I'm a farmer - even three days without crops would be a national emergency for our food system

Why? I heard a slogan a few years ago that, at the time, seemed a bit alarmist: 'nine meals from anarchy.' What it means is that if there were a sudden and unexpected interruption to our food supplies, it would only take about three days for all of us in Britain to be in serious trouble. That’s because nearly all the food we eat today is supplied to us using what’s called a 'just in time' distribution system.

This system is mostly organised by supermarkets. Supermarkets don’t like sitting on lots of stock, so they actively minimise storage needs. This works perfectly as long as nothing goes wrong.

But imagine a sudden interruption. A weather event, a war or unexpected political development (do all those sound rather familiar right now?), or even a cyber attack on our data centres. Any of these could have a catastrophic effect on our vital need to eat.

It nearly came to that a few years ago, in 2014, when a big snowstorm hit the UK. On our farm in West Wales, the road was submerged in drifts. I was in London for a meeting when I got a message from my wife: 'You'd better go to a supermarket, because we might be snowed in for a few days - if you can even get back to us.' So I went to Tesco in Camden. It was minus 14 outside, but inside the store it was 20-odd degrees, the shelves were full of every imaginable food and everything seemed completely normal. I stocked up my basket and headed back to the farm in Wales, only to find the snow was so bad that I was forced to abandon the shopping and walk the last mile. The next day, I battled back through the snow on a quad bike to rescue our supplies.

A few days later, the snow melted and distribution to the supermarkets continued as normal. But I subsequently heard that if the snow had gone on for just two or three more days, it would have been a national emergency.

All this begs the question: are we now prepared for these sudden shocks? Shocks that are more likely than ever because of factors such as El Niño, the Ukraine war, or the effects of the recent summer drought. Taken together, these pressures already mean this year could prove to be one of the most dangerous yet for our ability to feed ourselves here in the UK.

You might think it odd, but on our farm, we think about food security every day. We are trying to be self-sufficient by feeding our animals with grass, hay and silage which is home-produced, growing carrots for schools in West Wales in a project called Welsh Veg in Schools, and making cheese from the milk of our 90-strong dairy herd, which means we have 30 tonnes of cheddar with a shelf life of a year, stored in a barn.

This system, however, is very much an exception. Most modern farmers are now commodity slaves, captive to the tyranny of a ubiquitous cheap-food production line; powerless to get off the treadmill of industrial agriculture and heavily centralised distribution.

Interestingly, the government is suddenly paying attention to some of these issues. They may be straws in the wind, but it has come to the new Prime Minister's attention - no doubt in part due to this summer’s drought and the ongoing problems in the Strait of Hormuz - that the current ‘just in time’ system could pose real problems when it comes to national food security. There is a phrase, 'an army marches on its stomach', but where would the food that soldiers eat be grown, and how vulnerable would that supply be to some of the events I've mentioned, or even a hostile intervention from an enemy?

Even migration, one of the biggest issues on today’s political agenda, has its roots in food security. Ask yourself what would make you abandon everything you know, travel halfway across the world, and then risk your life in a boat crossing the Channel to reach a country where you think you might be safer? One answer is conflict, but the other is food. The war in Syria had its roots in famine, and many migrants from Africa are on the move because the arid, drought-stricken lands where they used to live can no longer sustain them or their families with reliable sources of staple food.

Food security is not some abstract term which only governments need to worry about. It is the capacity of a nation, a region, a community or an individual to be able to access reliable and sustainable sources of food, come flood, tempest or war - and the truth is, this access is now threatened on multiple fronts for all of us.

The antidote to this situation is to take action - from the ground up. Each of us needs to ask ourselves - where does our food come from? If the answer is that we have no idea (beyond the supermarket shelf), then it probably comes from another country, produced by some anonymous farmer who cares about us no more than we care about them. We urgently need to replace that story with one where we have some sense of the farmer, grower, or local community our food comes from, and where we choose to support those local systems with our hard-earned cash.

It sounds simple, and yet it isn't. During my farming lifetime, we have destroyed much of the localised infrastructure that used to enable us to eat local food from local farmers, things like the packhouses, the small dairy farms, the abattoirs. I could go on, but the relentless push towards centralisation and efficiency has swept away the latticework of local infrastructure. A system which now seems rather fragile.

If you ask a supermarket boss why they have done this, they will say they have no choice, and it doesn’t matter where the food they sell comes from, as long as it’s there on the shelf. It's time to challenge that proposition, in the name of a more secure food future for our children and us.

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Patrick Holden is founder and CEO of the Sustainable Food Trust, whose mission is to work internationally to accelerate the transition towards more sustainable food and farming systems.

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