National Food Strategy #5: Global risks to UK food supplies

This blogpost lists the global risks to UK food supplies — and that of course includes supplies into Birmingham.

It’s based on our 2019 report, unsurprisingly titled Global Risks to UK food supplies. It gives a useful context for the statement made at the beginning of the third blogpost in this series that we currently import 40% of our food. But that this food won’t be available in the future.

In the Global Risks report, we categorise the list into four interlinked categories of risk:

  1. Climate Change to include extreme weather conditions and water risk.
  2. Resource depletion to include, land use (there’s none left), top soils, soil nutrients, what wilderness is left (very little). We also put anti-microbial resistance (AMR) into this category. (Many people consider AMR as being only related to human health, but in relation to crops and livestock.)
  3. Population to include projected world population, projections by region (with estimates that, by 20250, 40% of all the world’s children will be in Africa), forcibly displaced people and migration.
  4. Geopolitics to include control of transport links, an arctic shipping route and the Belt and Road Initiative.

If you prefer your information via video, this supplements the Global Risks report: Strange New World:

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Previous blogposts in this National Food Strategy series are:

#4: The irreconcilables

#3:  The global competition for safe, nutritious food

#2: Responsibility, resilience and ethics

#1: The brief

A link to our submission is here.    A list of all the blogposts in this series is here.

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The Birmingham Food Council is a Community Interest Company registered in England and Wales number 8931789