The UK is at high risk of a food crisis if the government does not act fast and support farmers, according to the NFU's new vice president David Exwood. In a speech at the Royal Bath & West Show, he stressed that the closeness of war and the threat of a global food crisis were being compounded as consumption continued to climb.
"We don't know what a food crisis is going to look like or what shape it might take," Mr. Exwood said at the event on 2 June. "But we know that food doesn't come out of thin air, and it's a hard thing to produce - now we have the perfect storm of global production problems and political crisis.
"Food security and strategic supply matters: It's unlikely we're going to run out of food on the shelves, but what will be available, and the price of it, we still don't really know." Farming in the current climate of volatility and uncertainty was challenging – heightened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he added.
"The serious war in Europe has changed the landscape. We have to think about those farmers and what people are going through not so very far away." The government's U-turn on its farming stance had caused frustration: "Three or four years ago, Michael Gove said that food was not a public good, it wasn't the business of the government, that it was all about the environment.
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