The recent warning that the UK is unprepared for food emergencies should not come as a surprise to anyone working in the food industry.

The fact is, experts have cautioned for years that Britain’s food system is not built for resilience: just-in-time deliveries, thin buffers and an incredibly heavy reliance on imports. The result is when a climate shock or a geopolitical conflict hits, like those we’ve had this year, there is very little protection in the system to absorb it.

This will continue to have a huge impact. The FAO’s Food Price Index hit 130.7 points in April 2026, fertiliser costs for UK farmers have risen by as much as 70% on the back of conflict in the Middle East, and the Food and Drink Federation expects food inflation to reach at least 9% by the end of the year. Shortages and price rises are no longer hypothetical scenarios. Instead, they are arriving at the checkout and making the consumer pay more.

Stockpiles buy time, not security

The instinctive response is to talk about stockpiles, and there is a case for them. Countries such as Switzerland maintain emergency reserves, and a strategic buffer would give the UK breathing room in a crisis. But a stockpile is a bridge, not a destination, as it buys a finite amount of time, perhaps months; but does nothing to fix the underlying exposure that created the shortage in the first place.

The same is true of leaning harder on traditional agriculture alone. British farming now relies on the same volatile inputs as everyone else: fertiliser, energy, predictable rainfall and open trade routes. Farmers cannot replant their way out of a drought, and they cannot conjure affordable fertiliser when supply is disrupted thousands of miles away. Climate risk and geopolitical risk no longer arrive as separate problems. They combine and break a system built almost entirely on open fields that has very little insulation against that.

Clean food is no longer just about meat

If we are serious about resilience, we need production that sits outside the climate and geopolitical risk cycle, rather than merely hedged against it. This is where clean food comes in: proteins, fats and other key ingredients grown in bioreactors rather than on exposed farmland, using technologies such as precision fermentation and cell cultivation.

For many people, clean food still means lab-grown meat. That is now only part of the story. The same technologies are increasingly being applied to the ingredients that sit at the heart of everyday products, and which are among the most exposed to shocks. Coffee and cocoa, both perennial crops battered by erratic weather and structural deficits, are being reproduced through fermentation, with some producers making cocoa flavour compounds from oats and beet sugar rather than cacao beans. In the US, animal-free egg proteins are already on supermarket shelves. And in the UK, Clean Food Group is scaling CleanOil, a palm oil alternative made in a million-litre facility in Liverpool, with no tropical deforestation and no transoceanic shipping. None of these depend on this season’s rainfall, this year’s fertiliser price, or the state of a shipping lane on the other side of the world.

Food as national infrastructure

This is why food innovation needs to be treated as integral to the UK’s long-term national resilience strategy, not pushed to the side as simply a “sustainability” issue. The environmental case remains vital, but the equally urgent argument today is security of supply.

Precision fermentation and cell cultivation allow production to be located close to demand, within our own borders, with tightly controlled inputs and predictable output. For a country that imports a large share of what it eats, that is a strategic asset. We already accept that energy independence is a matter of national security, so why don’t we view food the same?

Realised, this will make the government recognise clean food as critical infrastructure, provide clear and timely regulatory pathways through the Food Standards Agency, and public funding that helps the sector scale alongside private capital.

Working with British farming

The goal of this is to complement British agriculture, moving the most resource-intensive and vulnerable parts of production into controlled environments, so that farmers can focus on higher-value, more resilient practices rather than absorbing every shock at the root; spending more for less yield.

The conditions the agricultural industry has this year are a warning of what will keep coming if we don’t drastically adapt our food system. Stockpiles may help us survive the next crisis, but they will absolutely not prevent the one after. Building new production capacity now is how we stop asking whether Britain can feed itself under stress, and start answering it.