El Niño exposes cracks in UK food supply chain resilience

A new warning from the National Audit Office (NAO) is raising hard questions about UK food supply chain resilience, with a quarter of the country’s food imports now exposed to the effects of a ‘supersized’ El Niño and domestic harvests posting deficit upon deficit.

The Met Office provisionally confirmed this week that the UK experienced its hottest summer on record over the past few months. Five heatwaves this year alone have hit farms hard. The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) has estimated that British farmers will have lost £4.8 billion in failed harvests since 2024, following below-average yields in the years before the current run of heat.

The production shortfall is not a rounding error. Against the previous ten-year average, the total crop deficit was 4.3 million tonnes in 2024, 4.2 million tonnes in 2025, and is projected to reach 5.9 million tonnes in 2026. Three successive years of structural underproduction is a supply-chain stress test the sector did not sign up for.

A structural import dependency the UK cannot wish away

The NAO’s concern does not exist in isolation. According to the ECIU, the UK already imports half of the food it eats. Around half of those imports consist of commodities the country does not grow domestically, with a similar proportion coming from regions exposed to climate shocks. Stack El Niño on top of that baseline and a quarter of total food imports become vulnerable simultaneously.

The EnviroLink Network frames the underlying problem plainly: Britain produces significantly less food than needed to sustain its 67 million residents. That gap is not new, but climate volatility is widening it faster than policy is closing it. When domestic output falls and the import routes that compensate are themselves under pressure from the same weather system, the margin for error shrinks rapidly.

None of this is, strictly speaking, a surprise. El Niño’s effects on global commodity flows have been modelled for years. What is harder to defend is a supply-chain posture that treats those models as a distant scenario rather than a planning constraint.

UK food supply chain resilience: where does government strategy stand?

The policy response, such as it is, has been gradual. In July 2025, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published the UK government’s latest food strategy for England, setting out 10 priority outcomes for the food system, according to the NAO. Whether those priorities translate into procurement diversification, strategic reserve policy or meaningful support for domestic production capacity remains the question the NAO’s current work is pushing on.

It is worth being precise about what a food strategy document does and does not represent. A set of priority outcomes is a framework, not a funded programme. The distance between publishing a strategy and hardening physical supply chains against a climate shock of this scale is considerable, and the NAO is right to put that gap under scrutiny.

On the import side, the ECIU’s analysis points to a structural challenge that no strategy document resolves on its own: when roughly half of imports come from climate-vulnerable regions, diversifying away from that exposure requires either new trade relationships or a serious push to grow more domestically. Neither happens quickly. A signed trade deal takes years to embed in real supply volumes; expanding domestic production in staples the UK has depended on imports for requires land-use decisions, farmer incentives and infrastructure investment that operate on decade-long timescales.

The £4.8 billion harvest-loss figure the ECIU has put forward deserves to be read carefully. It is an estimate of cumulative losses among British farmers, not a cost to consumers or to the public finances directly. But it represents productive capacity leaving the system, and productive capacity, once lost through farm insolvencies or land-use shifts, does not come back quickly when the policy mood changes.

The NAO’s ongoing review of UK food supply chain resilience is continuing, and its findings when published will be a more rigorous accounting of where preparedness actually stands than any strategy document can provide.