from almost every major supermarket chain, the government is running out of credibility for this seemingly ill-calculated tax policy.
How can a farmer be expected to make investments and pass on his farm to the next generation with this easily breached tax threshold hanging over his head?
Tesco’s chief commercial officer Ashwin Prasad has stated that the UK’s “future food security is at stake”. Posting on its website, Lidl said: “We are concerned that the recent changes to the inheritance tax regime will impact farmer and grower confidence and hold back the investment needed to build a resilient, productive and sustainable British food system.”
Who stands back and takes the overview of British food and orchestrates how we respond to demand, the world climate crisis, and how we use our land?
The government has many levers at its disposal to shore up our food security, from granting an energy discount to large-scale controlled environment agriculture (CEA) (as it does for poultry processing) to centralising planning controls and shifting incentives for food production as opposed to rewilding.
Add to this, the destructive cocktail of war and strife in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Korea and the ongoing famines in Ethiopia and Somalia; then shake it up with Trump’s latest tariff threats and the US’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord to a weak pound driving up the price of imports.
For the last 30 years, we have taken for granted the policy of cheap food, which was created by the Blair government– price has been the central core to our supermarket-driven food offer ever since. We have now reached a dangerous moment when, if we do not make some strategic decisions to change the way we choose, source and grow our food, there may be profound consequences.
The more we join up the dots, the more depressing and futile our outlook could become. When is someone in government going to pull together a pan-departmental policy to connect the health of our nation with our food policy?
Roger Saul was the co-founder of the Mulberry luxury fashion brand before becoming an organic farmer at Sharpham Park. He will lead the UK Food Security Panel at the ‘Sustainable Foods 2025 Event’ in London this week
