UK supermarkets run out of turnips
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The direct cause of the food shortage is still unclear to me, but it was interesting to see that this issue was known about months beforehand.
> High temperatures and a lack of rain, followed by a period of cold weather, are being blamed for creating the “most difficult season ever,” Tim Casey, chairman of the Leek Growers Association, said.
> Suppliers have warned that shortages could last weeks as a combination of bad weather and transport problems in Africa and Europe has left some fruit and vegetables out of stock.
Right at the beginning you could say that was down to profiteering, but from what I've seen the supply network for these places flexed and was able to reconfigure a lot more quickly because it's less monolithic.
Also, it's worth noting that it's not uniquely British; the Irish have had the same problems.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/60111856
(source: worked as a mainframe engineer in an "Agile" team a large financial corp).
As a consequence, supermarkets have become reliant on overseas producers who, sometimes, are not able to meet demand.
People want to buy locally produced fruit and vegetables but they do not want the people who pick it to have a decent standard of living.
I can sympathize with supermarkets having to try and mitigate every panic buying frenzy that the media are all too willing to encourage.
I think this is more of a reflection on you than it is on frenzied buying. It's pretty easy to eat multiple cucumbers a week if you like them.
Never underestimate the capacity of our media to blow something up beyond all proportion. I don't doubt that supply is a bit lower than normal, but it's not like we're about to resort to cannibalism here.
So is the desire to raise food prices, as seen by 50% food increase pricing on many things, in a year with 8% inflation (Canada).
"Taking advantage of", class 101.
For those who can't watch the video, basically the gist is most of the food in shortage (lettuce, tomato, cucumbers etc) is normally grown in the UK in large greenhouses from local producers, but energy prices got too high last year making it uneconomical to grow in a greenhouse as obviously it's energy intensive to do so. The govt refused any support and supermarkets rejected the potential higher prices and instead decided they could just source product overseas instead. The greenhouse producers therefore didn't plant much for this season, but the foreign sourced produce also had a poor harvest which resulted in no excess available for export to the UK and therefore some stores now can't stock some fresh produce. Energy prices have come down and so local UK produce growers are now growing again and should be back to normal supply in a couple of months. Although he mentions earlier in the video that this years wheat crop is doing poorly and that is normally used as animal feed which could mean potential future shortages for things like meat and eggs.
Plenty of food here right now! The only thing we have an issue with is tomatoes, and local tomatoes are about to come into season.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41076908.html
Tue 21st Feb "Irish Times: Supply of vegetables to Ireland disrupted by poor weather and energy costs"
https://www.irishtimes.com/food/2023/02/21/supply-of-vegetab...
Those are the same ones as the UK. Except the turnips (allegedly).
Our experience is the same, basically, the whole thing is just a sort of mad nexus of anti-Brexit / supermarket profiteering / media sensationalism / slightly bad weather making a small difference / supply chain issues.
The egg section has seemed quite Soviet for quite a while. Now the veg aisle is getting the same way.
When I came back to Sweden, here we don't have a tomato shortage, but the price has gone up to about 9 GBP per kg - so not much difference in reality.
wow, didn't realise Therese Coffey had such sway on the British public. Presumably most of these turnips are just being thrown out and not actually eaten.
Yikes -- do the Tories not have any economists at their disposal or do they just choose not to listen to them?
We rely very heavily on imports in winter. The majority of this stuff can be grown in the UK but isn't because UK supermarkets are obsessed with lower prices. We need more onshore production and higher prices.
If you look at tomatoes, we actually had some domestic production but these places chose not to grow this winter knowing that supermarkets wouldn't pay the higher price. So they rely heavily on places like Morocco and Kenya that can offer lower prices, and sometimes that doesn't work out.
I had a friend whose family ran one of the largest potato farms in the UK. They stopped working with supermarkets in the 90s because it was so horrendous (Tesco notoriously used to do multi-hour contract negotiations with farmers, they would deliberately not give them seats so they had to stand for the whole thing and turn the heat up in the room without giving them water, they also had specialist negotiators who were notoriously abusive...this is how the largest supermarket behaves), they did food service, and then they went into food manufacturing. It was the only way to retain margins (many of the largest food groups in the UK came out of farms that needed to keep moving up the supply chain because of pressure from supermarkets).
We need local production that rewards people for work and investment.
And you are saying "cheap food" is needed...okay, the price is low but there is no food. How does no food rank on your system of things required in society?
You are clueless because you are, presumably, imagining somewhere like the US where food is cripplingly expensive. That isn't the case here, food is cheap but so cheap that often results in there being no supply of some products. People can't conceive of farmers and workers actually needing money to buy their own food.
He spoke to his suppliers and supermarkets just won't pay the higher prices. The supply is there though. He had a full range of salad products.
The UK buys a lot of produce from NL (which is a huge exporter of tomatoes and other greenhouse-grown produce), they have been selling in Europe at the higher prices that factor in higher electricity cost, UK supermarkets have stopped buying from them because it would mean having to increase prices.
And finally, UK producers chose not to produce at all this winter because they believed that UK supermarkets wouldn't offer a price that made production profitable...they were right.
This kind of thing happens because, for multiple reasons, there is an obsession with providing very low food prices. UK supermarkets achieve this (the prices for vegetables are comically low here, still...my Tesco had a sale on potatoes the other week, 20p/kg...how? How is this possible? Farmers here get absolutely abused) but the result is that sometimes they don't have anything.
It has been happening with eggs, milk, meat (most UK supermarkets just don't get quality meat anymore, even their premium ranges of top cuts of beef are shoe leather), vegetables...and, of course, all anyone can talk about is the declinist nonsense rather than look at how fucked the food supply chain is.
I am not sure what the solution is but this problem has existed since the early 90s when the industry began to consolidate heavily into the large supermarkets. The industry has kept trying to consolidate which may lead to less aggressive action (supermarkets are fully aware of how damaging their behaviour has been), but the govt has been blocking this to keep food prices low.
One big change was Aldi/Lidl who have introduced more diversity into the supply chain without compromising on price...but that is only in some verticals, and their general position towards farmers is still quite aggressive.
But the pursuit of extremely low prices and consumer value is not a sign of decline.
But left without controls, these types of markets tend to devolve into monopolies if allowed and cartels if not. Markets require regulation. That’s why you can get fresher cheaper produce at a farmers market while the supermarket doesn’t be road is selling California Peaches in Georgia and Washington apples in New York.
An example I’m familiar with is a local farm that’s been in continuous operation since the 1750s. They built successful long standing relationships with local grocery chains, which allowed them to grow over 20 years. Enter modern finance - the biggest two chains get bought by private equity, who fires the grocery buyers and brings in Accenture and does a strategic sourcing engagement. End of the day, the supermarket went from buying 100 truckloads of onions to 0, having made a deal to source Canadian (subsidized) onions for 1.5% cheaper. It broke their cash flow and almost put the farm out of business.
They made mistakes for sure, but this is the pressure exerted on the production and supply chain so long as our current legal thought process persists.
My village general shop has all fruit & veg as normal. This shortage is a media obsession.
Oh great, and there's me thinking it was only an amusingly trivial contribution to the nation's woes. Now I've got this whole calamity to worry about.
And by the way, the idea that supermarket meat is inedible is absurd. A fillet or sirloin from Tesco, and I'm sure others, is perfectly delicious.
The only supermarket that has decent meat is Aldi. But if you compare this to product sold into food service, it isn't close.