On 13th August 2026, the vegan environmentalist journalist George Monbiot wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian explaining that market analysts warned that parched soils following this summer’s extreme weather, combined with military conflicts in Iran and Ukraine, have pushed Britain into its most severe food security crisis in decades.
The impacts of intense dry weather are currently hitting farmers across Europe and the US, where wheat production is forecast to drop to its lowest level since 1971, whilst shrivelling heat in Canada threatens spring wheat crops. Meanwhile, Russian attacks on ports have restricted exports from Ukraine, and conflict involving Iran has severely curtailed shipping through crucial trade routes including the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal. Drought in the Panama Canal has further disrupted global trade routes, exposing the systemic fragility of the international food system to a cascading collapse. A suppressed report from government security advisers previously warned that the UK food supply faces a strategic risk of catastrophic failure by 2030, yet the British government maintains no strategic food reserves, relying instead on private commercial logistics.
Monbiot stated, “When a business makes long-term plans, they call it prudence. When a government makes long-term plans, they call it communism… So governments have developed a bias against long-term thinking. This may explain why we no longer maintain strategic food reserves…A world in which governments hold strategic stockpiles has a better chance of weathering either a temporary shortfall or a systemic failure. If food reserves were big enough, they would buy us enough time to rebuild the system. In their absence, if the food system collapses, so does society.”
When Monbiot asked about national reserves, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs refused to state whether stockpiles exist, offering only a statement claiming, “The UK has a highly resilient food system, drawing on both strong domestic production and international trade, and we do not expect the recent dry weather to have any impact on national food security.” In the end, only when governments take significant steps to shift from an animal-based food system to a plant-based one will the root of the problem be addressed.
