The UK is busy destroying the little agriculture it has with free-trade agreements like the one with Australia that has far fewer animal-welfare safeguards, thu

The UK is busy destroying the little agriculture it has with free-trade agreements like the one with Australia that has far fewer animal-welfare safeguards, thus tying British cattle growers' hands behind their backs, when Australia already has significant comparative advantages. You can imagine what will happen to those supplies if there is any major disruption. The thing is, global warming is making UK agriculture more productive, but government policies are hostile to agriculture, obsessed as they are with finance and what Dan Wang dismissively calls the "sounding smart industries" like media, which are going to be hit by GenAI like a freight train. The country also needs to get a grip on its water supplies, something that takes long-term investment over decades. The current government is loth to take action against water utilities that were privatized by Thatcher and continuing to be looted by their hedge-fund investors. Similarly the EU's Common Agricultural Policy was originally a subsidies program for French and Italian farmers. It is long past time for it to be reoriented towards food security. The massive food surpluses like the mountains of EEC butter of my childhood are a distant memory now.