For the last 50 years or so, efficiency has been the organizing principle for the UK food system. The reasoning is that food is cheapest and most reliable if it’s produced wherever costs are lowest, moved through lean supply chains that hold little stock, and traded across open markets. Reserves and slack are treated as waste. This “efficiency mindset” characterizes a broad implicit—and sometimes not so implicit—consensus that shapes trade rules, government thinking, and the way food supply chains are built in the UK and many other countries.
Yet, recent reports and commentary approaching food security from different angles—climate adaptation, global trade, cost-of-living crisis—have reached a similar conclusion: the efficiency-first model is itself a source of vulnerability. The exposure arises from heavy reliance on imports, supply chains that are too concentrated and too lean to absorb and bounce back from shocks, and a loss of public sector capacity to steady prices or supply when shocks hit. The proposed response is also broadly shared: focus on rebuilding domestic production, hold public reserves, and manage markets rather than leaving them to their own devices.
In other words, efficiency is being displaced by resilience as a goal of food policy.
In this article, I look at where the case for that shift is coming from and what resilience is for. I then turn to the question that matters most and is least often considered, which is not just who resilience benefits, but who gets to decide.
From efficiency to resilience
The shift from efficiency to resilience is evident across a range of recent work and notable for where it’s coming from.
Three reports converging on a conclusion
No longer confined to longstanding critics of the industrial food system, the case for resilience is now being made by official advisory bodies, mainstream institutions, and the food industry itself.
- IPES-Food, an international panel of food systems experts, locates the shift in the breakdown of the free trade system that has shaped global food for half a century, now strained by conflict, extreme weather, and cuts to aid. Its concern is partly geopolitical: as powerful countries abandon the free-market rules they once imposed on others, import-dependent nations are left exposed, and food is increasingly used as a geopolitical weapon.
The response it sets out, which it calls “resilient self-reliance,” centres on market management tools like public food reserves and supply management, drawing on examples from Canada, Norway, India, and West Africa.
- The Climate Change Committee (CCC), the UK’s official and generally cautious advisory body, in its latest statutory assessment of UK climate risk—A Well-Adapted UK—recommends that government stress-test food supply chains for systemic failure, require large food companies and supermarkets to disclose their climate exposure, and explore building a national food stockpile, while holding domestic production at no less than 60% of what the country consumes. The CCC goes further on distribution, suggesting government may need to provide direct support to lower-income households during food price shocks, much as it does during cold weather.
For a technocratic body to propose that the state hold reserves and shield the most vulnerable from price spikes is a notable departure, and a measure of how much concern about who bears the cost of a shock has grown.
- The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a UK think tank, has drawn on three decades of price data to show that the lean, concentrated structure of the food market is itself a source of harm. They observe that when a shock hits, prices climb quickly and then settle at a permanently higher level rather than returning to their starting point.
The report focuses on climate and trade, but its conclusion extends more deeply to the structure of the market itself. The supply chain is dominated by a small number of large processors, manufacturers, and retailers, and their concentration of pricing power is what lets them hold prices higher after a shock passes and costs fall. The lasting “cost” falls on households, rather than on the firms best able to absorb it.
The IPES report is ostensibly about global trade, while the CCC assessment focuses on climate adaptation. ECIU is highlighting the effects of shocks on the cost of living. But each one shows how the pursuit of efficiency has made the food system fragile and explores what it would take to build resilience back into it.
A broader turn towards resilience
The IPES, CCC, and ECIU reports are highly visible recent proposals on the issue, but the same thinking is already independently shaping government, industry, and international practice.
Following publication of the CCC’s A Well-Adapted UK, a coalition of farmers, food businesses, trade bodies, and NGOs urged Downing Street to treat food resilience as a matter of national security. They argue that food deserves the binding targets and statutory duties the UK brought to the energy crisis, and with that, the scale and speed in addressing the challenges that true food system resilience demands.
The contrast with what’s happening in some other countries is also hard to ignore. Finland maintains emergency grain reserves equivalent to several months of consumption, as required by law; Norway is rebuilding the grain stocks it discontinued in 2003; and Sweden is establishing its first emergency reserves. The UK, meanwhile, holds no strategic food reserve and continues to rely on just-in-time supply.
Over the past couple of years, independent assessments have converged on a shared sense of how exposed the UK food system has become. Now that concern is increasingly accompanied by proposals for addressing it. At its core is a vision that treats slack, stock, and spare capacity as essential, rather than the waste that a system shaped by a logic of efficiency has spent decades stripping out.
A policy toolkit for building resilience
National food reserves and government controls on production may sound radical, but they are among the oldest instruments of food policy. Public stockholding, with a government buying, storing, and releasing food when needed, is one of the longest-standing ways states have managed food markets. These approaches fell away in the 1980s and 1990s during a wave of market liberalization, but the IPES report documents how some countries are using these instruments to build resilience. These instruments keep food available and affordable when supply is disrupted, and support the people who produce it.
Public reserves are a simple policy instrument. India runs one of the most developed versions, purchasing staples from domestic farmers at guaranteed prices, thereby supporting producer incomes and releasing stocks when prices rise. As world rice prices climbed by around 75% in 2007–08, India’s wholesale rice price rose by only about 14%. In West Africa, a collaborative food storage programme creates pooled regional reserves that prioritize local sourcing and procurement from producer organizations rather than large conglomerates or private traders, and are offered to the countries that need them most.
Supply management is a more interventionist approach, coordinating production through quotas and market boards, setting minimum farm-gate prices, and limiting imports that could undercut domestic producers. Canada has run its dairy, poultry, and egg sectors this way since the 1970s. During both the 2007–08 food price crisis and the COVID pandemic, milk prices in Canada held steady, while those in the United States and Germany, which took no similar approach, swung sharply.
Some of the tools proposed for the UK by the CCC are less interventionist, including stress-testing supply chains to identify potential risks and requiring food companies to disclose their climate exposure. A proposed target of at least 60% domestic food production as a share of total consumption through to 2050 sets the direction of travel without dictating how to achieve it.
All of these approaches mean the state takes responsibility for keeping food available and prices stable, rather than assuming the market will take care of it. But that protection still reaches some people more than others, and who benefits is baked into the design.
Resilience for whom?
Building resilience by design offers the potential to determine who is protected, who pays, and on what terms. For example, a grain reserve used to steady prices could end up protecting the profits of large processors and retailers rather than farmers or households. But the same reserve could be built to support the people hit hardest by shock, as India does by pairing its stocks with a distribution system aimed at the most vulnerable households.
The choices are not always between good and bad design. Sometimes they involve genuine trade-offs. Canada’s supply management steadies farmers’ incomes by holding farm-gate prices up, but that can mean higher prices for households. Resilience involves choices, and who it serves depends on how it is designed and governed. This suggests a bigger question about who decides on the design in the first place.
A reserve could be well-designed on paper and still be built without the farmers and households it affects having any say in how it works. Distributional effects matter, of course, but so does who has a voice in shaping them. I would argue that a truly resilient food system can only be built with the involvement of the people who depend on it.
None of this is easy, and even where the will exists, the capacity to design these tools well cannot be taken for granted. The risk is that resilience gets treated as a purely technical problem, a question of which tools and how large a reserve to maintain, rather than who benefits and who decides.
What comes next
For half a century, efficiency has been the goal of food policy. That principle is now being challenged through a turn to resilience.
Many of the instruments proposed are not new and have been proven to work. But their purpose needs careful consideration. A shift to resilience could entrench the firms already holding power rather than being used to build a food system that protects the people who have been left most exposed by an efficiency mindset. The result we get will depend not only on the tools but also on who shapes them and to what end. Those decisions belong in public debate now, while the goals of food policy are open to reshaping, rather than being settled by default in favour of those who already hold power, while the people with the most at stake are left without a say.
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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