27 January 2026

Dear AFN Network+

Defra has quietly published what should be one of the most significant reports on UK food security in years: a national security assessment of global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. Reportedly produced with the Joint Intelligence Committee, it identifies six critical ecosystems on pathways to collapse, some potentially beginning within the next decade. It bluntly concludes that the UK’s reliance on imported food and fertilisers makes it vulnerable to supply shocks, price volatility and geopolitical competition for resources.

The timing is important. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke of a ‘rupture’ in international geopolitics at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. Military action in Venezuela and President Trump’s threats to ‘acquire’ Greenland and impose tariffs on European allies shows that the Atlantic alliance is frayed and trade is being weaponised. The old rules-based order is giving way to power blocs carving out spheres of influence.

The assessment warns that “significant disruption to international markets as a result of ecosystem degradation or collapse will put UK food security at risk.” The geopolitical conditions for supply shocks and resource competition make that disruption less a hypothetical prospect than a potentially imminent reality.

Quick Take:

• The assessment’s central warning is that without significant increases in food system resilience, the UK would be unlikely to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food. Some critical ecosystems could begin collapsing from 2030.
• The UK cannot currently feed itself. We import 40% of our food, rely on imports for fertiliser, and lack enough land to feed the population and rear livestock at current levels. The assessment states UK food production is “vulnerable to ecosystem degradation and collapse.”
• Yet UK politicians talk about energy security with a clarity and assertiveness we don’t hear applied to food. Ed Miliband frames green energy as ‘breaking free from petrostates and dictators,’ but there’s no equivalent framing for food.
• This raises hard questions about what we eat and what we ask of our agriculture, including whether giving over 85% of agricultural land to animal husbandry is sustainable over the medium term.

Deep Dive:

What the assessment says

The report, produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee according to The Guardian, identifies six ecosystems most critical for UK national security: the Amazon and Congo rainforests, boreal forests in Canada and Russia, the Himalayas, and South East Asia’s coral reefs and mangroves. All of these ecosystems are assessed to be on pathways to collapse. There is a realistic possibility that coral reefs and boreal forests start to collapse from 2030, with rainforests and mangroves following from 2050.

The consequences would cascade through reduced global crop yields, fisheries collapse, destabilised food-producing regions, heightened competition between states, and accelerated migration and conflict.

The picture is sobering for the UK. We import 40% of our food, with over a quarter coming from Europe. We are heavily reliant on imports for fresh fruit, vegetables and sugar. Animal farming at current levels is unsustainable without imports such as soy from South America, which makes up 18% of animal feed. We are not self-sufficient in fertiliser, either. The assessment is clear that the UK “cannot currently produce enough food to feed its population based on current diets” and that domestic food production is “vulnerable to ecosystem degradation and collapse.”

A complacent special case?

These findings have to somehow reach a policy community where it has long been unfashionable to worry about food security. The prevailing view harks back to imperial free-trade thinking, which sees the UK as a wealthy country, and food can simply be bought from wherever it is cheapest to produce. Calls for attention to food security are readily dismissed as special pleading from a farming industry shy of international competition.

Yet growing evidence of climate impacts and biodiversity loss, coupled with an increasingly febrile geopolitical context, mean a wider range of voices are now asking pointed questions about resilience. For a government preoccupied with growth and household finances, food price inflation remains stubbornly high, which is partly driven by climate change, and likely to increase as the old order crumbles further.

This view contrasts starkly with energy policy. Ed Miliband continually justifies the Government’s green energy mission as strengthening energy security and reducing vulnerability to Putin’s adventurism. At the 2024 Labour Party Conference he declared that we will “break the power of the petrostates and dictators over our energy policy…we can, we must, we will Take Back Control of our energy.” During a House of Commons Chamber exchange he stated that “Putin’s boot is on our throat.”

We do not hear politicians talk about food security with similar clarity and assertiveness.

Stockpiling gathers pace

Other countries are not waiting. The Financial Times reported on 14 January that “from Sweden and Norway to India and Indonesia, states are holding back increasing quantities of rice, wheat and other staples as insurance against a world they increasingly view as unstable.”

Frederic Neumann, Chief Asia Economist at HSBC, told the Financial Times: “The Scandinavian countries serve as a barometer of global geopolitical risk and so the extent that they are bringing food stocks back up means that they’re perceiving an increased geopolitical stress in the world.”

Norway is building emergency grain reserves not seen since the Cold War — holding 30,000 tonnes of wheat across 2024 and 2025. Sweden has allocated more than $60 million to rebuilding food stocks after more than 20 years of winding down its Cold War stockpiling arrangements, with the aim to provide 3,000 calories a day for its 10 million population for a full year. Finland is upgrading from six months to nine months of supplies. Egypt, Brazil and Bangladesh have made similar moves.

What needs to change

We are going through an epoch shift. Governments are going to be increasingly concerned about the security of food supplies, and biodiversity loss needs to be reframed as a core national security issue and source of systemic risk rather than a subset of the environmental agenda.

Ecological resilience needs to be much better integrated into food policy. What we eat and what we ask of our agriculture must be thought about in terms of strengthening resilience and meeting more of our nutritional requirements from our own land and resources.

This leads inevitably to hard questions, including whether giving over 85% of agricultural land to animal husbandry is sustainable over the medium term. Independent reviews, including Henry Dimbleby’s National Food Strategy and the Climate Change Committee’s Seventh Carbon Budget, have pointed to a paring back of animal production by perhaps a third. That would create scope for a more resilient agriculture balanced towards healthier foods such as fruit, leafy green vegetables, and pulses, rendering the UK less vulnerable to international shocks.

A food system that evolved from a legacy of free trade and cheap food needs to be better understood as a strategic vulnerability in these turbulent times. As we argued in our AFN Roadmap for Resilience, change is coming. The question is whether we shape it or are shaped by it.