Britain imports the fruit it could grow, from countries baking harder than it is

Britain grows enough grain, meat, milk and eggs to cover its own needs. Fruit and vegetables are another story. A report published on Wednesday by the Food Foundation, a charity that works on food policy, put the picture plainly. About 40% of the UK’s food is imported, including 80% of its fruit and 47% of its vegetables [1]. That is one of the highest rates of reliance on imported fruit in Europe, ahead of France, Germany and Spain [1].

The uncomfortable part is where it comes from. The report found 18 of the top 20 countries supplying the UK with healthy staple foods are rated moderately to severely vulnerable to climate breakdown [1]. Britain is leaning on places the heat is hitting harder than it is hitting Britain.

Much of it could be grown here. Five of the nine fruits British shoppers buy most - apples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and pears - grow perfectly well in the UK climate [1]. For four of those five, the country produces less than 40% of what it eats [1]. Among vegetables, only carrots reach a high level of self-sufficiency, at 94% [1]. For tomatoes, mushrooms, peppers, cucumbers, onions, broccoli and green beans, roughly half is home-grown [1].

Why the growers stop short

Nobody involved thinks this is about agronomy. Ali Capper, who runs an apple and hop farm in Worcestershire and chairs the British Apples and Pears trade body, said members want to grow more fruit [1]. What they need, she said, is certainty on seasonal workers, water, planning rules, competitively priced energy, and “long-term agreements and profitable returns” [1].

Energy is the sharpest of those. Glasshouse growers have said for months that their power costs run above those of neighbouring European countries, and some have cut production because of it [1]. UK inflation rose to 2.9% in the year to July after the energy price cap went up 13%, adding about 221 pounds to a typical annual bill [5]. Food inflation, meanwhile, fell to 1.3%, its lowest in close to five years [5].

Fertiliser is the other lever that moves with energy rather than with farming. Roughly half the world’s population is fed thanks to synthetic nitrogen fertiliser, and making it runs on natural gas, so its price tracks gas markets [14]. War in Ukraine and the prolonged US-Iran conflict have pushed those prices up, and a farmer facing a dearer bag simply spreads less [14].

The National Farmers’ Union deputy president, Paul Tompkins, said growers are working to keep fruit and vegetable crops watered “at significant financial expense” [3]. NFU president Tom Bradshaw put the import question bluntly: “We’re not going to be able to trade our way through this potential crisis” [3].

The green field next to the brown ones

Near Chelmsford in Essex, Sam Squier’s roughly 200-acre beef farm sits as a green patch in a landscape of scorched brown [4]. His herd grazes herbal leys - a mix of grasses, deep-rooting herbs and legumes - that hold water and feed the soil. He has not bought winter feed in eight years [4]. He estimates the soil now holds around 400,000 litres more water per acre than before he switched [4]. Earthworm numbers, he reckons, rose from about 80 million to 680 million in six years [4].

Neighbouring farmers are already eating into their winter feed [3][4]. So why is Squier’s method not everywhere? He gives the answer himself: government environmental grants funded his transition, and he says the farm would struggle to stay viable without that support [4]. For others, he named ownership and tenancy arrangements, money, and plain resistance to change [4].

The evidence that it works is not thin. A study for the consultancy Soil Capital found farms using regenerative practices cut drought-related yield losses by at least 10%. That held in about 85% of cases, its chief impact officer Andrew Voysey said [4]. Lloyds Bank reckons water companies save 4 to 6 pounds of clean-up costs downstream for every pound put into farm soil health [4]. That is why a bank, a food business, two water companies and an insurer have pooled money to pay farmers to do it [4].

The same gap, in a South African cane field

South Africa has about 25,653 small-scale sugarcane growers. Their farms and the mills they supply generate 65,000 direct jobs and 270,000 indirect ones, supporting more than a million livelihoods in Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal [6]. Many produce well below what their land could yield. A six-year project led by entomologist Lawrence Nkosikhona Malinga at the South African Sugarcane Research Institute went looking for why [6]. It ran with the provincial agriculture department and two grower associations [6].

It found four things: weed pressure, late decisions, dependence on contractors, and poor access to certified seedcane [6]. Every one traces back to money or institutions rather than knowledge. Growers use less herbicide than needed, or apply it late, because of cost [6]. Planting and fertiliser decisions slip because of finance, or because a contractor is booked elsewhere [6]. Certified seedcane is expensive or arrives too late, so growers plant whatever variety they can get rather than the one suited to their soil [6].

The study’s closing finding is the one worth carrying: “Small-scale growers often know what should be done, but operate within systems that make it difficult to follow the advice” [6].

The same arithmetic shows up elsewhere. San Pablo, in northern Colombia, now has about 275 smallholder oil palm growers, many of them former coca farmers [7]. Subsidies, technical support and tax discounts drove that switch, not new agronomy [7]. Nigeria is the world’s fourth-largest cocoa producer. Industry experts estimate farmers growing more than half its beans may fail EU anti-deforestation rules that take effect at the end of December [8]. The country has around 300,000 mostly small-scale cocoa farmers, and the EU buys 60% of the world’s cocoa [8].

The ceiling is a model, not a measurement

The number a field “could” produce is itself an estimate, and it moves. Writing in FoodNavigator, Ross Hendron argues UK wheat yields have been flat for three decades [9]. He co-founded the crop-genetics firm Wild Bioscience, so he is an interested party. He notes bread-making wheat production hit a ten-year low last year [9]. A new strain of yellow rust has overcome the Yr15 resistance gene [9]. He cites John Innes Centre scientists estimating half of today’s UK wheat area is now susceptible [9]. He sells a solution, so read the diagnosis and the prescription separately.

Research keeps nudging the ceiling. In Science on Thursday, researchers reported a rice locus, TGW1a, that shortens growing time and raises grain weight at once - normally a trade-off [10]. In Nature, a meta-analysis of 70 experiments plus 32 years of southern African field records found wild C4 grass production up 28% over three decades as carbon dioxide rose [11]. The authors say the fate of that extra carbon is uncertain [11]. A Chile-led team published the most complete genetic map yet of one of only two flowering plants that grow naturally in Antarctica [12]. The hope is to move its cold and drought tolerance into crops [12].

None of that reaches a field on its own. In Skagway, Alaska, a brewery grows 250 pounds of lettuce a week in a third-floor aeroponic farm [13]. That covers its whole restaurant, in a town of 1,000 that barges its produce up from the Lower 48 [13]. The owner paid $150,000 for the kit in 2018, then the supplier vanished [13]. Bowery Farming, once the largest US vertical-farming company at a $2.3 billion valuation, shut last year [13].

What this summer took

The gap this year is not theoretical. France’s agriculture ministry estimates the maize harvest down 35% on 2025, at about 9m tonnes - a level last seen in 1980 [2]. It says part of that is farmers switching to other crops such as sunflowers, not only the heat [2]. French growers report shortfalls of 25% for courgettes, 35% for lettuces, 40% for peas and 60% for broccoli [2]. Coldiretti, Italy’s largest farmers’ organisation, says about 60% of the country’s farmland is affected by drought [2]. It puts the cost to the sector, including wildfire and storm damage, above 3bn euros [2]. Spanish cereal harvests are down 35% in Castilla y Leon and 49% around Madrid [2].

Britain’s cereal harvest is on track to be the worst since comparable records began in 1984, and almost three-quarters of England is in drought [4]. Five key reservoirs in England and Wales are at “exceptionally low” levels [15]. The Danube has dropped to its lowest in 30 years in several countries, forcing nuclear plants in Hungary and Romania to shut or run reduced [16]. Champagne began its earliest harvest since records started in the early 20th century [17].

The next shove is loading. The Met Office says the developing El Nino is likely the strongest in living memory [18]. Pacific sea-surface temperatures are already well over 2C above normal and may exceed 3C later this year [18]. Prof Adam Scaife, its head of long-range forecasting, said: “I have never seen an El Nino signal this intense in our forecasts” [18]. The UN’s food agency has warned it could push tens of millions into crisis-level hunger [18]. Tropical crops - cocoa, coffee, sugar, palm - sit in the exposed band [19]. Mentions of El Nino in corporate filings and earnings calls have hit a multi-year high [20].

Also this week

The USDA forecasts Iowa at 216 bushels of corn per acre and Illinois at 212 [21]. The crop is running late in places, with no mature corn yet in 10 of the 18 major states, which is normal for most of them [22]. Ohio managed 0.9 days suitable for fieldwork in a week, down from 5.2 the week before [23]. US farm bankruptcies rose in both 2024 and 2025, reversing an improving trend [24]. Northern Ireland farm profits topped 1bn pounds for the first time in 2025, up 36% in real terms on record beef prices [25]. The agriculture minister warned prices have since fallen while input costs rose [25]. In the UK, 207 salmonella cases and one death share a single strain, and the evidence points to imported eggs [26]. In the US, more than 15,000 cyclospora cases across 47 states, and two deaths, drove wholesale lettuce prices down a record 73% in July [27]. That wiped out the year’s profit for some Salinas growers [27]. Deere lifted its profit forecast on construction demand, while demand for big tractors stayed weak [28].