When the Environment Secretary stood before farmers in February and declared food security a matter of national security, few could have predicted how quickly those words would collide with the realities of industrial feed chains. Yet on 18 July campaign groups Sustain and Communities Against Factory Farming laid bare the contradiction at the heart of the government's poultry sector growth plan. Rather than fortifying Britain's capacity to feed itself, the strategy risks locking the country into precisely the vulnerabilities ministers claim to fear.
The causal chain is brutally clear. Soy imported from South America makes up 18 per cent of all animal feed produced in the UK, according to a national security assessment that also warns current levels of animal farming cannot be sustained without those imports. That dependence, the same document notes, leaves Britain exposed to supply chain shocks, accelerates Amazon deforestation and hastens ecosystem collapse. A separate government report on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security spells out the broader threat: climate crisis, food shortages and economic impacts all converge when a nation outsources the foundations of its protein supply.
The Farming and Food Partnership Board, established earlier this year to drive sector growth plans that began with horticulture and have now reached poultry, was presented as the mechanism to deliver resilience. Emma Reynolds told the NFU conference in February that she wanted to "use different levers of the state and use the board to really boost the level of food production in the UK." She added that "this government believes food security should be treated as a matter of national security." Yet the practical outcome of those ambitions, critics argue, has been consultation on easing planning rules to make it simpler to build on-farm reservoirs, greenhouses, polytunnels and farm shops that primarily serve intensive livestock operations.
This government believes food security should be treated as a matter of national security.
The campaigners' intervention on 18 July did not reject the need for domestic food production. On the contrary, it demanded a more intelligent form of self-reliance. They urged ministers to abandon the poultry growth plan and instead prioritise homegrown sources of protein, pulses, legumes, nuts and beans, which could be cultivated within British soils without the ecological and geopolitical overhead of transatlantic soy shipments. Ruth Westcott of Sustain described intensive poultry farming as highly resource-intensive, polluting and inefficient, so it can never be a solution to food security. Harriet Bell of Riverford warned that planning reform must not become a free pass for developments that undermine healthy water systems, biodiversity or animal welfare, adding that long-term food production depends on healthy soils, water systems and biodiversity.
From imported fragility to regenerative strength
Look back across the past half-century of British agriculture and the pattern repeats with depressing regularity. Each wave of intensification promised efficiency and security. Each wave instead externalised costs, whether through depleted soils, polluted rivers or, in this case, distant deforestation that now returns as a national security risk. The government's own 25-year farming roadmap acknowledges geopolitical instability, climate pressures and supply chain risks, yet its opening moves with poultry appear to double down on the very model those assessments flag as unsustainable.
What makes the moment urgent is the convergence of pressures the national security assessment itself documents. Climate disruption tightens export controls in producer nations. Geopolitical tensions disrupt shipping lanes. Biodiversity collapse erodes the natural systems that ultimately underpin all farming. In such a world, dependence on 18 per cent of feed arriving from South American soy fields no longer looks like prudent commerce. It looks like a single point of failure engineered into the national diet.
