The Telegraph has reported this morning that:
Wildfires and extreme weather are putting Britain's food supplies at risk, the bosses of Britain's biggest supermarkets have warned.
The chief executives of Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Aldi and the Co-op have written to the Prime Minister calling for urgent action to protect food security and lessen Britain's dependence on imports.
Supermarket bosses are calling for Andy Burnham to set legally binding targets to increase the proportion of fruit and vegetables grown in Britain by 2040.
The suggestion is absurd. As the Guardian notes this morning in a newsletter:
Half of England is officially in drought, with July set to be the driest on record after winter floods, the Environment Agency has said.
Try growing fruit and veg in the UK without adequate water supplied and see how you get on, I suggest.
It would appear that you now need to be ignorant about how your supply chains work to be a boss of a supermarket.
There was just one reasonable demand these bosses could have made. It is the legacy of Theresa May (and she has few other good ones) that the UK has a legal commitment to net zero by 2050. It is only by achieving that goal, which has been internationally endorsed at COP summits, that the problem that we face with food supplies might be solved. If supermarket bosses claim they do not know that, then they are, in my opinion, either ignorant, willfully stupid, or politically manipulative in pursuit of profits.
It's time these fools stopped feeding lines to the Telegraph with its hatred of all things to do with climate change and did instead smell the coffee and realise that unless we tackle the root causes of the problem we have - which are to be found in the carbon waste in many of the products that they sell - they will not have a business left by 2050.
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Buy me a coffee!
Then there’s the mountain of plastic waste they supply to us with every weekly shop. But don’t worry. It’s OK. They charge us 10p for a plastic carrier bag, so that’s alright then.
We, the people, have every right to be angry with the manipulation and deceit of today’s global political class. Their collective pandering to the caprices of the overly wealthy 1% has brought us all to this point. If the politicians had spent more time genuinely caring about the health and security of the whole population rather than enhancing their own prospects by doing the bidding of vested interests we might just have avoided the looming climate catastrophe. As the wildfires spread, it will become harder and harder for the political class to avoid taking much of the blame for this. Just look at the emerging controversy over data centres and their outrageous demands for water. A backlash is starting in the US even now. As the consequences of climatic breakdown spread like wildfire (excuse the pun) the backlash could lead to social unrest worldwide. In the UK, whilst it is still early days, I do not detect any real change under Andy Burnham. At least the Greens have, at their core, the issue of the environment so I will still support them rather than drift back to LINO. We are all living on borrowed time and we were warned about this decades ago. Your video this morning highlights the (intended?) inadequacies of the Westminster silo approach that avoids taking a more holistic approach to the gravity of the situation we are all now in. Heaven help us if there is no rain sooner and/or a fifth summer heatwave occurs.
Thank you
“Politically manipulative in pursuit of profits.” Got it in one Richard.
I liked that line
Yes I heard that idea about growing more in the UK. Its pretty stupid as we have severe drought and crops would need a lot of irrigation to keep going which is tricky when you are running out of water! My experience of the dry weather in Cornwall illustrates the problems with a failed blackcurrent crop due to lack of water and the heat – currents are shrivelling in the heat. My potato crop is also down due to dry weather and trees in woods are suffering.
We need to cut emissions now so reduce air travel and car travel. A start could be made with banning private jet flights that would help. The more affluent you are the more you consume and emit GHGs. But the government is wedded to growth so nothing will happen!
We need an air travel tax. Noww.
We need an air travel tax. Now.
On a related topic, a comment on X proposing the construction of an aqueduct between Scotland (where it’s always raining apparently) and England, has resurfaced. Most of the comments in the National newspaper are priceless and based around the acronym GTF. They also point out that English water authorities, which unlike Scottish Water are privatised, need to look at their own practice of underinvestment, in both repairing leaks and in new reservoirs before once again pillaging Scotland’s resources.
Westminster governments, irrespective of political ideology, will happily run pipes and tankers to Loch Ness if it’s cheaper than holding water companies to account. Scotland’s water will be deemed a national security asset and bled from the nation.
True
Let’s not forget those thirsty data centres being given planning permission without considering where the water will come from.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/21/not-enough-water-for-uks-datacentre-plans-trade-body-says
On another note, these supermarkets could stop selling disposable barbecues, which are apparently a source of some of the wildfires.
Agreed
Two points come to mind on this and the recent responses to Burnham’s “re-industrialisation”.
Firstly I fail to see how the wildfire in the Cairngorms (the biggest I believe) threatened the supply of fruit and veg to Scotland never mind a wider area. I have walked that area for years and have never come across a fruit or veg farm. I don’t believe there is one in a hundred miles. The bosses comments seem imbecilic.
Secondly what is relevant however relates to defence. The Scottish Gov were offered MOD “help” in combatting the fire. With due gratitude they requested air support with water bomb facilities. They were told the MOD doesn’t have such equipment. So let’s invest 31bn for nuclear bombs against a threat no one can identify at a time no one can determine rather than aircraft and water bombs against a threat which is now obviously very real and present. Brilliant. The King in the South deserves brownie points!
Much to agree with
Brilliant content for a cryptic comic strip or cartoon! Does your infographic software stretch to that?
What comes to mind everyday is remembering how there was a time when the question would frequently come up of how the Easter Islanders could have been so foolish as to chop down the last tree. Now we know …
I will make one on this…
“Wake up and smell the coffee” – well, we won’t be growing that either will we…
No….
“the root causes of the problem”… here is one of them – UK water companies losing 1 million tonnes of water ……….per day due to leaks.
but but say the tories and libtards, privatisation has been a great success.
Radio 4 this morning featured an interview with an East Anglian farmer who was on the verge of losing her lettuce crop. She said that they could install a water capture and storage system but it would cost in excess of £50,000, and the prices that they got for their crops had been screwed down so hard that they couldn’t afford it.
Sadly Radio 4 made no attempt to ascertain why farm gate prices were lower than the real cost of growing the food, just as they made no attempt at explaining why only one new reservoir had been built since the 1980’s, or why uge amounts of water were still being lost through leakage.
Super market bosses are acutely aware of the importance of food prices to their business model. Fruit an veg is always the very first area customers enter, they’re essentials, and other food essentials follow. The prices of these essentials are screwed down so low in order to create and sustain a monopoly position and drive customers in through the door. The price paid to farmers is imposed many months in advance and bears absolutely no relation to actual crop yields.
Farming effectively provides a massive subsidy to the big supermakets, which is essential to their no longer sustainable business model, so now they’re expecting huge indirect subsidies from government as well.
When I lived in Australia 15 years ago, average sliced bread cost $4.50 a loaf. Since then, it has stayed around the same price but it was awfully expensive at the time.
Why do I bring that up? Because most food in Australia is home grown and most of the country was already affected by drought when I was there. The same is now happening across Europe. I know Net Zero is more important but we also need to do something now.
Australia did something about it (desalination plants). Will Europe? I have this feeling that in the UK we will still be having this debate when the New Forest is just a pile of ash.
This is why to me, it would make sense bringing water supply back into state control, which would/should I think invest in trying to make sure crops could be watered in high temperatures.
For some time, the State has allowed the water systems (that deliver water to users) to become more and more privatised (let’s call them ‘carriers’) whilst we already know that the major water companies clean and store what water we have (sewage as well). The did this under NAVs – New Appointments and Variations – to open the pipe network to other providers for competition – we see a lot of these in housing development and they are a pain in the arse to deal with and a license for future monopolisation and exploitation.
So each part of the water network is not really there to deliver water or solve problems concerning water.
They are all set up to make a buck or two out of the water that passes through them – nothing else. And the water comes from ‘heaven’ apparently and is free for them to exploit. Having to make fresh water themselves from sea water using desalination requires far too much risk as far as they are concerned.
We need to take back control of water. End of. Burnt Ham has a lot to do.
“Supermarket bosses are calling for Andy Burnham to set legally binding targets to increase the proportion of fruit and vegetables grown in Britain by 2040.”
Why the hell would any farmer take a financial gamble to grow fruit and vegetables when all the UK government farming subsidies seem to be directed at removing farmland from cultivation and then engaging this farmland for rewilding.
One cannot have it both ways!
Migration policy also makes this goal impossible…
Same as in the USA with respect to migration policy and continued operation of profitable farming.
[…] story to which this infographic relates was posted by me […]
Good old private equity!
Morrisons reveals 5,000 job cuts after £900m loss
Sarah Butler
Morrisons has revealed losses widened to £926m last year and it cut almost 5,000 jobs as the Bradford-based supermarket continues to struggle with heavy debts and competition.
Pre tax losses widened in the year to October 2025 from £612m in the year before as sales rose 3.2% to £15.8bn despite hefty grocery inflation throughout the year.
A spokesperson for Morrisons said it had: “demonstrated our resilience in the face of some tough external headwinds,” which included a cyber-attack on a key IT provider, rising inflation and government cost increases.
View image in fullscreen
A Morrisons supermarket in Camden, London. Morrisons has revealed losses widened to £926m last year and it cut almost 5,000 jobs. Photograph: Ian West/PA
The company said debt and interest costs were both reduced and “the underlying performance of the business was robust”.
At the year end net debt was £3.2bn, down 46% since Morrisons was bought by private equity firm CD&R in 2022. Interest costs were reduced by 29% to £281m.
It said profits had been hit by a write down on the value of the McColls convenience store estate before it closed dozens of the small outlets last year.
However, the accounts filed at Companies House show Morrisons reduced staff numbers by 4,912 as it ditched a newspaper delivery service and reduced jobs at head office and in its Rathbones bakery division.
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