Britain importing too much, growing too little food

The balance of UK food imports and exports is all wrong, says a new report, posing a threat to British diets.

Britain is leaving itself dangerously exposed as it increasingly relies on imports of fruit and vegetables, according to a report out this morning.

Land being used to grow fruit has fallen by 35% in the UK since 1986 and for vegetables by 26%, says Horticulture in the UK, from the Food Research Collaboration (FRC) based at City University London.

Combined vegetable and fruit production has fallen by 27% since 1986. While the report accepts that the more exotic fruits cannot be grown in the UK economically, it says that there have also been serious drops in production of traditionally home-grown crops such as mushrooms, lettuce, brassicas, apples and pears.

The authors claim that this not only puts the UK at risk from failed foreign harvests, but also notes that the price of fruit in the UK has gone up by 26% and vegetables by 27% between 2007 and 2013. At the same time as production has gone overseas, Britons are also eating a less healthy diet, with just 25% of males and 28% of females eating their recommended five portions of fruit and vegetable per day, down from 2006.

The report drew particular attention to apple orchards, which have declined from 12,800 hectares in 1986 to 5,300 today, and plum trees, down from 2,400 to 750 hectares.

The trade gap in horticulture is £7.8billion per year, with fruit and vegetables making up by far the bulk of food imports to the UK. It isn’t all one way, but the authors of the report, Tim Lang and Victoria Schoen, highlight how Britain imports the healthy stuff and exports the junk and alcohol: “We worry that government strategy looks a bit like allowing Europe to feed the UK with good healthy produce – fruit and veg – while our food industry exports less desirable elements – alcohol and over-processed, sugary, fatty foods.”

Indeed a government report last year shows the success of Britain’s 2,500 food exporters, who managed to sell £48million of wine to France, £15million of British biscuits to Germany, £10million of chocolate to Switzerland and £147million of beer to the US.

With the FRC report highlighting the risk to overseas harvests from drought and flooding, you can add currency risk to that mix too. The pound has fallen by 7.6% against the trade-weighted index of foreign currencies in the past six months, making imports more expensive. If the risk of Brexit troubles the markets further, they are likely to get pricier.