The aim is, of course, to not be self-sufficient in food

We do not desire, in the least, to be self-sufficient in food:

Extreme rainfall which has left parts of Britain underwater may push up food prices and pile pressure on farmers’ finances as crops are washed out, agriculture experts have warned.

Prolonged downpours have left land waterlogged and may cause shortages of homegrown produce as farmers are unable to sow. Time is running out for farms to save the harvest with spring planting, says the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), which represents farmers.

There was a time when this sort of thing meant people dying of starvation. Lifeless bodies littering the ditches where they’d been trying to scrape some nourishment from whatever weeds had survived.

What changed was transport - the ability to bring in food, in bulk, from places not subject to the same weather effects. The solution today will be the same, these fields won’t be producing food, fine, we’ll bring it in from others which will.

Self-sufficiency would be a return to that earlier scenario though. All very local and low in food miles until that year there’s nothing to eat at all. The secret to food sufficiency is to have many suppliers across many geographies and weather systems. That is, sufficiency is guaranteed by dropping the self part.

Or, you know, trade - which makes it difficult to understand why people want to put our very lives at risk by reducing the international trade in food.