Nine meals from anarchy

The Daily Mail newspaper, on 7th June 2008, has an article about how close people in Britain are from a “food crisis”. It starts off with,

Long before many others, Cameron saw the potential of a real food crisis striking not just the poor of the Third World, but us, here in Britain, in the 21st Century.

The scenario goes like this. Imagine a sudden shutdown of oil supplies; a sudden collapse in the petrol that streams steadily through the pumps and so into the engines of the lorries which deliver our food around the country, stocking up the supermarket shelves as soon as any item runs out.

If the trucks stopped moving, we'd start to worry and we'd head out to the shops, stocking up our larders. By the end of Day One, if there was still no petrol, the shelves would be looking pretty thin. Imagine, then, Day Two: your fourth, fifth and sixth meal. We'd be in a panic. Day three: still no petrol.

What then? With hunger pangs kicking in, and no notion of how long it might take for the supermarkets to restock, how long before those who hadn't stocked up began stealing from their neighbours? Or looting what they could get their hands on?

It was Lord Cameron's estimation that it would take just nine meals – three full days without food on supermarket shelves - before law and order started to break down, and British streets descended into chaos.

It then goes on to show the signs that this may be going to happen in the near future. Below are some I’ve picked out.

Oil prices are spiralling
Food price inflation
Food production methods are now 95 per cent dependant on oil
Cost of transporting food
Carbon footprint of chemical fertilisers
Wheat prices have doubled
Pig farmers are going out of business
Disabled people and poorer pensioners have to go short of food
WalMart rationing rice

It also goes on to say,

And so as oil prices have risen, so too has the cost of food - and I'm afraid it's only set to get worse. The age of cheap food is at an end - and it will impact not only on our supermarket bills, but on the whole economy.

London imports more than 80 per cent and a food shortage would hit the capital the hardest.

The net result is a looming crisis of which soaring oil prices could simply be the starting gun.

Today, we stand on the brink of a longer-term problem. In the words of Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London: 'We are sleep-walking into a crisis.'

Suddenly, that warning of being 'nine meals from anarchy' no longer seems such a distant or improbable threat.

The article was by Rosie Boycott