It’s worth paying attention when a country’s own intelligence analysts warn that ecosystems critical to its food security could begin collapsing within a decade. That’s what Defra’s national security assessment, reportedly produced with the Joint Intelligence Committee, concluded earlier this year. It’s far from the only warning. Tim Lang’s ‘Just in Case’ report found the UK unprepared for food supply shocks. A national emergency briefing warned parliament directly of existential climate risks, with food featuring prominently. And 20 senior food industry executives have anonymously warned that supply chains are heading toward inevitable shortages and business failures.
New research from a group I am part of, involving more than 30 experts from across government, industry, and academia, arrived at a consensus on one of the biggest challenges in our approach to food security: when asked to prioritize interventions that could prevent food system crises, experts ranked greater long-termism in policy planning beyond a single UK government lifespan as their top priority.
This matters not because short-termism in government is news. What’s significant is that experts across sectors agree our governance structures are fundamentally mismatched to the food system challenges we face. Observers, including intelligence agencies, preparedness commissions, industry insiders, and cross-sector researchers, see warnings coming from many directions.
But our political institutions remain constrained by multiple forces, including electoral pressures, media cycles, and crisis-response planning and funding models that prioritize immediate concerns over strategic foresight. This systemic short-termism creates persistent barriers to the kind of sustained, multi-decade planning that food security requires.
In this article, I bring the group’s research to bear to show how short-termism could lead to failure in our food system and what we can do about it now.
The tinderbox: How short-term decision making creates long-term vulnerabilities
The group’s research highlights a fundamental challenge: what appear to be separate risks such as cyber attacks, extreme weather, or international conflicts actually form an interconnected pathway where each shock makes the system more vulnerable to the next. Understanding these cascading vulnerabilities is essential for building governance systems capable of genuine preparation rather than perpetual reaction.
Building food system resilience requires decades, but UK governance operates on much shorter decision-making cycles. The mismatch is significant: climate change adaptation in agriculture, soil health restoration, supply chain diversification, and cybersecurity infrastructure all require sustained investment over 10- to 20-year time horizons. Yet institutional structures often reward immediate, visible interventions over the patient work of system-building. We plan transport and energy infrastructure on longer timescales. Why not food security?
This temporal misalignment has created what the group’s research refers to as a “tinderbox”: chronic vulnerabilities that transform manageable shocks into potential crises. For example, just-in-time food supply chains deliver efficiency but remove buffers against disruption. Supply chain consolidation reduces costs, but also creates single points of failure. And digitization improves logistics but creates cyber vulnerabilities across payment and cold storage systems.
Meanwhile, reduced farmer profitability, exacerbated by policy uncertainty and climate pressures, forces land use decisions that prioritize short-term survival over long-term resilience. Rising inequality means 18% of UK households with children have experienced food insecurity, while food poverty leads to mental health impacts that erode social cohesion and public trust in institutions. Each of these problems requires sustained, decades-long attention to address root causes. Instead, our governance model treats them as separate issues.
From isolated shocks to system failure
The greatest threat to UK food security isn’t any single event, but rather how acute shocks cascade through a system already weakened by chronic vulnerabilities. Three types of triggers were identified by the group as particularly concerning, not because they’re the only risks, but because they demonstrate how quickly manageable disruptions can become systemic crises when governance structures lack the resilience to sustain a response.
- Cyber vulnerabilities: A ransomware attack on major retailers could prevent food purchases, while attacks on wage systems could leave workers unpaid. More critically, cyber disruption of energy supplies would cause outages in cold storage, leading to massive spoilage of fresh and frozen foods. The 2024 CrowdStrike incident offered a preview when payment systems were briefly paralysed, and empty shelves appeared within hours.
- Climate amplification: Extreme weather increasingly strikes multiple regions simultaneously. Flooding in the UK over 18 months contributed to an 11% output reduction in wheat-growing areas in 2024. Domestic impacts compound with international ones: correlated weather patterns due to climate change mean UK crop failures could coincide with failures in major breadbaskets, creating global shortages and price spikes that hit an import-dependent UK particularly hard.
- Geopolitical acceleration: International conflicts not only disrupt trade, but they also create cascading vulnerabilities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated how quickly energy costs spike, supply chains fracture, and food prices soar. Future conflicts could target food production directly through biological weapons, disrupt critical chokepoints like the Suez Canal, or trigger secondary effects like last year’s Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. Since this research was conducted, the geopolitical landscape has further deteriorated, with trade increasingly weaponised and countries from Scandinavia to South Asia rebuilding food stockpiles in response.
These interconnected weaknesses amplify each other. As one expert explained: “Something happens, markets panic, governments panic, debt/inflation goes up, geopolitical tensions ramp up, then when the next thing happens, everything is more jittery.” Each electoral cycle’s focus on immediate pressures prevents the sustained attention needed to address root causes, leaving the tinderbox drier with each passing year.
We’re already seeing this dynamic play out in real time, with shocks such as cyberattacks on major retailers, extreme weather events disrupting harvests, and ongoing conflicts affecting global supply chains becoming constant features of our environment rather than exceptional events. Without governance systems designed for sustained resilience-building, we remain perpetually reactive, always one crisis behind.
Long-term thinking requires institutional capacity
Throughout the group’s research process, experts converged towards more systemic thinking, with initial discussions of specific risks evolving into emphasis on interconnections and cascading effects across the food system. The research found that effective food system governance requires four interconnected changes, each reinforcing the others to create genuine long-term capacity:
- Cross-government coordination must replace departmental fragmentation, breaking down silos between health, trade, environment, and social security, for example, ensuring that agricultural policy aligns with, rather than contradicts, public health goals.
- Governance must include diverse voices beyond industry insiders, particularly marginalized communities disproportionately affected by food insecurity.
- Stronger international collaboration is essential for coordinated responses to global shocks.
- Monitoring and early warning systems require data sharing across commercially sensitive boundaries.
Recent evidence suggests this isn’t just a theoretical concern. The Covid-19 Inquiry exposed how quickly coordination breaks down when government faces complex, cross-cutting challenges, even with the urgency of a pandemic forcing the issue. If Whitehall struggled to align departments when lives were being lost in real time, the prospects for sustained coordination on slower-burning food system risks are sobering.
The Prime Minister himself has acknowledged the difficulty, describing the gap between pulling a policy lever and seeing results as longer than it should be. A former No10 advisor went further, arguing that any initiative requiring multiple departments to act faces near-impossible odds without direct and ongoing prime ministerial backing. Food policy has no single departmental home, making it exceptionally vulnerable to exactly this kind of institutional inertia.
As experts in our work emphasized, the detail of individual interventions is less critical than identifying coherent combinations that work together. The four priority interventions reinforce each other. For example, cross-government coordination creates space for longer-term planning, while inclusive governance ensures that planning reflects real-world needs rather than departmental assumptions. Equally, international collaboration provides the external partnerships needed for resilient supply chains, while monitoring systems offer the early warning capacity that enables proactive rather than reactive responses.
Future-focused frameworks are emerging
Governments taking a more future-focused approach is slowly happening, but it isn’t exactly new. Wales pioneered this approach domestically nearly a decade ago with the Well-being of Future Generations Act, which legally obligates government to consider the welfare of future citizens in all policymaking. Former Future Generations Commissioner Sophie Howe notes that such frameworks require “embedding [futures-thinking] in a transformative way, rather than a performative way”. Finland established the world’s first parliamentary Committee for the Future even earlier – in 1993 – which responds to the government’s “Reports on the Future” each electoral term and provides cross-committee advisory services on long-term policy implications.
Along with those country-level examples to learn from, there has been a more recent international effort. In 2024, the UN developed a Declaration on Future Generations, signed by 193 countries, which commits nations to incorporating science, data, and strategic foresight into long-term policy planning. This Declaration provides practical tools for implementation and represents more than a symbolic commitment. The proposed Special Envoy for Future Generations and UN Forum would support country capacity-building, facilitate knowledge exchange, and review progress on long-term commitments. This multilateral infrastructure offers the kind of external accountability that can help national governments maintain focus beyond electoral cycles.
The alignment between these frameworks and expert recommendations on long-term planning, systems thinking, and inclusive governance reflects growing global recognition that food security requires institutional transformation. With both domestic pioneers like Wales and international infrastructure through the UN, countries now have proven models and multilateral support to overcome the political barriers that have historically trapped food policy in short-term cycles.
The long view: From crisis response to system resilience
Taking a genuine food systems approach requires understanding that our food security challenges are interconnected, not isolated. Short-term disruptions cascade through a system already weakened by chronic vulnerabilities. Addressing this reality requires the kind of long-term thinking that political cycles actively discourage, but which global frameworks, such as the UN Declaration on Future Generations, now support.
The group’s research offers clear guidance for this transformation through principles that should underpin any serious attempt at food system reform:
- Address root causes of both chronic and acute risks, rather than just treating symptoms.
- Embed dignity, kindness, and fairness into policymaking.
- Co-design solutions with those disproportionately affected by food insecurity.
- Account for power dynamics and conflicts of interest across the food system.
- Take a holistic systems approach that anticipates interconnections and unintended consequences.
The evidence is clear: Chronic vulnerabilities are already undermining our food security. Meanwhile, acute shocks such as cyberattacks, extreme weather events, and geopolitical conflicts are becoming more frequent and severe. The interplay between chronic weaknesses and acute triggers creates a compounding risk that grows with each passing year, thereby increasing the likelihood of cascading failures.
The sooner solutions are found, and embedded, the better. Effective governance mechanisms established by government can overcome short-termism in food security planning. Businesses can prioritize resilience alongside efficiency and communities can build robust local food security networks. Investors can demand meaningful risk assessments that extend beyond the next quarter. All these measures will contribute to the transformation of secure food systems. A food system that evolved from a legacy of free trade and cheap food needs to be understood as a strategic vulnerability in turbulent times. The stakes couldn’t be higher, not just for our food security today, but for the future generations who will depend on the systems we build 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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