Farmers give food security warning

The growing impact of surging costs linked to fertiliser, fuel, energy, animal feed and labour on the nation’s ability to produce food has been pressed home to politicians in the run up to local elections.

And this week NFU Scotland continued to put food security front and centre of its lobbying priorities when it met with MPs and committee members at Westminster.

President Martin Kennedy and vice presidents Andrew Connon and Robin Traquair also promised to push all supermarkets to support domestic production - or run the risk of not having domestic production to support.

“This perfect storm - and I don’t use the term lightly - driven by Brexit, Covid and now the dreadful war in Ukraine will have repercussions for years to come,” said Kennedy.

“We will continue to play our part as food producers, but we simply cannot do that without proper support and prices for the quality we produce.”

He said that although farmers could see the rising threat to food, sadly many were too blinkered and only interested in the short term.

“For far too long, we have not paid nearly enough attention as a nation to the most important energy source we rely on, which is food, and unless governments and supermarkets wake up soon, we will be looking at food security concerns that we haven’t seen since World War Two,” Kennedy warned.

“As we look ahead, we can plainly see that unless we act now and ensure our domestic production systems continue to deliver, we will see real food supply problems in the not-too-distant future.”