04 February 2026

We tell ourselves that food crises happen elsewhere. But a new study, led by AFN’s Sarah Bridle, with contributions from the wider AFN team alongside experts from across policy, business and civil society, has mapped the pathways by which the UK could face serious food system disruption.  The conclusion is that the underlying chronic issues are already in place; all that’s missing is a spark.

The peer-reviewed study draws on insights from over 30 food systems experts across policy, business, academia and civil society through a structured foresight process involving interviews, surveys and workshops. Participants were tasked with anticipating how acute shocks could combine with existing vulnerabilities to produce a food system crisis, and what interventions might prevent it. 

The research could hardly be more timely. The Atlantic alliance is fraying and trade is being weaponised, while extreme weather hits harvests at home and abroad. Recent assessments, including the Covid-19 Inquiry and Defra’s national security warning on ecosystem collapse, have highlighted just how poorly-equipped the UK is to handle the complex, cross-cutting risks our food system now faces.

Here’s what the research found.

Quick Take

• The UK food system is a “tinderbox” of chronic vulnerabilities. Rising inequality, food insecurity, supply chain consolidation, climate pressures on farming, and declining trust in government have created the conditions for crisis. The experts’ view is that these chronic issues mean any acute shock could escalate rapidly.
• Three acute triggers could light the spark: a major cyber-attack, an extreme weather event hitting harvests at home or abroad, or a new international conflict disrupting trade. Any one could cause a food price or availability shock. The concern is that these triggers are increasingly plausible, and could coincide.
• Fear and mistrust can turn disruption into crisis. The research defines a food crisis not just by hunger, but by widespread fear of inadequate or unsafe food. Panic buying, empty shelves, food fraud and crime could erode trust and tip disruption into unrest.
• System-wide interventions ranked highest. The top priority was longer-term policy planning that outlasts single parliaments. Cross-government coordination, international collaboration and forums for diverse voices also ranked above technical fixes.
• Diversification is a recurring theme. Across production, supply chains, distribution and diets, the experts saw diversification as key to resilience. Agroecology and regenerative agriculture were highlighted as ways to make farming more resilient to climate shocks.
  

Deep Dive

The tinderbox and the sparks

The research describes the chronic risks as a ‘tinderbox’. UK farming faces low profitability, policy uncertainty and ecological degradation, and supply chains have consolidated around a just-in-time model that prioritises efficiency over resilience. Digitisation has brought new efficiencies but also new vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, society is already under immense strain from food price inflation, rising inequality, growing reliance on food banks and declining trust in public institutions.

Within this context, study participants identified three plausible acute triggers. The first is a major cyber-attack on food system infrastructure that could target payment systems, logistics or energy supply. The 2023 ransomware attack on Dole and the 2025 attacks on major UK retailers show this is not hypothetical. The second trigger is an extreme weather event severe enough to cause significant harvest failures, either in the UK or in the overseas breadbaskets on which we depend. The third is a new or escalating international conflict that disrupts trade routes, energy supplies or critical imports such as fertiliser or feed. 

The risk is not just that one of these events occurs, but that two or more occur together or in quick succession. Conflict can prompt cyber-attacks, for example, and cut off trade in critical inputs. A financial shock triggered by crop failures overseas could coincide with a domestic harvest failure. The potential for compounding and cascading shocks makes current risk assessments, which tend to treat these threats in isolation, seem dangerously optimistic.  

From shock to unrest

How does a food shortage or price spike become a crisis? The research notes that a food system crisis is not simply about hunger. Crisis can occur when large numbers of people become acutely anxious about whether they can access enough safe, nutritious food, and it is fear, as much as scarcity, that tips a society toward unrest.

The pathways the experts mapped run through a series of events. For example, a shock causes food shortages or sudden price rises, and the poorest are hit first and hardest. Visible signals like empty shelves trigger panic buying across income groups, which deepens the shortage. Food fraud increases, black markets emerge, and then crime and even violence to obtain food become more likely. At each stage, poor communication from government, retailers or the media can accelerate the crisis, with social media amplifying fear and misinformation.

Critically, escalation depends on pre-existing levels of trust, because where trust in institutions is already low, people are quicker to assume the worst and act accordingly. The Covid-19 Inquiry made a similar point: public compliance with emergency measures depends on confidence that authorities are acting competently and fairly, and that confidence has been severely eroded.

The research also notes that any crisis will have considerable geographic and social variation. Areas with higher poverty, weaker social infrastructure or less access to alternatives will be hit harder, so the impacts will be unevenly distributed, and so will the unrest.

Building resilience

The diagnosis is sobering, but what about the prescription? The research asked participants to prioritise interventions that would build resilience across the food system. And perhaps unsurprisingly, system-wide changes ranked consistently higher than technical or sector-specific fixes.

Top of the list was longer-term policy planning that extends beyond the lifespan of a single parliament. This echoes a recurring theme that anyone working in food policy will recognise: the mismatch between the long time horizons required for food system transformation and the short-term incentives of electoral politics. Second was genuine cross-government coordination, bringing together not just Defra but health, treasury, trade, education and others around a shared food systems agenda. Third was stronger international collaboration, recognising that the UK cannot insulate itself from global shocks. Participants also called for forums that bring diverse voices into preparedness planning, including those most affected by food insecurity.

Further down the list, but still important, were interventions targeting specific vulnerabilities such as diversifying food production and supply chains, investing in agroecology and regenerative agriculture, improving infrastructure such as flood defences, and securing digital systems against cyber-attack. Good social security and emergency cash transfers to the poorest were identified as critical buffers against price shocks.

These findings speak directly to the governance failures highlighted by the Covid-19 Inquiry, which exposed a system in which cross-departmental coordination was, in the words of one former advisor, ‘200% harder’ than acting within a single department. Scientific advice was cherry-picked and devolved governments were left uncertain about whether to act together or independently. The food system presents precisely the kind of complex, cross-cutting challenge that this machinery of government has repeatedly failed to manage.

The implication is clearly that without reform to how government approaches complex risks, the UK will remain poorly prepared for the shocks that are increasingly likely to come.

What now?

The research makes a compelling case that the conditions for a UK food crisis are more advanced than policymakers tend to assume, and that the triggers are increasingly plausible. Technical fixes alone will not be enough. We need the kind of joined-up, long-term thinking that recent inquiries have shown government struggles to deliver, alongside a willingness to take food security as seriously as energy security.

As we argued in our own Roadmap for Resilience, change is coming to the UK food system whether we like it or not. The choice is whether we shape it or are shaped by it.

Our thanks to the AFN team members who participated in the work: Angelina Sanderson-Bellamy, Neil Ward, Tim Benton, Saher Hasnain, Bob Doherty, Pete Smith, Simon Pearson, Charles Godfray, Dominic Watters, Juan Pablo Cordero, Molly Watson, Judith Batchelar, John Ingram, Jude Irons, Tom MacMillan, Kerry Whiteside