20160703_R4

Source: BBC Radio 4: Food Programme

URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07hwv25

Date: 03/07/2016

Event: Brexit and Food: A Food Programme Special

Credit: BBC Radio 4

People:

Professor Tim Lang: Professor of Food Policy, City University
Dan Saladino: Series producer, Food Programme
Tim Worstall: Senior Fellow, Adam Smith Institute

Dan Saladino: ... From West Wales to a hotel lobby near Victoria train station in London. I'd arranged to meet someone who's been researching the implications of Brexit for the past two years - Professor Tim Lang of City University Centre for Food Policy. Inside the hotel, tourists were arriving - all were glued to television screens.

Female tourist 1: Scary... Yes, just scary. What's going to happen to everyone - the whole economy in the world?

Female tourist 2: Yeah, how it's going to bring all of us into recession. Is there a plan in place?

Dan Saladino: Is there a plan in place? "No", says Tim Lang, who's clearly having a bad week. Because when it comes to food, having no plan translates as "We have a serious problem".

Tim Lang: I think it's a deeply troubling time. Our centre wrote four briefing papers preparing for this, and the analysis we gave was very sober, saying this is an enormous impact on the food system if we choose to do it. We're now in that reality. And what worries me mostly is that the political class is currently failing us.

Dan Saladino: The analysis Tim Lang mentioned consists of four research papers covering a range of different aspects of the UK's food system. The Common Agricultural Policy and other EU food policies are far from perfect, he says. But his team's conclusion was that they have helped to keep food prices relatively stable.

Tim Lang: We then did a study looking at the big picture of Brexit versus Bremain, and that made us even more concerned. We thought the enormity of this really is not featuring in the debate. Why? Why? This is food. This is what was one of the main motivations for the creation of the Common Market in in the first place. The Netherlands had had a famine in 1944, but Europe had been devastated. And then we did two other studies, one on horticulture in particular, because Britain is highly exposed. We get a huge amount- big percentage of our horticultural fruit and vegetables - from the European Union.

So, to summarise all of those papers, we concluded: we could vote to leave - and indeed we did. But if the people chose it, a period of major reorganisation was needed. And that was our final point - we didn't think the British state was ready for it. And what we're seeing now, in politics, is a sign that we were absolutely right. There is very little civil service expertise, the politicians haven't thought about it, there's no Plan B. The Secretary of State even gave a speech in January saying there is no Plan B. I mean, I nearly tore what hair I've got left out of my head! There should be Plan B - there should be Plan C, D, E and everything! So, dear British consumer, think very carefully about this.

Dan Saladino: Those consumers would have been reading, Tim, that - and this comes from you - history suggests that a country which only just feeds itself is in a potentially fragile state. Now, aren't you overstating it?

Tim Lang: No, I'm quoting government figures - 54% of our food is home-grown, about 30% comes from the rest of the European Union and the rest comes from around the world, coffee or tea, for example. Now, when we look at the figures, the food trade gap is now £21 billion in defecit. So we think that's, by any definition, a fragile situation to be in.

Dan Saladino: On my phone I have a question that's come in from a Food Programme listener - I'll just play you this and see if you can provide an answer.

Angela Field: My name is Angela Field. I wanted to know: as a result of Brexit, should we expect the price of imported foods to rise and should we be looking to buy more from local producers and UK producers?

Tim Lang: That's a really good question, Angela. One of the things on which there was absolute agreement, among the academics who looked, was that food prices are highly likely to go up, because the pound - everyone agreed, and indeed it has now - would go down, therefore imports will cost more. Is that - the second part of your question - therefore a trigger that Britain produces more of its own? In the long term, yes. But who's going to grow this? We rely upon foreign labour to produce the food - to grow it and to process it in the factories. And as I've said in a tweet, you know, those who voted for Brexit - are they now prepared to go and work picking Brussels sprouts and cabbages, and lifting potatoes in Lincolnshire, where I'm from? Do they really want to do that? I don't see any sign of them wanting to do that. Actually, it's Eastern Europeans who are prepared to do it. Come on, let's get clear, guys. This is call-it time, here. Do you want food from Britain? In which case, you've got to get going and doing it, or not.

Dan Saladino: Another point being made is, at this point in time, we are still one of the wealthiest economies in the world. We can spend our way out of this - we can buy food on a global market, post-Brexit.

Tim Lang: Mr. Gove, in an interview with the BBC, at one point said one of the things that he wanted to leave the European Union for was to open up trade with the rest of the world, so we can - in a throwaway remark, he said - we can get cheaper food from Africa. I thought Africa had a problem and it needed to feed itself. Is that option really moral and justified? I don't think so. It's a fantasy of free trade - very strange politics.

Dan Saladino: But not strange to people who's spent much of their lives working hard to take the UK out of the EU.

Tim Worstall: My name's Tim Worstall - I'm a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.

Dan Saladino: Which is a free-market think tank. And Tim Worstall was having a good week. For him, Brexit is mission accomplished.

Tim Worstall: I have actually been writing about this and working towards it for the last two decades. Wonderful. Superb. First decent decision made in 20 years.

Dan Saladino: And among the arguments Tim has put forward for Brexit, either as a former speechwriter for Nigel Farage or in his role at the Adam Smith Institute, many revolve around food.

Tim Worstall: I have a great interest in trade, and food obviously is the most important thing that we human beings have traded, over the millennia.

Dan Saladino: When you envisaged this moment arriving, did you expect a period that we're currently going through, which is instability, uncertainty and a degree of panic?

Tim Worstall: Yes, there will be a large number of headless chickens running around. And after a few weeks, a month or two, everyone will realise the sun still rises in the morning but now we get to make our choices. That's the only difference.

Dan Saladino: On a Skype line from his home in Portugal, Tim Worstall predicted that when things do settle down, we can all look forward to a stable, more secure and affordable food future.

Tim Worstall: The bigger problem, I think, that people have got here is that they really just don't quite understand how markets work. We do not buy food from the European continent because we are members of the European Union. It's some farmer, it's Georges or Jacques or Joachim or somebody, who sells something to Sainsbury's. And why would that change, just because we've changed the political arrangement? Whatever tariffs food faces, after Brexit, will be determined exactly by the British government. We get to decide what our import tariffs are. Why are we going to make the things we want to buy more expensive for ourselves? So obviously, you know, we like buying continental food - great, we won't have tariffs on continental food. What's the difference?

Dan Saladino: What would you say to people who point to the fact that we have some of the cheapest food in Europe? In fact, the proportion of our income that we spend on food has decreased.

Tim Worstall: Yeah, well, I mean that's just part and parcel of getting richer. Food is what's -

Dan Saladino: But that's happened under EU membership.

Tim Worstall: We have to pay quite large tariffs to import food from outside the European Union, I think it's something like 30, 34% on sugar, at the moment. Okay, so we're outside the European Union. We now decide that we want to buy sugar not from the European Union. We don't have to charge ourselves 35% on importing sugar from Guadeloupe or Martinique or wherever. We're fifth, sixth, seventh, whatever it is, richest nation on the planet. Here in the UK - or you there, in the UK - should be growing the high value stuff that Britain grows really well. I mean, our grass-fed beef, for example, is some of the best in the world - people line up to buy joints of it. But simple stuff like turnips or wheat - why should we even think about trying to grow it in the UK, when there's the vast steppes of the Ukraine or the American mid-west or the Canadians? At hundreds of dollars a ton, and ship it to us. Why would we bother with trying to make this cheap stuff when we're a high-income, high-cost nation?

Dan Saladino: And his post-Brexit food vision isn't based on some theoretical economic model - it actually exists.

Tim Worstall: There are two different sets of models we can talk about, here. And one is: you know, let's just go and have free trade in food, you know, unilateral free trade. Why not buy the best food in the world from the cheapest producer of it? Of course the diversity of supply actually ensures supply - it ensures supply security. We also have this other model of how should we deal with British farming. And there the model is New Zealand. I mean, basically New Zealand has no farm subsidies whatsoever, for anything.