A key driver of our Food Security Mission is the spectre of crippling food price rises. This article explains the problem and what communities can do about it. The good news is that, despite the dark outlook, doing something about it is fun and builds community.
The inability of people to afford food is one of the cruellest consequences of poverty. In January this year, one in seven UK households struggled to afford food, according to the Food Foundation’s food insecurity tracker. The bad news is that this problem is going to get worse – much worse. Food poverty campaigners and food poverty services are battling against an incoming tide of food price inflation. We are going to have to change our food system profoundly.
A major report on food security, launched earlier this year, Just in Case: narrowing the UK civil food resilience gap, by Professor Tim Lang, gives us a warning of what need to be ready for.
Food prices will rise inexorably. In August this year, according to the Office for National Statistics, food price inflation was 5.1%, which means doubling in 14 years, with fresh food prices rising the fastest, raising the cost of a healthy diet disproportionately. But 5.1% is just the start. Severe climate over-heating in Europe will increasingly restrict our future imports of fresh food. (The Just in Case report shows that we currently import 78% of our fruit and vegetables.) Domestic growing of these foods is concentrated in the East of England, the part of the country particularly vulnerable to both flooding and drought. Meanwhile, wars are escalating. Wars restrict global trade routes, and they drive up the price of fuel used by our carbon-intensive food system.
On top of this, there is spiralling economic inequality. As the rich become richer, the price of all assets rises. That includes land. In Wales, land 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, according to Strutt & Parker. This is blocking farming from a new generation of farmers that could mobilise in response to the growing food crisis. So, as food prices rise inexorably, our ability to grow our own food is diminishing.
We have already lost control of our food supply to powerful corporations. 95% of our shop-bought food comes through ten supermarkets. Such concentrated power is not kind to farmers, driving down the prices they get so that they have to depend on Government subsidies. According to Welsh Government figures, farm business incomes in Wales are reducing, as is productivity, and the number of farms making a loss is increasing, currently 24% of all Welsh farms. As economic inequality grows and Governments become poorer, the prospects for future farming subsidies are not good.
We must build resilience
Tim Lang makes building resilience the central recommendation of his report on food security. We need to ‘take back control’ of our food; our future lives will depend more and more on locally owned and locally managed food systems. We are in a race against time to build them. If we lose, we will pay an extremely high price, unequally born by the least well-off.
Building food resilience locally, regionally and nationally in Wales means prioritising two actions: growing vastly more everyday foods within our region and under our control (in ways that build biodiversity, mitigate climate over-heating and keep our rivers clean); and building community collaboration around growing, preparing and eating food.
We have defined four actions that build food resilience: promoting farm diversification, building new farms, advancing community growing and building community food resilience.
1. Farm diversification
We need a massive return to mixed farming. The Welsh Government has already declared a horticulture strategy, which is praised in Tim Lang’s report, and is providing technical and financial support for this kind of farming.
The key constraint on diversification is the lack of access to new markets – diversification without a secure market makes no sense. So we must build new routes to market – into local communities through food hubs and loops, into local schools (like the Welsh Veg In Schools project), and into nearby cities.
Powys enjoys a particular advantage – its proximity to Birmingham. Birmingham has a vibrant food strategy to secure more food from its rural hinterlands. A joint project with Powys is underway to re-build former food trade routes into the city, a project recently profiled on the BBC Food Programme.
2. New farms
We need hundreds of new small farms and new farmers focusing on growing everyday foods for local and regional markets. Such an influx of growers can rejuvenate Welsh farming and rural communities.
There is a myth in wide circulation that small-scale farming is not viable. This is indeed the case in a system dependent on subsidies, where subsidies are proportionate to the amount of land managed. But, if you take out subsidy income, the income per acre for edible horticulture, using modern agroecological techniques, is 151 times the average per-acre income for Welsh farms. (This does not mean small-scale farmers are wealthy. The average farm size in Wales is 119 acres and the average subsidy is 57% of farm income. That makes the net income from a 119 acre farm about the same as an intensive two-acre horticulture business. But the 119 acre farm is likely to have a home; horticulture farmers are expected to do without.)
3. Community growing
Growing food outside of the commercial sector will also play an essential part for families who will never be able to afford good food. That means a huge expansion of communal growing. We have the skills to do this. The UK organisation Social Farms and Gardens, managed from Wales, already has 500 community garden programmes in Wales.
We also need to integrate housing and growing as we build more homes. There are many examples across Europe of such development, such as Oosterwold and Ecodorp Land of Aine in the Netherlands.
4. Community food action
When communities mobilise around food, it builds the foundations for a much more effective and rapid response to mounting pressures and to emergencies. Community action includes communal growing, communal eating, communal cooking and storage facilities, teaching people to grow vegetables and teaching families to cook on a budget using local food.
Communal eating is a particular opportunity, irrespective of how it makes good food much more affordable. According to the 2025 World Happiness Report, communal eating is a foundation of happiness worldwide. It builds togetherness and resilience. We can take inspiration from the Danish fællesspisning (communal dining) initiative, reported in the UK media. We have huge experience in Wales of festival catering, and many communal cooking facilities, all of which could be recruited into extended use.
A Food Security Mission
Our Food Security Mission is driven by fear of what is to come and how hard it will hit us if we do not use the time we have to get stronger. But we are also driven by hope, because we know that the crowning feature of humankind is our ability to withstand adversity together within communities. If preparing for hard times ahead means we have to organise delicious communal meals and spend time together, what’s not to like?
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