We have spent a year talking about energy security, but with inflation in food prices running at 19 per cent, how much longer before the debate turns to food security? Ideally, we would have policies which prioritise energy security as well as food security, but sadly the latter seems to have been forgotten. National self-sufficiency in food (the percentage produced relative to the percentage consumed) has been allowed to fall from 74 per cent to 61 per cent since the mid-1980s.
Worse, energy and climate policy is damaging food security. There is no better example of how the latter is being sacrificed in favour of the former than Project Fortress, Britain’s largest solar farm. Work on the project has just got underway on 890 acres between the town of Faversham and the north Kent coast.
At a time when food price inflation is rampant, this is a conflict which deserves to be taken seriously
Indeed, Project Fortress is just one of many large-scale solar farms which are due to consume large areas of agricultural land in the next few years.
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