Why the drought could threaten national security

0:02Sky News, the full story first.

0:11The hot weather could be a risk to the UK's national security, and this is why.

0:19Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much But on my podcast Stuff Matters I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now Just search for it on your podcast app and follow

0:53Half of England and the whole of Wales are in drought, and this affects the UK's food security. We import 40 % of our food from abroad, but we may need to import even more. Climate scientists say the UK's summers will get hotter and its winters will get wetter. Farmers are on track for the worst cereal harvest on record, as drought eats into their crop yields and their profits. The high heat moments above 30 degrees stopped some of our crops that were flowering like beans dead. And then because of the high heat, the wind has been like a hot hairdryer over our crops and it's just terminated them.

1:34Farmers have long claimed that food security ought to be a national security issue and that our shopping and eating habits may have to change with the changing weather patterns. I'm joined by Sky's climate reporter, Victoria Seabrook, and Martin Lyons, a Cambridgeshire farmer and the CEO of the Nature Friendly Farming Network. Victoria, first of all, what is causing this drought? How long have we been going through this drought? It's been developing roughly since the end of June. And this does tend to come as a surprise to a lot of people because lots of people are thinking, well, this winter was really wet.

2:13How on earth can we be in drought? And actually June was wetter than average. But what we've seen is this flash drought develop. And that's because of a combination, not just of a lack of rain, but also just how hot it's been. So England and Wales have just experienced their driest July on records going back 190 years. And it looks like it's here to stay because when conditions get that bad for it to change, you need substantial and prolonged rainfall. And there's very little sign of that in the long range forecast for the areas that need it most. Now, you've been reading a report from the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.

2:54Can you just talk me through what some of the key findings of that report were? Yeah, there's some really striking figures in this and it brings home the impacts of some of these things that can feel a bit distant or a bit abstract. It says that our harvest of cereals and oilseed rape, which are really crucial staples, these sorts of things, wheat, barley, oats used in bread, beer, breakfast cereals, animal feed, we're on track for the worst harvest since detailed record keeping began in 1984. Now I want to bring in Martin Lyons here. Martin, you're a farmer. How have you been experiencing this drought and how has it been affecting your work?

3:35The high heat moments above 30 degrees stop some of our crops that are flowering like beans dead. And then because of the high heat, the wind has been like a hot hairdryer over our crops and it's just terminated them. If I were to walk on your farm now, could you describe to me what I would see? What does your farm look like? Well, all of our crops are harvested. We're a month earlier than we normally harvest, which has added lots of complications because everything came ready together where we normally try and spread out that harvest. And then there's big cracks in the ground. You know, everything's brown and dead.

4:09The hedges, the trees are dying. And where we have flower strips and habitat on our farm, they are also dying off so that the insects, the pollinators and others are also struggling. So that means we'll have less pollinators to pollinate my crops next year. We have been digging ponds and cleaning ponds out the last few years to kind of get ready for the science. The science says there's worse to come. And the frightening thing is this may be the coolest summer we have for the rest of my life. Victoria, what does drought mean for arable farmers like Martin, those who grow crops in the ground for a living?

4:41Wheat, which is our staple crop. You know, if you go to almost any arable farm in the country, you will find wheat. That is really struggling in particular. I actually went to a farm in North Hampshire this week and he'd harvested his wheat three weeks early and the grain was half the size that it should be because since he planted it in March, he's had just a third of the rain that he would have expected. and he's looking at about a£20 ,000 loss just on wheat. So that story just brings to life a problem in one place that is playing out all around the country. So the lost revenue for those crops specifically is on course for between£300 million and£390 million.

5:27But there are other plants that also look like they're going to have a poor harvest this year, things that need a lot of water, things like potatoes, but also cauliflower, broccoli and peas. So there's conversation about should we be starting to try and grow different things? Should we be trying to eat different things? One farmer that I read about this week, he's had much more success instead of growing peas, you know, a staple of our diet, fish, chips and peas, growing chickpeas instead. So I hope you like hummus, Mari. I love hummus. All the flavours of hummus. Martin how much do you think that climate change is responsible for the drought that you're experiencing the evidence is clear it's it's 100 % it's climate change and and it's affecting us now as a farmer I'm not sure what I'm going to do in 10 20 years time in Cambridge here in East Anglia if we're going to experience these volatilities of weather because I cannot cash flow that I I cannot grow a plant or crop this year not knowing what our weather extremes are going to be for next year, wet or cold or whatever it's going to be.

6:33So I think we really need to wake up to the fact of, for nutritional security for the UK, what do we need to produce? Where does it need to be? Does some production need to move further north in England or up into Scotland, where it may be a little bit cooler, more moisture available? We've seen tiny, tiny bits of rain in the southeast. That's kind of the most affected area of England, isn't it? Wales, of course, entirely in drought. How much rain would it actually take to make a difference at this point? Unfortunately, we need the wettest winter we've ever had and a prolonged wet winter to recharge our aquifers, our landscape and our reservoirs.

7:09In East Anglia, our reservoirs never got completely filled up last year, last winter, because we weren't that wet. We need to be creating more ponds, lakes, reservoirs, become a spongier landscape. We pumped out huge volumes of water out to the sea last winter, where we could have been storing more of that and making it available for the environment, but also for me as a farm and a business growing food. Do you think that consumers need to change what they buy? Do we need to be accepting of having smaller vegetables maybe or not always having everything 365 days a year. Yeah, I think the government in their procurements could do a lot more to back British nature-friendly farmers and making sure produce that we feed, you know, schools, hospitals, prisons, armed forces come from British farmers.

8:01But also the specification many of the contracts are to have that perfect five carrots in a package. We're going to have to relax that. Victoria, the impact of this drought, is it going to change the price of things in supermarkets? Whether you see food prices rise depends on three things. First of all, it depends on what is happening elsewhere. It depends on who else is trying to buy that. So just to give you an example, we did have a cucumber shortage in July. We import 80 % of our cucumbers and that was because of problems growing them in Spain, which meant that the Netherlands hand was strengthened, the price of cucumber shot up, and the buyers here, they weren't convinced that consumers would want to pay those prices.

8:46So it depends on all of those things. And the UK is lucky. We have pretty good purchasing power relative to a lot of places in the world. Martin, are you looking at potentially putting your prices up or potentially something like shrinkflation where the prices do the same, but the produce gets smaller? So unfortunately, as a farmer, I have no choice over my price and what I sell at. We're trading as an international price and we have to sell to what the market is offering me. I have no control over it. But what we are seeing is prices are already going up because of lack of supply locally and internationally.

9:21We are the third cheapest food price in the world on many products. So, you know, as a farmer, I do need to see some increased prices. or say she can't be planting this autumn. Currently, many of our crops are not economical to plant this year for the prices next year. So many of us are going to be looking and saying we're not going to bother because it's too risky to put that investment into the crop to not get a market price at the other end. One other thing where we might see some changes is with milk. We've had lower milk yields because with the weather, the grass has grown less, but also because the cows are basically stressed.

10:00They're using more energy trying to keep cool than they are producing milk. So we've seen less milk as well. Victoria, we import a lot of food, don't we, as the UK? Of course, we're an island. We're reliant on imports for about 40 % of our food, which is a lot. Now, lots of countries import food. But as you say, we're an island. So those supply chains are more vulnerable. and actually this research and the problems with the harvest this year, they've all prompted a lot of calls to take food security more seriously. You know, as we are having these big conversations nationally about, can we defend ourselves?

10:40Can we defend our energy infrastructure? There are calls now to integrate food security into that because if you're going to defend yourself, you also need to be able to feed the people doing that to put it in its most basic terms and in terms of what else we could be doing and do we need to change our diets. One idea that someone I spoke to yesterday suggested was that we should all be eating more venison because we have far too many deer in this country which are gobbling up all the trees that we're trying to plant and the young trees that we need, which would also help stave off some of these more extreme weather effects.

11:14It's not actually that easy to find in a supermarket though. I mean, I do eat venison, but it's not that easy to find and some supermarkets don't sell it. Maybe they should, you know, up their game and everyone should start selling more venison. Well, that's exactly what people have been saying is that we need to start getting used to these sorts of things now, you know, now while there's not an emergency. So supermarkets, restaurants, maybe government procurement have a role in trying to get us used to some of these foods now before we really need it. Because what some security experts have been saying is the worst thing that could happen would be not only to have a drought and a difficult harvest, but also more widespread war on the European continent.

11:53Then what do we do? Then it's too late to be thinking about food security. And if you cast your mind back to the COVID pandemic in those early days, some of the shelves did run empty, which wasn't necessarily because we didn't have enough food, although supply chains were disrupted. It was because people were worried and were grabbing things and then other people later on couldn't get them. So it's these sorts of things that they're saying we need to start thinking about now.

12:29Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much But on my podcast Stuff Matters I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them You will see how together they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now Just search for it on your podcast app and follow

13:07when it comes to government policy to actually act on protecting food security as a really important national security issue do you think that some of the people you speak to in the industry believe there is that appetite in government yet no this is something that farmers uh have been warning of for several years. The government is supposed to come up with these regular plans to help adapt the country, to help us cope with how our weather is changing. So that's not just for farming, but schools, hospitals, railways, and so on. Just this year in the heat waves, it forced schools to close, fridges in supermarkets broke down, trains were cancelled because the tracks were too hot.

13:54Time and again, we see these examples of infrastructure that was just built for a different country than what we are now, a different climate. The government is supposed to come out with these adaptation plans, they're called, and they have been panned pretty consistently. Under Keir Starmer, what the government did is they said, okay, what would a well-adapted UK look like? What should we be doing? And a report came out from the Climate Change Committee a few months ago, which outlined what we should be doing to help us all. One of the big ones was actually that, I mean, stepping away from farming for a minute, was that air conditioning would be unavoidable in parts of England in the coming decades, something that they'd tried not to say because that comes with its own complications of needing more energy and so on.

14:44So that's where we're at, but there is not much faith that successive governments have taken food security seriously enough. But this is also, I mean, unfortunately, a global issue, right? Even if the UK were to be better, that doesn't necessarily mean that alone is going to stop climate change. Broadly, the whole world is moving in that direction. One of the points that people often make when they're unconvinced about climate policy is they say, well, the UK only accounts for 1%, less than 1 % of global emissions. But there are dozens of countries which each only on their own account for 1 % of emissions.

15:20So together, that obviously adds up. But yes, you're right, the UK, if it just acted on its own, it wouldn't have a huge difference. But it's not. And that's what the regular COP climate summits, the UN meetings are every year is to try and get all the countries together and painfully inch them forward bit by bit. I also just wanted to pick up on in terms of what's been causing all of this, the science is solid that climate change is making the UK's winters wetter and summers hotter and drier. Whether that translates into drought is not so clear cut. There's not a definitive link between climate change and drought because that depends partly on what we do with the water once it reaches the land, what we do with our reservoirs, how healthy our land is and whether the water can soak in or whether it just runs off, things like that.

16:14Farmers like Martin have been calling for a lot more help from the government to help them improve this for all of us. That would be things like making it easier for them to build reservoirs on their land, not having to get such difficult planning permission. making it cheaper, things like that. Farmers manage 70 % of the UK. If we get really good support, we can do some really amazing stuff to really mitigate some of the biggest problems we face for nature and climate and food security. And we just need to get that backing in and have a long-term plan. Many of the current government schemes are sort of only a three-year funded scheme.

16:52We need longer-term views of how we get these things into ground. To shape and change your farm business, maybe five to seven years to really adapt and learn new practices. You can't do a lot in three years. And we've designed our whole landscape to drain away in the past. And now we might need to redesign that thinking of having more storage facilities and slowing the flow of water down so we have longer periods of wetter, more water in our landscape when those drier periods come. Victoria, Zach Polanski's been talking today about the drought, about the weather. What's he been saying? He's calling it the biggest crisis since World War II.

17:32Zach Polanski is trying to make the point that this is a huge risk for the UK. I mean, for everywhere really in the world. Because the thing is about climate change is it compounds other risks. So it makes problems with water security worse, food security worse, etc. What he's saying is that we're not taking this seriously enough. He's also calling for financial support for people to help keep their homes cool. I live in a flat in London, a block of flats, and it has been baking at night time. I've been sleeping when it's been really hot. I put a wet tea towel in the freezer and then I get it out at night time and sleep with that on me.

18:13It's been that hot. So he's saying that we need to just start thinking about these things differently. And in fairness to the government, they have been looking at this. And I should also say that they have plans underway for nine to 10 new major reservoirs. Now, obviously, these things take a long time to build and our infrastructure plans don't always go ahead in this country, but they're not doing nothing. Victoria, Martin, thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you. And if you have any suggestions for future episodes, don't forget to email us at why at sky.uk. and this is why we'll be back tomorrow.

19:04Hello, Ed Conway here. Here's what might sound like a slightly random question. What do AirPods, bananas and a pair of shoddily made running trainers from the 1970s have in common? On the surface, not very much. But on my podcast, Stuff Matters, I will uncover the deeper stories behind each of them. You will see how, together, they tell a fascinating new story about the world we live in. The first full series of Stuff Matters is out now. Just search for it on your podcast app and follow.