It seems the fates have decided to remind us of our place in the natural order. El Niño, that great, churning beast of the Pacific, has been officially declared a threat to British food security. One can almost hear the collective groan from the shires, where farmers now face the prospect of wet, miserable harvests and soaring grain prices.
But let us not pretend this is a novel crisis. The pattern is as old as civilisation itself: when the climate turns, empires totter. We have become so accustomed to the illusion of control, of taming the elements with our clever technologies and global supply chains, that we forget the fundamental fragility of our existence.
The Victorians, for all their industrial bluster, understood this. They built granaries and diversified crops, knowing that nature was a fickle mistress. We, in our hubris, outsourced our agriculture to the four corners of the earth and called it efficiency.
Now, as El Niño stirs the atmospheric seas, we are reminded that food does not come from Tesco; it comes from soil, rain, and sun. The irony is rich: we spend billions on climate subsidies and carbon credits, yet our emergency plans crumble at the first sign of a displaced jet stream. The government’s response, predictably, is a mix of bureaucratic hand-wringing and technocratic bluster.
But no amount of ‘resilience strategies’ can substitute for the simple truth that Britain must once again learn to feed itself. The fall of Rome began with a series of bad harvests. We would be wise to pay attention.
