THE first duty of any national government is to put your own country first by keeping it safe. Shelter, food and water have always been the top three candidates alongside keeping the enemy at bay, by having strong armed forces and defences. 

The word crisis keeps coming up everywhere on all of these areas and of course, the other newcomer on the block – climate change. When it comes to food security, food really is a home grown problem, or as I have been saying for a long time now, ‘the lack of home grown food.’ 

The National Farmers Union last week warned the government that if we don’t pay more attention to growing a lot more than the 50% of our own food in the UK, then our food security can not be guaranteed for the future. We now have some of the first manifestations of the problems with empty shelves of some fruit and vegetables. 

It has been stated by the NFU and others, that we can grow all our own tomato in southern England with greenhouse’s. This would apply to many of the other food products as well. So why is it a problem in the UK? 

We are told it’s all down to wanting cheap food. With climate change; wars and building on many farmers fields, it is time to stop blaming the markets are the problem and start planning for a very different world.

With our population increasing at an unsustainable rate; mostly due to the governments past and present failed immigration policies and enforcements. It doesn’t take a mathematician to work-out that we just don’t have enough food to feed an over-crowded country. 

I have been warning of this for some time and alongside this, I wrote in this column last year that we may need desalination plants soon, just to water the crops. 

Has anyone taken this seriously? No! If something is a crisis, then act as if it is, and not like some zombie government. It’s time to stop worrying about what other countries think about how good we are or not and look after ourselves. After all, if we don’t, everyone will suffer, and that includes all the people we have in the country from wherever they came from. 

As a local councillor and on the planning committee, it is very frustrating to see good agricultural land being taken out of use for house building and can’t find a strong national planning policy to quote, to really stop it in the long run. 

In the last current planning review, even undeveloped coast land was put forward for building. These areas should not even be considered in the first place. Fortunately, this time, most were taken out by the end of the review. 

We should not have to fight each time to keep our green spaces, they should be Permanent! We need to be on a war footing – grow more food at home!