There’s a good reason we really don’t want to go all self-sufficient in food you know:
Food prices will soar in the coming months after the
recent flooding wiped out huge swathes of the country’s crops, experts
warned yesterday.
A predicted shortage of
vegetables – including potatoes and peas, and cereals such as wheat –
is likely to cause manufacturers and retailers to push their prices up
and increase food-price inflation.
Fields in prime
vegetable growing areas of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire remain under
water and only an extended dry period will give farmers any hope of
salvaging this year’s crop.
Imagine back a thousand years or so, before we had a national food market. (As A Farewell to Alms points out, we’ve had a national wheat market since 1200 AD) Crop failures of that nature would lead to starvation in the affected areas. A secure and robust food supply system is one in which we get food from all over the world, meaning that such things no longer happen: the crop failures always will, but we can stop the starvation.
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