How will Wales feed itself when the supermarkets fail?

Duncan Fisher, Our Food Trust

The biggest question that Wales is going to face in the coming years is: how will we feed ourselves?

Right now, hiding behind the astonishing abundance of food in the supermarkets, it is easy for the Welsh government and local Governments in Wales to duck the issue.

The groundbreaking report by Tim Lang last year, Just in Case: narrowing the UK civil food resilience gap, reported again in the Guardian last weekend, shows that our hyper-efficient, hyper-centralised food system is now a serious vulnerability.

131 food distribution centres feed nine supermarkets that provide 94.5% of the food we eat. In an age of drone warfare and cyber warfare, this is the UK’s Achilles heel.

Tim Lang makes the point that in 2021-22 Government investment in this aspect of our security was 0.0026% of our total defence expenditure.

We are sitting ducks, just days away from complete social chaos. Our vulnerability is obvious and widely known.

The UK produces 54% of the food it needs. Compare that with France, Australia and US, which produce enough for everyone. Food sufficiency in Spain is 75%, in the Netherlands, 80%.

We import 84% of our fruit and 50% of our vegetables. And even our domestic production is concentrated in the East of England, which is particularly vulnerable to both flooding and drought.

Last week, a new round of food price increases is foreseen, driven by the attack on Iran.

Food price inflation in 2025 was 4.2%, which would lead to a doubling in price in 17 years. This is being accelerated by sudden and dramatic shocks driven by more wars and extreme climate events, all of which are guaranteed to happen again and again.

Wales (and the whole UK) needs to get a grip. It needs a serious investment in rebuilding the local and regional food supplies that Government farming policies have completely dismantled in the last decades.

For the first time in history, rural areas are growing food for supermarkets instead of nearby cities. Just as Government has financed this transition, so now it must finance the transition back to a normal and resilient food system.

Numerical targets

Tim Lang makes the case for numerical targets for domestic food trade and for a new food security and resilience law (not a strategy or a plan, but a law) that defines feeding people as a requirement of government at all levels.

In France, the Future of Agriculture, Food and Forest Law (2014) requires territorial food planning by cities.

As we have considered in Powys how to rebuild farming serving local and regional markets, we have realised that the key to change is not actually in rural areas but in the urban areas where most food is consumed.

The most fundamental key to change in farming in Wales will be new urban markets. We are collaborating with Birmingham, which has a vibrant food strategy that includes diversifying its food supplies into its surrounding rural areas.

The first new supplies of fruit and veg will start this year. Every Welsh city needs urgently to develop similar plans to those in Birmingham, building partnerships with their rural hinterlands. Once farmers hook into secure local markets, local food economies will start to flourish again.

Housing

We have also discovered in Powys that the key constraint on growing more food is not agricultural policy, but housing and planning policies.

The commoditisation of agriculture has stripped the countryside of people working in agriculture.

Planning policies have consolidated the process, making it enormously difficult to build new homes for a new generation of farmers.

This is a challenge that FUW has raised in its manifesto for the 2026 elections. Feeding Wales with fresh food means more growers. And that, in turn, means more homes.

Powys and Bannau Brycheiniog National Park have introduced new planning guidelines, which specifically enable ‘homes for horticulture’. The Future Generations Commissioner has recommended this change across all of Wales. We need to go further, putting food security into the heart of planning policy at all levels.

We need to rethink homes for farms in terms of affordability. As economic inequality grows and the rich become richer, the price of all assets rises, including land.

In Wales, farmland is already priced at three times its agricultural value because it is seen as a good investment by those with wealth. This is gradually sucking farmland out of farming.

In 2023, non-farmers bought more than half of the farms and estates sold in the UK. This does not happen in France, because farmland is protected in law: it cannot be sold out of farming. The average price of farmland in France is a third that in UK: £2,600/acre in France and £8,200 in UK (2024 figures).

The price of land is closing farming to a new generation of farmers. This week, the students of Black Mountains College wrote an open letter to local authorities and the Welsh Government appealing to them to ‘let us farm’. They name lack of land and homes as the key barriers.

In Powys the Future Farms Partnership has piloted the building of three new small farms, growing food agroecologically for local and regional markets.

Five young farmers moved in last year and were trading within months, demonstrating that small farms

The next stage is a radical innovation: working with ClwydAlyn Housing Association in the North of Wales to build affordable farms through Wales’ social housing strategy.

The Future Farms Partnership has declared a goal of 100 new farming enterprises growing agroecologically for local and regional markets.

Stockpiling

Finally, Wales needs to plan for emergencies. National Government and all local authorities need to start stockpiling food, like many other countries do. But it’s not just about stockpiling.

We need every community in Wales to address the question of how to make sure everyone is fed during food shocks – we need to build food resilience throughout society.

That means local growing for families who cannot afford to buy food, communal eating, teaching food and growing skills, and advising households on how to prepare for emergencies.

There are already small projects like this all over Wales. But the scale of current action is vastly inadequate to protect people during food shocks.