Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

cultivation
Shrinking future?
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UK food production is set to decline in the medium term, due to a number of factors.

The first is that farmland is going out of production and is being sold off to non-farmers. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) is in a separate running battle over government plans to impose inheritance tax on farms, neither side conceding any ground in a fiercely argued war of words. Over the past year, 400,000 hectares of farmland has been taken out of production and will never be recoverable as farmland. Prime minister Keir Starmer concedes that inheritance tax can have a significant impact, but argues that tax efficient strategies will keep farms in business. “That’s why I am absolutely confident the vast majority of farms and farmers will not be affected by this,” he told journalists. “It’s important for us to keep communicating how that works. Over the £3m, it’s then 20% rather than the usual rate (40%) and it’s payable over 10 years.” However, these figures only apply to farms passing from one generation to the next, which is no longer a reliable assumption to make. What is more, given the high average age of UK farmers, there will be less chance of the gaps between generations being as long as 10 years.

crunchy numbers cultivation
Commodity price rises will be hard to swallow
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With coffee trading at over USD 4 / lb and cocoa prices hovering around GBP 9,000 / ton, traders are preparing for an increasingly stormy market. Over the past year, supply chain experts have logged a growing number of unseasonally hot weather episodes that have been followed by recent sharp rises in commodity prices. Coffee, in particular, is vulnerable to extreme conditions: the first coffee trees were found fruiting in the mid-height levels of a rain forest canopy and their modern descendants have not adapted well to growing conditions on open ground.

There are product prices that are monitored closely by retailers, which earn high margins, such as orange juice, butter or beef. The theory is that while customers are still buying products in these categories, consumer demand is intact. More problematic is the availability of a raw material like sunflower oil, a major crop in Ukraine and Bulgaria. With Ukrainian crops hit by war as well as drought last year, a wide range of food manufacturing businesses have seen sunflower oil price rises of 50% and more. It does not take many ingredient prices to start moving upwards for life to become very hard for any business that supplies multiple retailers, who systematically refuse to countenance price increases.

crunchy numbers royal-commission
Open for business
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The Royal Commission on Food Prices opened on Wednesday December 10, took evidence over four days, shut down over Christmas, reconvening on New Year’s Eve and worked on New Year’s Day. At this stage in the proceedings, it is worth emphasising that prices will be quoted at face value and that the historical value of the pound was constantly changing throughout these years. There may be instances when particularly clear or striking examples occur, in which case they will be covered.

The first port of call for official figures is the Board of Trade. Working from its 1907 census of production, the prewar economy was valued at around two billion pounds (2 x 10 to the power of nine). This figure is described as “…the real income of the United Kingdom at the time to which that inquiry related.” There are a number of categories for goods consumed, each relating to the number of companies the goods went through to reach the end user: “…it was estimated that [the] charges of distribution, including the cost of transport amounted to something between one-half and two-thirds of the value of the goods at the place of production or importation.”

The aggregate value of agricultural imports (ie including some non-food products eg seeds, plants, flowers) at this time was £531,900,000, incurring £63,000,000 in customs duty and raising the customs value (in its current usage) to £595,000,000 before the goods go on to end users.

royal-commission
Money talks
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Sir Leo Chiozza Money was born in Italy in 1870 to an Anglo-Italian father and an English mother. The family moved to England in the 1890s. He worked as a journalist, wrote books on economics and earned a reputation for incisive statistical analysis. He worked for Lloyd George as a parliamentary secretary, before becoming a junior minister towards the end of the war. Born Leone Giorgio Chiozza, he added “Money” to his name, making it less foreign for English speakers to pronounce. For those among you who think “Sir Money” is a wind-up, visit this Wikipedia page.

The years around the turn of the 20th century were filled with books and other publications. Titles included British Trade and the Zollverein Issue (1902); Elements of the Fiscal Problem (1903); Riches and Poverty (1905). Money was an unswerving advocate free trade, arguing that imperial powers could not afford to give tariff preferences to the colonies, because the colonies would not be able “…to supply them (the imperialists) in sufficient quantities to support our industries and people.” It makes you wonder how poor countries survived before their resources were discovered and exploited by rich invaders.

Money’s evidence to the commission started (para 1) by identifying a growing world population and higher standards of living as a cause of rising prices. War has a very powerful impact on inflation in its own right, not least due to its disruption to transport and commercial activity in general. Money cites the historic rise of British wheat prices, (para 2) from 22 shillings a quarter in 1894 to 34 shillings a quarter in 1914. This inflation is judged to be serious rather than “profiteering” (para 3) and Money describes the situation as “precarious in peace and desperate in war.”

The UK was lucky to get through the first world war, when its supply chains came under fire (para 4) from submarines and other vessels that were being developed. Britain could not and should not expect to feed itself on imported food at peace or at war (para 5). This is a valid point, coming as it does with a call to renew the country’s agricultural system. More than just a good thing, (para 6) it is “… of great social and industrial importance.” He develops this theme (para 7) and argues that scaling up agricultural production will remove middlemen from supply chains and lead to cheaper retail prices. Nice try, but wide of the mark. Likewise, his proposition that surpluses from British dominions and possessions (para 8) should be bought up for sale in the UK begs a number of questions, such as who decides what is surplus or not. The notion that a loaf might be made up of “partly of relatively dear home-grown wheat and relatively cheap Colonial and foreign wheat…” is fanciful at best. As is the suggestion that Money’s plan would resolve issues around land tenure and the agricultural wage (para 9).

Money proposes a ministry to manage the price components for the nation’s food supply (para 10). While the government did indeed establish a food ministry as Europe slipped back into war, its purpose was to ensure there was food to eat rather than numbers to crunch. Like many other economists, Money is quick to point out that what applies in one sector of the economy can probably be re-used and applied elsewhere (para 12). It is also an efficient way of spreading any policy shortcomings from one sector to another.

domestication draft animals food production
Horse sense
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A cornerstone of Urban Food Chains crystallised this evening. Fundamental to the structure of a supply chain is the basic unit of transport and energy. Taking three major themes of this blog, let’s unpack the topic. First, before the dawn of time, generations of early agriculturists worked for millennia to domesticate species and crops that we would recognise today. They also tamed fire, an evolutionary trump card. Their lasting achievement was to breed forerunners of today’s strategic ungulates: cows, pigs, sheep and horses. Fast forward to the early twentieth century, when the first world war slaughtered millions of draft animals.

This high tech cull of horses, in particular, damaged the bedrock of the agricultural world. Livestock numbers would take decades to restore, if indeed there was either the economic resources or the political will to do so. The first world war was a reset that made way for change on a global scale, for humans and animals alike. Thousands of years spent establishing stable working relationships turned to dust in the heat of battle.

The penny dropped when I read Christopher Turnor, an author of the time, complaining that the UK had too many pastures, they were blocking food production. The origins of all this empty grassland are to be found in Edwardian England, but the wartime cull of draft animals accelerated the trend. The rest is not so much history as a race to plug the economic gaps left by the ravages of war.

cultivation domestication fish pre-history raw
Food values
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To paraphrase Saint John, in the beginning was the meal. And the meal was with God…

We live in a world with more explanations than questions, more doubts than answers, more belief than knowledge. What sustains us is an unseen chain of events that conspire to make human life happen, whatever it takes. Our dependence on this process is total. Welcome to the world of food.

Our shared origins go back to the beginning of time before crops or livestock had been domesticated. There is general agreement once hominids had domesticated fire — tamed is probably a better word — there was a further four to six millennia before domesticated animals and crops emerged on the scene. Scholars may disagree over when this change came about, but we can be sure that until it was a fait accompli, everything else in the story of civilisation was on hold. There are quibbles about when exactly such a change can taken as read, but everybody is counting in millennia.

The rest is history. The trouble with history is its dependence on written records and sometimes incorrect attribution of artefacts. The reason we know so little about early agrarian populations is because they had neither written records nor surviving artefacts to bear witness to their passing. This is a pity, since what we do know about these groups is that they lived in harmony with nature and were environmentally enlightened. We are indebted to some of the world’s most dedicated and skillful archaeologists, who have traced the remains of villages that were built in the trackless alluvial wetlands. At this time, hominids and animals fed future generations of flora and fauna. Man was still bound to the laws of nature at this time.

When the world’s first states emerged, they were expressions of an agrarian social structure. Their dealings with the world around them were probably more extensive than we will ever know. What matters is that we learn and understand from such scraps as we can glean, to focus on value without being diverted by units of account.

datacrumb fish
It’s a wrap
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Researchers at Portland State University (PSU) have confirmed high levels of microplastics in five species of wild fish caught inshore by local fishermen. Some 180 out of 182 samples analysed for the study showed signs of contamination by microplastics, which can be persistent and harmful to many species, including humans.

crunchy numbers datacrumb
Fewer shops, fading footfall, future gloom?
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Up and down the UK, we see Big Issue vendors on the high streets of Britain, clutching a bundles of magazines in a bid to sell an incisive vision of consumer society. As an example of the high standards of news writing that fills the pages of the magazine, issue 1060 published at the end of January carries a well-researched snapshot of the decline that is tightening its grip on British high streets and shopping centres. A downpage panel records the 2.2% year on year drop in footfall, as fewer shoppers venture out in 2024. Some 13,500 shops closed during the year, nearly one third more than the previous year’s 10,494 retail closures. This averages 37 shops closing every day, according to the Centre for Retail Research. Figures from the Altus Group record that there are now 38,989 pubs still trading in the UK, after 400 closed in 2024. Some of this decline could be laid at the feet of online shoppers, but the figures tell a story of dwindling economic activity.