You can blame the weather and Brexit. But there’s more to the UK’s food supply crisis

Empty fruit and vegetable shelves in a north London supermarket. Photograph: James Veysey/REX/Shutterstock

In October 2014 I told the Defra select committee that we needed to start paying more for our food. If we did not do so, we risked paying vastly more later and experiencing shortages in supply, resulting in empty shelves. For decades the supermarket sector had been given a free run at our food supply chain by governments of both stripes. Just a dozen companies then controlled 95% of UK food retail and used that economic might to force such drastically tight deals on producers that many had gone out of business. Our self-sufficiency had withered. We were now, I said, at serious risk from external shocks disrupting our food supply because we were so dependent on imports.

I didn’t expect one of those external shocks to be self-inflicted, but then the Brexit vote came along. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of how deformed our food system had become knew it would have a drastic impact.