We're Building on Fields While Importing More Food

Image: Knelstrom Media.

By Martin Foskett / Dispatches / Knelstrom Media

​Britain has perfected a modern agricultural ballet: paving over fields at home while ordering dinner from abroad, preferably via several borders, two currencies, and a shipping lane having a nervous breakdown. It is a choreography of cranes, lorries, planning notices and supermarket aisles, all moving in opposite directions with absolute confidence and no visible sense of irony.

The countryside, once a place for crops, livestock and the occasional disapproving crow, is now a draft concept. It exists primarily as a suggestion, to be pencilled in until a housing allocation arrives with a glossy brochure and a promise of "sustainable living" wedged between a dual carriageway and a vape shop. Fields are no longer fields; they are potential. Potential estates. Potential tax receipts. Potential problems for someone else.

Concrete has become the nation's most reliable harvest. It grows quickly, responds well to subsidies, and never asks awkward questions about rainfall, fertiliser costs or foreign competition. Planning committees beam with the satisfaction of people who have approved something. Developers talk earnestly about community, which usually means a loop road, a playground shaped like a ship, and parking spaces optimised for arguments.

Meanwhile, the business of growing food carries on in Theory. In practice, it has been outsourced to warmer climates, cheaper labour, and governments with a greater tolerance for risk. British farming is encouraged to become a heritage activity, something to be photographed, grant-funded, and discussed at conferences where the sandwiches come from Spain.

The logic is delivered with a straight face. Britain, it is said, must build. People need homes. The population is rising. The spreadsheets insist on it. Fields, on the other hand, are underutilised. They sit there producing things at their own pace, tied to seasons and weather, which is considered inefficient behaviour. A field that takes months to grow wheat is clearly slacking when it could host 300 identical houses in the same time.

The houses themselves arrive with names borrowed from the very thing they replaced. Meadow View. Harvest Close. Barley Mews. There is no barley. There is no meadow. There is, however, a small plaque explaining that the development respects the area's rural heritage. It is bolted to a wall made of something imported.

At the same time, food imports continue their upward march, a procession of containers and chilled trucks carrying tomatoes, apples, grain, meat, and dairy from everywhere except the place that used to grow them. Official figures show dependency rising with calm inevitability. This is framed as globalisation, which is a polite way of saying the weekly shop now has a passport.

Supporters of the system speak warmly of choice. Consumers benefit from year-round availability and competitive prices. Mangoes in January. Asparagus in November. Strawberries whenever the mood strikes. The small detail that these luxuries require complex supply chains, fragile diplomacy, cheap energy, and other people's land is treated as an externality. It belongs to the category of problems that only exist when they stop working.

Farmers, meanwhile, are invited to diversify. They can install solar panels, open glamping sites, or convert barns into wedding venues. Growing food is encouraged as a lifestyle choice rather than a strategic necessity. The message is clear enough: farming is charming, but importing is modern.

When farmers do try to expand or modernise, they are often met with the full orchestra of regulation. Environmental impact assessments, habitat surveys, consultations, objections, and appeals assemble with professional enthusiasm. A new barn is a crisis. A 500-home estate is an opportunity. One is scrutinised for its effect on a bat, the other promises to include a bat box somewhere near the bins.

The economics follow suit. Land values reward conversion over cultivation. A farmer sitting on the edge of a town can become wealthy overnight by stopping food production entirely. This is not greed; it is rational behaviour in a system that has decided carrots are less valuable than cul-de-sacs. Expecting otherwise is like asking water to flow uphill out of civic duty.

Politicians tour the sites with hard hats and smiles, speaking of growth and opportunity. Housing targets are chased with missionary zeal. Food security is mentioned occasionally, often after something goes wrong elsewhere. A war. A drought. A shipping disruption. At which point, everyone briefly remembers that eating is not optional.

There is a curious confidence that imports will always be there. That someone, somewhere, will always be willing to sell food cheaply, in large quantities, and without complications. This faith survives energy shocks, climate warnings, and the occasional empty shelf. It is a belief system built on the assumption that other nations will continue to produce surpluses while Britain produces planning permissions.

The supermarkets, sleek and brightly lit, reinforce the illusion. The shelves are full. The labels are reassuring. The origin stories are printed in small type. Consumers are gently trained to expect abundance, to be surprised by shortages rather than prepared for them. The idea that a country might want to feed itself sounds faintly old-fashioned, like mending socks or knowing the neighbours.

Critics are dismissed as nostalgic or alarmist. They are accused of wanting to freeze the countryside in amber, to deny people homes, to stand in the way of progress. This is a neat trick because it frames the debate as houses versus fields, rather than houses versus food. It avoids the possibility that a grown-up country might manage both without treating one as expendable.

Other nations take a different view. They guard agricultural land, subsidise production, and talk openly about self-sufficiency as a strategic goal. Britain, by contrast, prefers flexibility. Flexibility to import. Flexibility to build. Flexibility to discover, at an inconvenient moment, that flexibility is not the same as resilience.

The environmental argument is twisted into a pretzel. Building on fields is justified as efficient land use, while importing food is excused as someone else's emissions problem. The carbon cost of shipping produce thousands of miles is balanced against the moral glow of dense housing. Somewhere in the accounting, the soil itself disappears.

What remains is a landscape slowly rearranged to serve short-term pressures. More houses, fewer fields. More imports, fewer farmers. More dependency, wrapped in the language of choice. It works, until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, the country will discover that planning permission is not edible.

In the end, the question is not whether Britain can build houses or import food. It can do both, with impressive administrative flair. The question is why it insists on doing them in the most mutually exclusive way possible, as if land were infinite and supply chains immortal. Fields are finite. So is trust in systems that assume tomorrow will consistently deliver dinner.

The country continues regardless, pouring foundations into former pastures and congratulating itself on progress, while the weekly shop arrives from elsewhere. It is a bold strategy, full of confidence and concrete. Whether it counts as foresight will depend, inconveniently, on the harvest.

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