Third, I’d ask why British farmers are permitted to do things like raise meat. If there is truly an overriding concern about the population starving due to lack of ability to trade, then one wants to maximize the caloric output of existing British farmland, and one of the most-effective way to do that is to produce grain rather than meat; producing meat requires a lot of wasted potential calories. I remember once reading a statistic that if the US did nothing other than become vegetarian, that the surplus generated alone could feed all of Europe. Similarly, maximizing the ability of British agriculture to feed the British public involves shifting over fully to grain – and more-generally, plant production. One could obtain meat from abroad, and meat would be a pleasant, but unnecessary luxury that could be readily foregone in the event of our highly-implausible blockade. Now, I guarantee you that British agricultural associations are not going to like that approach at all, because it will make British beef farmers unhappy, but if there truly is the danger that Save British Farming is proposing, then that is a more-effective solution than the one that they are proposing.
But maybe Save British Farming is just grain farmers? Let’s look at their website. Ooop, it’s complaining about the Australia-UK trade agreement. And looks like they’ve got pictures of sheep next to their “being flooded by foreign cheap food” bit. And Australia is a huge sheepmeat producer. And it looks like the major concern about that trade agreement was from beef and sheep farmers: “The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned that freeing up the UK-Australian trade in meat will lead to hundreds of British cow and sheep breeders going out of business.”
The woman complaining is Liz Webster. If we look at her Twitter (well, X) feed, she’s complaining about competition for British beef producers: “Wonder why Australian beef is cheaper than British beef? The video on the left is 🇦🇺 govt funded feedlot houses 70,000 animals fed only grain to fatten quicker. Our British cattle on the right graze across acres with plenty of trees for shade. Each has a passport.”
She’s not worried about British food security. She might be worried about the economic viability of her business, but that’s a different matter.
EDIT: Okay, there’s one more possible scenario. I’m not totally being fair. It is hypothetically possible that if a sufficiently-large chunk of the world’s food producers decided to embargo the UK, to simply voluntarily refuse to trade with the UK, and then maybe put economic pressure on all the other countries sufficient to keep them from doing so, then they hypothetically could starve out the UK. Even in cases where sanctions have been imposed, food is generally allowed in, like with Iran. And food is a commodity, not easy to do that, but hypothetically, it could indeed happen.
In international politics, food power is the use of agriculture as a means of political control whereby one nation or group of nations offers or withholds commodities from another nation or group of nations in order to manipulate behavior. Its potential use as a weapon was recognised after OPEC’s earlier use of oil as a political weapon.
So, maybe that could be a concern. But…one significant caveat:
The four main nations that export enough agriculture to be able to exert food power are the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.[1]
So, basically, the UK’s closest allies, the rest of Five Eyes, would have to collectively decide that they were going to go and starve the UK and then set off to try to get the rest of the world to go along with it.
EDIT2: And let me add one more, final point. The UK today is a net food importer. About a third of British food is imported. If the aim is to domestically produce all food required, then – going back up to the question of why British farmers are permitted to produce meat today – I would ask why the pre-existing situation, one about which said farming groups have been quite happy, has not been producing complaints of “food security”.
Who would embargo Britain? Let me tell you: People with vested interests inside Britain. They then choose the most ideal scapegoat at the time in order to try to make the people think a certain way in order to further the agenda of the embargo creators.
Sometimes those with vested interests cock things up completely rather than achieve their goal, but it doesn’t matter much to those of us outside that club.
Things go missing, sideways, backwards or get more expensive regardless.
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Third, I’d ask why British farmers are permitted to do things like raise meat. If there is truly an overriding concern about the population starving due to lack of ability to trade, then one wants to maximize the caloric output of existing British farmland, and one of the most-effective way to do that is to produce grain rather than meat; producing meat requires a lot of wasted potential calories. I remember once reading a statistic that if the US did nothing other than become vegetarian, that the surplus generated alone could feed all of Europe. Similarly, maximizing the ability of British agriculture to feed the British public involves shifting over fully to grain – and more-generally, plant production. One could obtain meat from abroad, and meat would be a pleasant, but unnecessary luxury that could be readily foregone in the event of our highly-implausible blockade. Now, I guarantee you that British agricultural associations are not going to like that approach at all, because it will make British beef farmers unhappy, but if there truly is the danger that Save British Farming is proposing, then that is a more-effective solution than the one that they are proposing.
But maybe Save British Farming is just grain farmers? Let’s look at their website. Ooop, it’s complaining about the Australia-UK trade agreement. And looks like they’ve got pictures of sheep next to their “being flooded by foreign cheap food” bit. And Australia is a huge sheepmeat producer. And it looks like the major concern about that trade agreement was from beef and sheep farmers: “The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has warned that freeing up the UK-Australian trade in meat will lead to hundreds of British cow and sheep breeders going out of business.”
The woman complaining is Liz Webster. If we look at her Twitter (well, X) feed, she’s complaining about competition for British beef producers: “Wonder why Australian beef is cheaper than British beef? The video on the left is 🇦🇺 govt funded feedlot houses 70,000 animals fed only grain to fatten quicker. Our British cattle on the right graze across acres with plenty of trees for shade. Each has a passport.”
She’s not worried about British food security. She might be worried about the economic viability of her business, but that’s a different matter.
EDIT: Okay, there’s one more possible scenario. I’m not totally being fair. It is hypothetically possible that if a sufficiently-large chunk of the world’s food producers decided to embargo the UK, to simply voluntarily refuse to trade with the UK, and then maybe put economic pressure on all the other countries sufficient to keep them from doing so, then they hypothetically could starve out the UK. Even in cases where sanctions have been imposed, food is generally allowed in, like with Iran. And food is a commodity, not easy to do that, but hypothetically, it could indeed happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_power
So, maybe that could be a concern. But…one significant caveat:
So, basically, the UK’s closest allies, the rest of Five Eyes, would have to collectively decide that they were going to go and starve the UK and then set off to try to get the rest of the world to go along with it.
EDIT2: And let me add one more, final point. The UK today is a net food importer. About a third of British food is imported. If the aim is to domestically produce all food required, then – going back up to the question of why British farmers are permitted to produce meat today – I would ask why the pre-existing situation, one about which said farming groups have been quite happy, has not been producing complaints of “food security”.
Who would embargo Britain? Let me tell you: People with vested interests inside Britain. They then choose the most ideal scapegoat at the time in order to try to make the people think a certain way in order to further the agenda of the embargo creators.
Sometimes those with vested interests cock things up completely rather than achieve their goal, but it doesn’t matter much to those of us outside that club.
Things go missing, sideways, backwards or get more expensive regardless.
Because British consumers rather like buying British meat and we aren’t in a centrally planned economy.
Farmers would rather there was some amount of food scarcity, that way they could fulfill as much as possible for as high a price as possible.