Maeve Cullinan Global Health Security Reporter

Food prices up 10 per cent by Christmas. Shortages of chicken and pork on supermarket shelves by June. Mass crop failures.

While it might sound like a scene plucked from the mid-1940s, these are plausible consequences of the war in Iran for Britain in the coming months, according to Whitehall’s latest emergency assessments and food policy experts.

The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since February, through which around a quarter of the world’s oil and gas is transported, has triggered an unprecedented crisis in global energy supply.

It has also significantly disrupted shipments of agricultural fertiliser – roughly a third is sourced from the Gulf and transported through the Strait.

With ceasefire negotiations still ongoing and no resolutions yet reached, officials warn that mounting pressure on these essential materials – vital for producing, processing, transporting and storing food – could soon trigger a global food crisis.

Britain is particularly vulnerable. In the coming months, analysts say the UK should brace for a squeeze on both the availability and affordability of critical food commodities.

“The resilience of our food system is a grave concern,” Anna Taylor, executive director of the Food Foundation, told The Telegraph. “We are highly vulnerable to international shocks, whether from rising energy prices or conflict, and that is already causing havoc in supply chains.”

But why is the UK, a country that once mounted one of the most effective rationing campaigns in history – transforming parks, front lawns and even the Tower of London’s moat into allotments under the “Dig for Victory” drive – now ill-equipped to withstand shocks to the global food system?

And what would it take to build a food system capable of doing so?

A ‘just-in-time’ system

Since the Second World War, the way Britain produces and procures its food has changed dramatically. What was once a food economy that relied mostly on domestic agriculture now sources almost half of its food from overseas.

Roughly 45-50 per cent of the UK’s supplies are imported, mostly from countries like Spain, the Netherlands, and France, as well as non-EU countries including Colombia, South Africa, and Brazil – where cheaper manufacturing costs mean food is significantly less expensive to produce.

Fresh produce is particularly globalised, with 85 per cent of Britain’s fruit and 55 per cent of its vegetables shipped in from abroad.

While this system provides a cheap and constant supply of food – seasonal or not – when disruption hits, the effects are felt keenly.

“The UK has moved to this system in the last several decades, and we have become less and less resilient – and the reason for that is to try to keep the cost of food down as low as possible,” said Prof Chris Elliott, a food safety expert at Queen’s University Belfast who led the government’s review into the 2013 horsemeat scandal.

Professor Tim Lang, author of the Just In Case report – a major review examining the UK’s food resilience for the National Preparedness Commission last year – was more damning.

“My conclusion was: Britain is complacent,” he told the Telegraph. “We’ve got almost half of our food that we don’t produce, where does it come from? It comes through airports, it comes through ports, it comes through road systems, and they’re all vulnerable.”

Threats to the food system are not just limited to international conflict and its knock-on effects on global markets. They include cyber-attacks, adverse climate events like floods or drought in the countries from which we import, and even food weaponisation – where commodities are deliberately withheld or attacked.

Another weakness is a lack of national food storage.

Britain runs a “just-in-time” system – by nature, it does not have much storage capacity, and instead is designed to flow.

In good times, it works: it maximises efficiency, minimises the costs of storage, and reduces waste by aligning supply closely with consumer demand.

“The system that we have designed since the end of the Second World War, the just-in-time system, has practically got rid of storage,” said Prof Lang. “When you go to a supermarket and check out, you think, well, ‘it’s adding up the bill’ – it is, but what it’s also doing is reordering.

“One fifth of the trucks on British roads are lorries of food, and half of them are empty because they go and they take it back. All of that food is constantly moving, which is why the supermarkets, which are the gatekeepers through to consumers, are constantly placing mass orders,” he said.

The system means that if the international supply of food were to slow or stop, Britain would have little by way of reserves.

It is also heavily dependent on the internet and software – when Marks and Spencer and the Co-Op were taken down by cyber-attacks last year, it had a knock-on effect for two months.

“Just in time doesn’t work anymore, because you’re always worried about your next batch of goods. Will it actually arrive or not arrive? So the whole economic basis of our food system in the UK is fundamentally flawed,” said Prof Elliot.

There are alternatives. Several nations – including Switzerland, Japan, and South Korea – have long maintained large stockpiles of foods like rice, wheat, and corn, often designed to last up to a year in case of an international emergency. China has long held the world’s only strategic pork reserve.

Others have started developing emergency grain reserves as a direct response to rising international tensions. Sweden announced in October it would invest $60 million to set up grain reserves for the first time since the Cold War.

These supplies are designed to feed Sweden’s entire population for three months, and account for what it says is a rising caloric need during wartime, calculated at 3,000 calories per person per day.

“This is about treating food security as seriously in emergencies as we do in normal times. And if that sounds unnecessary, it is worth remembering that exactly the same debates were happening in the 1930s,” said Prof Lang.

The worst case scenarios

As the ripple effects of the conflict in Iran reverberate across the globe, the urgency of rethinking this food system is mounting in Britain.

The Food and Drink Federation, an industry body which represents more than 12,000 UK manufacturers, had forecast food prices would rise by 10 per cent by December. But that estimate is already being revised.

Dr Lillian Dana, the federation’s Chief Economist, told The Telegraph that the original projection assumed the Strait would reopen by the end of April.

“It is now likely inflation will be significantly higher,” she said, warning that energy costs have reached levels businesses cannot absorb alone. For many households, the impact could be severe.

“The ability to cope with yet another food price hike is extremely limited,” said the Food Foundation’s Ms Taylor. “Already, 12 per cent of households are skipping meals. When budgets tighten further, people cut back on fruit and vegetables first, affecting their diet quality and their health. It’s an extremely negative cycle.”

Whitehall is also preparing for the possibility of food shortages. A leaked government stress test run last month, codenamed Exercise Turnstone, modelled a “reasonable worst-case scenario” in which the Strait remains closed into June.

The exercise – involving No 10, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence – looked at the cascading impacts the conflict could have across British industries from energy to transport, healthcare, and agriculture.

Among its findings was a sharp reduction in UK carbon dioxide production, potentially falling to just 18 per cent of current levels. CO₂ plays a critical role in the food system, from livestock slaughter to preserving fresh fruits and vegetables.

Under such conditions, officials warned that shortages of products, including chicken and pork, could begin appearing on supermarket shelves by the summer.

Meanwhile, the price of fertiliser – already up 40 per cent since the start of the year – is now reportedly prompting some British farmers to cut back during the critical planting season.

Horticultural producers face a particularly tight squeeze, hit by both soaring heating costs and rising fertiliser prices.

The result could be a reduction in the domestic supply of staples grown in the UK, like potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers, as well as fruits including strawberries and grapes.

‘A strategic weakness’

Making Britain’s food infrastructure more resilient will require investment, time, and coordination across government and sectors, but experts say it can be done.

Professor Lang said the UK needs legislation to guarantee food security, and in his report recommends introducing a “Food Resilience Act”. This would place a legal duty on the government to ensure the food system can feed the population.

“That may sound unusual, but at present we rely on market forces to feed people – the assumption that if you have money, you can simply buy food,” he said. “In a crisis, that breaks down. It is not just about income: money does not guarantee access when supply chains fail.

“We already have resilience structures for emergencies, coordinated through Local Resilience Forums. If my house burned down or an office were bombed, the ambulance, police and fire services would respond immediately – but food is not properly integrated into that system,” he said.

Other countries, including Sweden and Finland, have recognised this critical gap and introduced legal duties, as well as built strategic storage systems, to ensure supply during crises.

“We should do the same,” he said. “It should not be left to ad hoc arrangements that fade once a crisis passes – as happened after Covid, when lessons were not fully carried forward.”

The public also has a role to play. Countries like Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and Finland take a public health approach to food preparedness, offering clear guidance on how households can prepare for emergencies without triggering the kind of panic stockpiling seen during Covid.

Prof Lang said a dedicated body, accountable to the Cabinet Office, should be created to support long-term planning – encouraging people in both rural and urban areas to grow food, and working with the hospitality sector to develop contingency mass-catering capacity in times of crisis.

“Britain has an extraordinary outdoor catering industry,” he said. “We should be drawing on that expertise.

“At Glastonbury, for example, a temporary city of 300,000 to 400,000 people appears – and is fed. That is a vast logistical operation, built on the coordination of many small providers with significant experience. We need to understand and learn from that.”

Growing more food and feeding people with what is grown in their local area could also be part of the solution, as well as building robust storage facilities spread out across the country.

For instance, all the food from the nine supermarkets that operate in the UK are currently processed and stored in just 131 hubs.

“With conflicts we are seeing emerge around the world, things like drone warfare, this is a strategic weakness,” said Prof Lang. “This is not beyond humans to resolve – but it needs clarity and political leadership.”

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