Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warns that the coronavirus global pandemic must force countries to focus on shorter supply chains.
He emphasises that self-sufficiency in food and energy would make countries less vulnerable to future attacks.
This warning comes on top of the uncertainties we already faced around Brexit – the threat of no deal with the EU at the end of this year has not gone away – and the impending global climate crisis.
Wales already produces more energy than it consumes, so we are in a strong position there.
Self-sufficiency in food is a bigger challenge.
Though Wales produces an abundance of meat and dairy, we import half our vegetables and most of our fruit.
A mere 0.1% of Welsh land is dedicated to commercial horticulture.
The immediate lockdown exposed the vulnerabilities of our centralised just-in-time food distribution system dominated by the demands of supermarkets.
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Producers of food originally destined for cafes and restaurants found that their wholesalers temporarily failed to divert their produce to supermarkets, all for want of the bespoke packaging required by the retail giants.
Eggs were not reaching the shops because of a shortage of branded egg boxes.
The idea of putting trays on shelves so shoppers could help themselves was never considered.
Why was my sole trading master butcher unable to meet the demand for lamb of all things on Easter Saturday?
The extra carcasses he had ordered never arrived. This, in a country which produces enough lamb to feed our population 100 times over.
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More tragically, hundreds of dairy farmers have been forced to pour their milk down the drain because their milk-processing company has refused to collect it.
Acton-based dairy processor Freshways specialised in bagging milk into strong plastic pouches for their cafe and airline customers but it never occurred to them to divert surplus supplies to nourish the one third of Welsh children living in food poverty.
Leaving aside the scandalous discarding of fresh milk – milk that the taxpayer had already paid for through the Basic Payments Scheme to farmers – a lot less food is being wasted.
Under lockdown, many more people are cooking from scratch rather than relying on processed food laced with sugar, fat and salt.
Others, however, are living in inadequate housing with only a kettle and perhaps a microwave to prepare food.
Many local authorities – certainly the case with Cardiff Council – have done a great job making sure that nobody starves during the lockdown.
Foodbank usage has doubled and an army of volunteers has delivered food parcels to the doorsteps of those unable to leave home.
Wales now needs to plan for a more resilient food future. We cannot know whether the fruit and vegetables normally imported from southern Europe and further afield will continue to reach these shores, whether crops already planted will get harvested or how severely routes to market have been disrupted by this global pandemic.
To guard against this insecurity of supplies, Wales needs to ramp up home-produced fruit and vegetables to fill the gap.
Puffin Produce, based in Haverfordwest, is Wales’ only large-scale producer.
Its network of 25 producers already keep Welsh supermarkets supplied with potatoes, cauliflowers, leeks and brassicas for most of the year, in line with the supermarkets’ obsession with uniform sizes and appearance.
Puffin does not rely on gangmasters supplying casual labour from Eastern Europe – it has a permanent team of 30-40 pickers to support its highly-mechanised harvesting operations.
Puffin’s founder and managing director Huw Thomas assured me that its growers could increase production by at least 25%.
A Tyfu Cymru audit of horticulture producers, led by Amber Wheeler, estimated that Puffin producers could double their potato production and grow 10 times more vegetables as long as they had some assurance that supermarkets would not then drive down the prices they are prepared to pay.
What of the other 200 Welsh commercial horticulture growers?
A lot depends on the attitude of the Welsh Government.
Businesses operating on less than five hectares of land have long been starved of capital investment as they are excluded from the EU Common Agricultural Policy.
With demand for veg boxes delivered to people’s doors exceeding supplies even before lockdown, there is clearly scope for rectifying that distortion.
The Landworkers Alliance Cymru calculates that a modest grant of up to £100,000 per enterprise could enable their 100 Welsh horticulture producers to double production this year.
Mr Thomas agrees that it would be perfectly possible to double the production of Welsh vegetables within the next 18 months.
Ms Wheeler, a food security and sustainability consultant, is more ambitious; she argues that Wales needs to multiply horticulture production 29 times in order to meet our “five a day” fruit and veg needs.
She calculates that this could be achieved on a mere 2% of our land.
This is not just about food security; it is also about bridging the gap in life expectancy.
There is a well-established link between poor diet and poor health which explains both a 20-30 year gap in healthy old age and the concentration of Covid deaths in more deprived communities.
The Well Being of Future Generations Act tasks our 44 public bodies to address this inequality.
Now is the time to start making better use of some of their £6bn public procurement muscle to purchase good food for schools, hospitals and residential homes.
Instead of always going for the cheapest food, the top priority should be freshness and nutritional value, strengthening local economies rather than spending the Welsh pound on propping up multinationals based outside Wales.
- Jenny Rathbone is Labour MS for Cardiff Central