Insights tariffs, a weaker pound and no warehouse space, the price of fresh produce could go through the roof. If you can find it at all. Last year, before the transition deadline was extended, the government did conduct wider risk assessments. When they were leaked, we discovered that it foresaw “potential consumer panic and food shortages”. This year, though the situation is greatly complicated by the pandemic, it seems to have decided that it’s best not to ask.
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s the problem confined to fresh food? With neither strategic food reserves nor a strategic risk assessment of warehouse capacity, I’m beginning to wonder. Without testing every link in the chain, the government has no grounds for dismissing the threat of an overall shortage. While it now seems almost certain that we will face a dearth of fresh fruit and vegetables, could there also be deficits of some kinds of frozen, tinned and dried food? Already, thanks to a combination of austerity and the coronavirus, plenty of people in the UK struggle to afford a good diet. According to the UN, a healthy diet costs five times as much as one that is merely adequate in terms of calories. The number of people using foodbanks this year has risen by nearly a half. Any interruption of supply will hit those in poverty first, and worst. When the government was challenged on this issue in par-
liament last year, it claimed it was “not responsible for the supply of food and drink to the population in an emergency”. That is up to “the industry”. In other words, little has changed since the Irish famine of the 1840s and the Indian famines of the 1870s. It’s the same reckless, uncaring attitude that has helped kill 50,000 people in the pandemic. Because we are leaving the single market and the customs union, the disruption is likely to
be brutal, whether or not a deal is struck. If Brexit causes further economic rupture, the shops are half-empty and even the foodbanks can’t find enough supplies, there is a real prospect of chronic hunger. But search as you may, you will find no one in government who gives a damn. CT George Monbiot is a columnist for the Guardian, where this article first appeared. His website is www.monbiot.com.
Sarah Anderson
Meatpackers and farmers team up
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or family farmers like Hans Breitenmoser, the odds of catching Covid-19 on the job are slim. Social distancing is not exactly a challenge when you’re farming more than 1,300 acres in rural Wisconsin. But Breitenmoser is one of many Wisconsin farmers who are showing solidarity with others in the food supply chain who are at the pandemic’s epicentre – meatpackers and food processing plant employees. According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network, more than 65,000 food production industry workers have tested positive for Covid-19, and at least 268 have died. Through the Wisconsin Farmers Union, Breitenmoser is part of
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a farmer-labour alliance calling for increased testing and other protections for these vulnerable workers, along with measures to insulate family farmers from pandemic-related economic losses. For Breitenmoser, who’s always lived on his family’s Lincoln County dairy and grain farm, joining forces with this heavily immigrant factory workforce makes total sense. “If you look at where value comes from and where the money goes in the food industry”, Breitenmoser told me, “I, as Joe Farmer, have more in common with Bob, the guy in the slaughtering plant, than I do with the CEO of a foreign agribusiness corporation”. While the CEOs are profiting,