Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

Advertisement
Brexit's legacy raw Turnor UK

Gratuitous ill will

peter 0

DEFRA has announced changes to entry checks for High Risk Feed Not (of) Animal Origin (HRFNAO) They took effect on January 1.

Britain imports about half its food, and has been a food importer for centuries. As a collection of islands, the British Isles (which does not include Ireland, by the way) is vulnerable to naval blockades when at war. The same holds in peace time, when it makes sense to offer competitively-priced port facilities. The Brexit preparations included a charge for imported goods to drive off the ferry and cross the marshalling yard, to leave the port. This thinly-disguised daylight robbery is called the Common User Charge (CUC) and gives those people with power in the UK government an opportunity to harass port operators around the country, without having to own up scoring an own goal.
 
In its early drafts, the CUC was expected to cost £100 or less; then less than £150. Every time the CUC charges were modified or increased, the DEFRA civil servants cranked up their revenue expectations. Exporters to the UK had trouble finding out when the CUC would be coming into force and, more worryingly, what they could expect to pay to use British ports.
 
The UK has a very diverse port sector, owned and operated by all sorts of organisations and businesses. Trading structures with centuries of history rub shoulders with modern commercial operators. Take a port like Dover, the entry point for the lion’s share of the UK’s food imports. 
 
The port was ganted a royal warrant in 1604 by James I, which transferred it to the town of Dover. It has been managed by a port trust ever since, until today it is one of the country’s largest ports.  
 
Ever since James signed Dover’s royal warrant, the town has had a free hand to manage and operate its port facilities as it sees fit. The crown has been excluded from the site — and it would appear that the UK government deeply resents the status quo. In a spectacular display of ill ill, DEFRA has taken the opportunity to take a side swipe at the businesses that pay good money to use the port.  
 
In mid-April, HMRC set a cat among the pigeons, announcing that CUC invoices would not be sent out until the end of July, just as the charge comes into force. Frantic enquiries from over-stretched company accountants went on to reveal that there would be no reference field on the CUC invoices that would enable invoices to be reliably checked against manifests before they are invoiced. To make matters worse, HMRC also informed importers that CUC invoices would revert to a four-week billing cycle, on July 30, when the first flush of CUC will also fall due, thereby engineering chaos for no good reason.
 
This deliberately provocative carry-on has fed a festering grudge. Like most ports run by a private trust in the UK, Dover is barred from using facilities and equipment as collateral when the port needs to raise money for capital investment. This requires an act of parliament. And a measure of tact.

Turnor UK UK economy

Crusty home truths

peter 0

In 1916, the UK was  growing a scant 20% of its total wheat needs. Bearing in mind that most people eat bread, it made the imported 80% of the ingredients for the nation’s bakery goods vulnerable to attacks from early German submarines. The rapid deployment of U-boats left the British vision of the Blue Water policy in tatters, as policymakers relinquished their once unshakeable belief in the Royal Navy’s invincibility. The country’s agriculture was trailing behind the Netherlands and Denmark, leaving unmet demand for cereals to be patched with shiploads of imports.  There was no lack of demand among the hungry cities – British consumers were spending some four hundred million pounds a year on food, a figure bandied about by Christopher Turnor, no less. 

The country’s disproportionately extensive grassland was not supporting beef production on a comparable scale to continental Europe. Could it be true, as some hardliners argued, that the fabric of British agriculture had been weakened by years of indifference of, among others, policymakers, but also by a shadowy network of traders, fixers and miscellaneous n’er-do-wells? While British livestock accounted for some 60% of meat consumed by the nation, no less than 80% of the UK’s foreign meat imports shipped from a single port in Argentina, by a single firm based in Chicago, oddly enough.

crunchy numbers cultivation haulage ship Turnor

Supply side risks

peter 0

The first world war forced ever greater rates of change than the old order would ever have imagined. Here is a collection of data curated by Christopher Turnor during the first world war and published in Our Food Supply: perils and remedies (Country Life 1916). Any prices quoted are face value at the time, without any subsequent adjustment for historical changes in value. Turnor does not go into detail on the sources of his data and its authenticity, but since he had the run of market information gathered by the Agriculture Board he is unlikely to have needed to look very far. The tables in this post are mostly scanned directly from Turnor’s book, with the intention of giving readers the opportunity to form a view on Turnor’s line of argument. I have made odd comments here or there, but I defer to the readers’ many and varied viewpoints, believing they are better served by sight of the original publication.

The production figures for cereals and potatoes over a 20-year time period are open to question, but the contrasting rates of change suggest that Germany had a strategic advantage in feeding its citizens over this period in its history. Sub-plot: Germany had little access to food grown in overseas colonies, so that supply chains were shorter and more effectively protected from military action.

It is a moot point as to whether a rural population of 20 million in Germany is going to be more productive than thirteen and a half million British empire citizens spread around the globe. There is no obvious equivalence, since resources, skills and infrastructure are not comparable.

Turnor was convinced that British agriculture was being held back by a high proportion of low-earning grass supporting too few grazing animals. Here is what he wrote in 1916:

“In thinking out measures which will increase the amount of our home supplies, the permanent development of agriculture must be the aim. Attempts to increase, hastily and temporarily, the production of the soil must be ineffective and can easily be actually harmful. We must get to the root of the matter. Present conditions affecting agriculture are unsound and unsatisfactory; better ones must be created.” (Christopher Turnor; Our Food Supply, Perils and Remedies, Country Life 1916.)

Scaling up from a county level to national comparisons, Turnor dug out the following figures during the early years of the first world war:

Turnor then presents a set of headline consumption figures. These classify ingredients and the opening table reflects national dietary preferences. The line for rye, for instance, identifies it as a German staple crop, and may well include sale of grain for brewing beer. A similar interpretation of barley being sold for malting would seem reasonable.

Table VII, below, sets out the cost of imported foods, probably as a set of customs values.

Stats for fifth quarter products went through the Board of Trade.

More follows

That’s it, folks.

Skip to toolbar