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Chapter 1: What community initiatives are emerging in response to food insecurity?
It's nine o'clock in the morning at St. Oswald's parish church in Coney Hill, a district on the outskirts of Gloucester. And local resident Tanya Dando is getting ready to feed people.
Right, so what they've got in there this week, I haven't finished putting stuff in yet. They've got toffee sundaes, peanut butter, gravy carrots and a pie.
The Coney Hill Food Hub is one of thousands of community food providers to have sprung up in recent years. Here, every Thursday, without any questions asked, people can walk through its doors, spend time with Tanya and her team, have a cup of tea, sit down for lunch and leave with a bag of food that could last a few days.
This is the calm before the storm. Tanya, I'm putting a milkshake in the fridge. OK, my love.
Tania opened the hub during the pandemic. Since that time, demand has kept on growing. More people, she says, are making tough decisions about which bills to pay and how much money is left over to spend on food.
I've done it myself in the past where I've had to choose my kids eating or me. So I'm like, no, the kids eat, obviously. But now, if I can help somebody else take that decision away, they all can eat, that's what I do. I've lived on the bread line. I've lived from paycheck to paycheck. So I know what it's like to juggle bills, food shopping, just normal expenses.
I've been there, I've done that, I've got the T-shirt.
Whatever happens in the Middle East now, the impact of conflict on food prices is going to be felt across the world for months ahead. There has simply been too much disruption to the so-called three Fs that flow through the Strait of Hormuz. Fuel, food and fertiliser.
And in the UK, despite recent announcements from Rachel Reeves, including changes to tariffs on some food imports, among those likely to be most affected will be the people Tanya helps each week.
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Chapter 2: How is inflation affecting food prices in the UK?
Suddenly, when everything changes and prices go up, they're kind of left holding the bag.
Your order to go back to your departure immediately. Your order to go back to your departure immediately.
When the war involving the United States, Israel and Iran got underway in February, it was quickly followed by the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic fell by around 95%. Ships such as this one, once one of 140 or so vessels passing through, could no longer transport goods around the world.
OK, copied your message. I will turn back.
We've all been on a steep learning curve about the strategic importance of the strait when it comes to the global food system and the movement of fuel, food and fertiliser. So much has just been sitting there, trapped, along with crews on board ships.
We feel like, you know, trapped inside the Persian Gulf and no further concrete information we are getting whether how to get out of there.
Order, order. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this meeting.
Last week, Parliament's Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee took evidence about what we'd learned so far about the impact of the war on the food industry, supermarkets and their customers.
We returned this morning to our ongoing inquiry into food supply chain resilience and fairness.
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Chapter 3: What role does global conflict play in food price inflation?
Simon Jack.
People who work in food production or food preparation tend to be at the lower end of the income scale. And you see some quite hefty wage increases. National living wage, for example, went up 7% last year. It's gone up another 4% this year. For younger workers, it's gone up even more substantially than that.
And you've got employers' national insurance, which have seen a big rise in those costs, which basically pushes up the wage bill And some areas of food production are quite labor intensive. So you add all that together and you can perhaps see why food inflation is accelerating at a higher rate than elsewhere.
So it's quite a sort of terrible cocktail of price rises all filtering in to the price of food.
Which we'll be feeling well into next year, says Andrew Opie of the British Retail Consortium, the organisation representing the UK's biggest supermarkets. Again, it's the experience of other recent crises that shows us what kind of time lag we're expecting to see.
When you look at things like the impact of the Ukraine war, which also had a big impact on energy prices, it takes about three to six months before we start to see prices coming through the chain. Then you reach a peak of about after about nine months in fresh food inflation.
and a little bit longer to come through in ambient processed foods, which would be about a year from the start of the Iran war, if it followed the same pattern as Ukraine, which we'd expect it to do. So by about March 2027, we should see the peak of food inflation.
Something that's amplified the impact of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are changes that have taken place in the surrounding region during the last decade. Adam Henier is a professor in development studies at SOAS and the author of Crude Capitalism, Oil, Corporate Power and the Making of the World Market.
As he sees it, China's economy boomed, its fuel imports from Gulf states increased, new levels of wealth were created there, and as a result, those Gulf states have gained greater influence over the food system.
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Chapter 4: How are supply chain disruptions impacting food availability?
So as oil prices are rising, you know, oil is part of some of these commodity index funds that bundle energy. They bundle things like fertilizer. They bundle things like food prices all into a single investment product. That's another way in which energy and food prices are coupled through financial investment. And we haven't yet seen the kind of speculation we saw after Russia invaded Ukraine.
That was a more immediate speculative fervor. And we had that speculative fervor again in 2008, partly because in those moments the amount of grain in storage was a little bit less than it is now. So fortunately, we have a pretty good... set of stocks in reserve right now of food, and that's keeping the lid on things.
But if there's a major climate event, or if this conflict lasts more months, it could balloon.
Commodity prices, including seed oils, meat, and to some extent grain, are increasing. But so far, it hasn't been as dramatic as during the start of the war in Ukraine. However, because of increasing energy costs and the concentration of fertilizer production Adam Hanier mentioned, Volatility is on the rise.
Over to Beth Bechdoll, Deputy Director General of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. She spoke to me on a line from Rome.
farmers are making decisions must before food reaches supermarket shelves. So today, given what's happening in the Gulf, farmers around the world, they are deciding what crops to plant. They are deciding whether they can even afford fertilizer. They are deciding how much fertilizer they should apply. And many are actually deciding whether they should postpone investments or different purchases.
So the current situation, I would say, is maybe more of a warning light and maybe a full alarm bell. So the question today is, I think, not simply what food costs now. It's going to be about what food availability and food affordability look like in the next six to 12 months.
Beth Bechdel on the global picture. Here in the UK, the 40% increase in food prices since 2021 affects everyone, but not equally. Simon Jack.
The average household in the UK spends about 10% of their household income on food. Now that is much lower than it was 50, 60 years ago. We've gotten used to sort of cheaper food. But even now, if you look at lower income households, they all spend 20 to 25%. of their household income on food. So it becomes a particular problem for lower-income households.
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Chapter 5: What are the economic implications of rising food prices for households?
Their coping mechanisms have kind of been worn out. Savings have been worn down. The ability to be able to absorb yet another rise is much worse than it was when this first started back in 2022 because people have been worn down essentially and economically.
At the Coney Hill Food Hub, that's exactly how it looks to some of the people sitting down for lunch.
My name is Mrs. Rosina Yates of Coney Hill. Why do you come? Because the price of the food can't afford food. I'm 65 this year. That's changed the way I eat, my diet. You just can't do it. You're frightened to put their lights on now because of the price of the electric and the gas.
That's why people like somebody like me that's on Universal Credit, people are frightened to cook with their gas or their electric. It's awful. That's why people like me are living off sandwiches. Because you can't afford to do it. Because you're frightened. This is what you call survival. Survival. This is why I come up here on a Thursday to get, like, potatoes or whatever has been offered.
To me, it's like, well, it's like Christmas Day to me.
Coming here?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello, my name is Reverend Rachel and I'm the vicar here at St Oswald's Church and obviously look after the church hall as well. How long have you been here? So just over a year. So, you know, I know lots of people here will be on Universal Credit and other benefits and so it's hard to make ends meet. So I'll go into some houses here and that will be my encounter.
that they are just talking about, I'm just getting by, I'm surviving.
Just surviving. Just surviving. Making ends meet, but not.
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Chapter 6: How do food prices affect low-income families differently?
Just can't afford it, you can't do it. So you go without. And you wonder why somebody like me is losing weight. Just can't afford it, can't do it. Yeah, survival. That's all I've got to say, survival.
The likelihood of more of the UK's population sharing Rosina's experience of just surviving has also increased the intensity of the politics surrounding food price inflation. There have been growing tensions between government and the food industry, out of which came suggestions that could have been made in the early 1970s.
We plan to have a comprehensive control over prices, all the prices which we as a country and as a government can influence. Of course, there are some, particularly in the field of raw materials and fresh foodstuffs which we import, which are dealt with on world markets and which we alone cannot control.
Edward Heath in 1973 on the aims of the then newly established Price Commission. Today's discussions between the food industry and government about how to best tackle food prices brought echoes from that time with talk of price caps.
we heard about a regulatory approach in Scotland and a voluntary one in the rest of the UK, all of which led journalists at the 160-year-old Grosser magazine to dive into their archives and pull out editions from the early 1970s and see coverage of Heath's ambitions for price freezes. Grosser reporter Ian Quinn.
Whitehall even had a hotline that people could ring in to... to sort of dob in people who were not sticking to these price caps. And amazing, really, to think, you know, even a few weeks ago, the prospect of Scotland suggesting price caps was pretty staggering.
If anyone had said then that within a few weeks, the UK government would be proposing that, I think we'd have thought they'd lost the plot. But obviously, desperate times call for desperate measures. Madam Deputy Speaker, the government has the right economic plan.
What emerged instead when Rachel Reeves made an official announcement last week was a change to the UK's tariff regime on a selection of food imports.
Today I am taking action by suspending tariffs on over 100 different foods sold in supermarkets. And I am clear that I expect supermarkets to pass these savings on in full to their customers.
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Chapter 7: What strategies are being proposed to address food price inflation?
the citizens want when you ask them. They just want it to be easy to eat well and affordable to eat well. And so it's pretty disappointing that companies are using food price inflation as a reason not to act on this. I obviously hope that the government will hold its nerve. There's no reason to think why
sort of measuring the amount of sugar in a product, which is essentially what this kind of conversation boils down to, should flow through to food prices. This is about us transparently knowing what is in products which are on sale for everybody.
Back at the Coney Hill Food Hub, food quality is also on the mind of its founder, Tanya Dando.
Somebody a couple of months ago said, I feel guilty because all I can afford is to feed my child chicken nuggets. But you're feeding them. And like, you know, why is all the healthy stuff so expensive? You know, it should be even cheaper if it's healthier for the kids instead of processed food. But if that's what you feed your kids because that's all you can afford, your kid's fed.
You've mentioned about chicken nuggets. Do people find the processed food cheaper, easier to buy?
Well, if you look at it, four chicken breasts, fresh chicken breasts, it's Ā£5.95. A bag of chicken nuggets is Ā£2.00. There's a big difference. So you do what you do to feed your kids.
Anna Taylor of the Food Foundation.
We know that overall unhealthy calories are half the price of healthy calories and that gap is widening. That's something else that we track. If you're really pressed, you're basically going towards the things which fill the family up.
I've heard families talk about the fruit bowl becomes out of reach for the kids now because we don't want them eating it all at once and then it's going and there's no fruit left. It's kind of rationed. All kinds of ways in which families have to take steps to make sure that they can still put a meal on the table. And that often means compromising on health.
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Chapter 8: How can governments and communities work together to ensure food security?
This is not our war, and that is why we did not join it. The priority is de-escalation and supporting families and businesses through this crisis. We're acting to protect people from unfair food price rises if they occur, to bring them down and have made targeted cuts to food tariffs products including biscuits, chocolate, dried fruit and nuts to help to reduce pressure on food prices.
Let's zoom out again from the UK's experience of food price inflation and think more globally. Around the world, because of the war in the Middle East, along with other conflicts, President Trump's changes to trade rules and climate change, even more severe inflationary pressures are being felt.
Professor Jennifer Clapp, who we heard from earlier, has spent years looking at the deeper, less obvious systems and structures that contribute to higher prices. In her latest book, Titans of Industrial Agriculture, How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector, she looks at the big four inputs into our food.
Machinery, seeds, pesticides, and part of the story we've already touched on, fertilisers.
Although globally, the top four firms control maybe a quarter of the global fertilizer market on the global scale, if you look at the national level, it's often much, much, much, much more concentrated. So in North America, it's like two companies control almost 100% of the potash because potash is so geographically bound.
And in nitrogen, I think it's 75% of the nitrogen market in North America is controlled by just four firms. And it's the same if you go to Indonesia, it's 99% is a fertilizer market. Nitrogen is controlled by four farms. So it's concentrated in specific locations.
This type of concentration of power in agricultural inputs can impact prices, argues Professor Clapp, particularly during periods of crisis and chaos in the food system, such as at the start of the war in Ukraine.
At that time, we saw grain markets go crazy because Russia and Ukraine collectively supply a huge proportion of the global export market, but also fertilizers coming from Russia and Belarus were disrupted. Indeed, supply chain disruptions were leading to higher prices, but prices went up so sharply and so quickly, and also beyond what you would think would normally happen.
And it turns out that the corporations were even, some of them, bragging to their own shareholders in their annual reports that they were able to increase prices that they were charging to farmers beyond their own price increases. And if you look carefully at the profit data, you see that not only were the
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