Industry insiders sounded the alarm earlier this month when an anonymous group of food industry executives released a whistleblowing memo, warning of unprecedented threats to UK food security. Their revelation confirms what many people working in and on our food systems have long understood but has rarely been publicly acknowledged by industry: our food supply chains are dangerously vulnerable to climate-related disruptions.
The disclosure is particularly significant because of its source. The whistleblowers are high-level industry insiders—some 20 executives from major UK manufacturers, retailers, and associated businesses—with decades of experience in the sector. They describe a system heading towards inevitable food shortages, supply chain collapses, and business failures if business-as-usual approaches continue.
The whistleblowers’ assessment echoes what I wrote in a recent article about reframing food security as a national security imperative in a climate-changed world. While energy, manufacturing, and other sectors are decarbonizing, agriculture will become the UK’s second-highest emitting sector by 2040. Meanwhile, climate impacts will dramatically reshape global food systems—disrupting supply chains, triggering population movements, and amplifying economic harms that feed into conflict and instability.
Mounting evidence of food system vulnerability
This industry warning wasn’t the first signal of serious vulnerabilities in our food system; it joins the growing ranks of other evidence. Research published by Jones et al. in 2023 found that 40% of food system experts believe there’s at least a 20% chance of severe civil unrest linked to food system failures occurring within the next decade. This risk assessment increases dramatically for longer timeframes, with 80% of experts seeing this level of risk over 50 years. The study identified extreme weather as the predominant threat across all scenarios, aligning with the whistleblowers’ concerns about climate-related disruptions to our food supply.
This research found that while extreme weather was consistently identified as the primary threat, it rarely acts alone. As one expert in their study noted, “something happens, markets panic, governments panic, debt/inflation goes up, geopolitical tensions ramp up, then when the next thing happens everything is more jittery.”
What makes the whistleblowers’ warning particularly alarming is that many of the food system risks identified by Jones et al. are already manifesting—much faster than predicted. Within just the past two years, we’ve witnessed simultaneous threats: climate-driven extreme weather (devastating droughts in Southern Africa, catastrophic floods in Brazil and Spain, exceptional wildfire events across North and South America), geopolitical instability (escalating trade wars and tariffs affecting global food producers), infrastructure vulnerabilities (ongoing conflict in Ukraine and port strikes in the US disrupting supply chains), and technological failures (like the Crowdstrike outage that briefly paralysed payment systems worldwide).
These events aren’t hypothetical future scenarios—they’re happening now, creating precisely the kind of compounding pressures on food systems that experts have been warning us about. The convergence of these multiple stressors makes the industry insiders’ warning credible and urgently prescient.
False assurances and wishful thinking
The whistleblowers’ memo adds to this picture an insider’s view of how businesses are responding—or failing to respond—to these mounting challenges. According to their memo, resilience planning within food companies is based on wishful thinking and false reassurances to investors. The strategies being developed to mitigate risks are not proportionate to the scale of threats industry faces.
Perhaps most concerning is how competitive pressures and regulatory constraints prevent crucial conversations about systemic vulnerabilities. The highly competitive retail sector, combined with competition law and the grocers’ code of conduct, creates an environment where companies are unwilling or unable to pool their insights and develop joint strategies for addressing shared risks.
This resonates with patterns I’ve observed in other complex systems. Earlier this year, I explored how large institutions resist transformation even when the need for change is clear and urgent. Just as healthcare systems demonstrate remarkable inertia in the face of climate and health challenges, our food systems exhibit a paradoxical stability. System rigidity leaves insufficient room to bend under pressure, making them prone to catastrophic failure when stressed beyond their tolerances. Consequently, the very structures that were designed to ensure stability increasingly make us vulnerable to cascading failures from each new shock.
This industry warning comes at a pivotal moment for UK food policy. While arguing for food policy reform, I have already noted how fragmentation has long described the UK’s approach, with responsibilities siloed across departments and many groups of people excluded from meaningful participation in decision-making. The new food strategy announced by Defra late last year offers the potential for more integrated and inclusive governance, but the whistleblowers’ memo underscores how urgent this transformation has become. The memo reframes what many considered a long-term threat into an immediate concern, demanding we accelerate our collective response.
From long-term to immediate threat: the imperative for action
While I’m excited about emerging research that offers new approaches to building food system resilience (including a project I’m involved with that I’ll discuss in a future article), the whistleblowers’ message is unambiguous: the vulnerabilities in our food system are immediate and severe.
They describe a food industry heading into a crisis that those within can clearly see coming. Their courage in speaking out, even anonymously, provides a rare moment of clarity about the scale and urgency of challenges facing our food systems.
We would be foolish not to heed their warning. The security of our food supply—and by extension, our national security—depends on immediate action to address the vulnerabilities they identify.
The memo calls for investors to demand better risk assessment and mitigation strategies from food companies. This is certainly necessary, but responsibility extends beyond investors. Government must provide frameworks that enable rather than inhibit collaborative approaches to resilience. Businesses must move beyond compliance-oriented sustainability to transformative adaptation strategies. And civil society must continue pushing for the systemic changes that market forces alone will not deliver.
I’ve said it before, as have numerous others, but it feels truer every time: the time to act is now.
I write about the future of food and the connections between our food systems, the environment and public health. Sign up for my newsletter.
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