Self-sufficiency is a myth. National food self-sufficiency doubly so.

Self-sufficiency is a myth. Interdependency,co-operation, mutual-benefit, and trade are real. Even better, these liberties - of markets, trade and enterprise - are the best way to achieve resilience

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Robert Heinlein

This quotation was, of course, attributed by Heinlein to Lazarus Long, the oldest human, in his collection of novellas “Time Enough for Love”. It is often cited as the defining feature of human self-sufficiency, an idea that sits right at the heart (along with longevity) of Heinlein’s writing. Whether it’s “Farnham’s Freehold” with its echo of frontier life or Friday Jones, the self-sufficient super-woman in the eponymous novel, Heinlein presents us with self-sufficiency as either a necessity for mankind or else as the logical outcome of human ingenuity and technology.

The problem is that, however super we artificially make our humans, they are never truly self-sufficient. The thing that makes, in Heinlein’s worlds, space travel possible isn’t self-sufficiency or even self reliance. Those possibilities weren’t made by Eric Frank Russell’s insubordinate, loner scout pilots. The wonders that open up the universe are a consequence of specialisation. For sure we still need risk-takers, we want the courageous, people who can turn their hand to multiple tasks. But we also need Adam Smith’s pin factory, we remain less than we can be if we don’t learn from Leonard Read’s pencil:

“I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that’s too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.”

The pencil is a simple everyday writing tool made possible by specialisation and by the bewildering network of co-operation, collaboration and competition that is a feature (left to its own devices) of humanity. When we walk down the aisle of our local supermarket browsing tens of thousands of different products from everywhere on the planet, we aren’t looking at self-sufficiency, we are looking at mutuality, community and at a Vietnamese family with a pepper farm.

Despite these wonders, and the truth that humans gain the most from free, mutually-beneficial networks, we are regaled daily with fears of shortage, with demands for security and with the claim that these production networks are bad for the planet. Here’s Tim Lang and others making the terrifying claim that our food system is not secure and resilient:

“The UK’s post-War food system, while revolutionary in its time, is no longer fit for purpose. To safeguard our future, we must prioritise resilience at every level – from local communities to national frameworks. Food resilience is not just about surviving a crisis but thriving despite it. This report stands apart from current frameworks by taking into account the public’s current attitudes and understanding of food risks, and asking how civil society can be better engaged to ultimately become more resilient.”

While Lang centres the fearful ideology of the eco-left where climate change - “crisis”, “emergency” - results in the collapse of agriculture as we currently know it, his proposals for autarky, for self-sufficiency, appeal to that same human myth we heard Robert Heinlein put in the mouth of Lazarus Long. The nation being self-sufficient ‘feels’ right, seems like we have taken control, and that something as important as feeding our people isn’t dependent on producers in other nations. For all that “Clarkson’s Farm” is an amazing programme that’s done great things to present the realities of farming, Clarkson’s obsession with sourcing only from Britain for his pub’s menu is verging on the ridiculous.

In the 1840s a series of bad potato harvests caused by late blight resulted in a terrible hunger and famine in Ireland. About a million people died and two million left the country. The relationship between England and Ireland was scarred forever. Imagine, under the ‘resilient’ system proposed by Lang and enthused about by the eco-left and the populist right, a catastrophic grain harvest in Britain. The benign international networks had been closed off, the supermarkets directed by government to abandon the supply chains that make them cheap and efficient, and “committees at the local level, building on existing food policy networks and chaired by trusted local experts” manage local council food stores.

This so-called “food security” is literally the best way to ensure that negative impacts on domestic food production are maximised across the whole population. Abject starvation may be avoided but there will be empty shelves, probably rationing and definitely a food supply system that doesn’t meet population needs in the manner that our current system based on international supply networks does meet our needs. If we want “food security” the way to achieve it is to ensure that supermarket shelves are fully stocked. And the way we achieve this is through human co-operation, mutuality and collaboration not with the same lie about personal self-sufficiency we began with.

Depending on how you measure it, Britain produces between a half and two-thirds of the food we consume. Despite this, agriculture represents less than 1% of UK GDP and the whole food industry only around 5%. What a remarkable achievement: less than 1.5% of workers in Britain produce half of everything we eat! And, at the same time, we get to buy produce from all over the world for pennies: tomatoes from Morocco, avocado from Mexico, ham from Italy and dates from Israel. This is how a food system should work yet so many want to tell me that ‘globalisation has failed’, that we need agricultural protection and that we should be producing our own tomatoes, ham, avocado and dates. Or perhaps more realistically simply not having those products or them being, as a result of tariffs, only affordable to the wealthy and well-connected.

In saying all this, I’m sure I’ll upset some people in the farming lobby who genuinely believe that perfidious foreign tillers of the soil are the reasons for farmers’ problems. But for most of my life we lived under a system of, effectively, the same sort of corn laws that helped make Ireland’s famine worse. Quotas, price controls, tariffs, import limits and subsidies didn’t all combine to make for a fantastic and growing agricultural industry in Britain. Maybe we should look instead at the experience of another independent island nation:

“Overall the reforms were an astonishing success. There are no calls for the reintroduction of subsidies, from either farmers or non-farmers. Farmers prefer being able to get on with their business without government interference and feel a greater sense of pride by not relying on hand-outs; non-farmers benefit from lower food prices and a serious reduction in their tax burden. Today, government assistance to the industry accounts for less than one percent of producers’ income, well below the OECD average of 16%, with the majority of that coming from the $NZ30 million a year that goes towards research and development. The end of the subsidies even had unexpected positive environmental benefits. Marginal land that had been farmed solely to qualify for subsidies was reforested while fertiliser and pesticide use plummeted.”

This might well mean fewer farmers in Britain from consolidation and merger as well as marginal land moving to other uses. We should perhaps remember that nearly three-quarters of Britain’s agricultural land is permanent grassland and rough grazing. Britain was, after all, an economy built first on sheep (or more accurately, wool). The central truth, however, is that if we want the sort of dinners we’ve got used to, then Britain has no option but to be part of those amazing international supply networks. The networks that bring us black pepper from Vietnam, mangoes from Karachi and wine from Marlborough in New Zealand. People who want to tell you globalisation has failed must face up to the reality that five minutes in any large supermarket will reveal it as the most incredible, varied and magnificent failure ever.

Self-sufficiency is a myth. Interdependency, co-operation, mutual-benefit, and trade are real. Even better, these liberties - of markets, trade and enterprise - are the best way to have a resilient supply of food and other products. A proper system of food security would bin Tim Lang’s Food Security Action report, would tell the National Farmers’ Union that we won’t limit supply chains to their benefit (and the consumers’ disadvantage), and would simply point to Tesco, Sainsbury and Aldi saying ‘more of that please’. Britain has an incredible system providing affordable, plentiful, safe and varied food. Why on earth would we change because we’ve fooled ourselves that we can be self-sufficient?