[morbia]

This is something that comes up time and time again with our recent string of conservative governments, going back to Cameron. At this point I'm pretty convinced that it is a dead cat strategy to avoid us talking about the lack of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets.

Or maybe I'm just being hopeful.

[dxbydt]

Total agreement. As a longtime anglophile, I believe the UK governance literally conforms to Yes Minister.There exists a strong bijection between any ongoing UK crisis and a corresponding Yes Minister episode. I have discovered a wonderful proof for this theorem but the HN margins are too narrow.

[eynsham]

Yes Minister is a documentary about pre-Thatcherite Britain.

1. The civil service has been hollowed out; it is now largely reliant on external consultancies and outsourcing firms for many important functions (e.g., Crapita).

2. It’s lost power at the same time. Simon Case is the weakest cabinet secretary in living memory. The last reasonably powerful cabinet secretary was Sir Jeremy. It’s not so much that parliamentary parties are in charge—though they’re not blocked; rather, nobody is in charge at all.

3. Political advisers now no longer find their path blocked to the same extent, but end up burnt out by political events: see the farce of Cummings’ plan to hire some mathematicians ending up cancelled because he couldn’t be bothered to filter out people unironically advocating the sterilisation of the Untermenschen. Since the SPAD system is so ad hoc, it of course manages even less than the Butskellite civil service did.

[hn_version_0023]

I'm going to admit to a little jealousy here. In the states, we get fake UFOs.

[bloat]

You really think that an issue as important as basic food supplies is going to be bumped out of the headlines by a tedious government consultation on internet governance?

[sjducb]

That's exactly what's happening. I'm in the UK and I was unaware of the problem with our food supplies

[andrewstuart]

How do people in UK feel about the food shortages?

Do they blame brexit?

[Stephanemw]

Not enough. UK popular media reporting focuses on the supplier's blaming this on 'the weather', or energy prices in production countries [0][1][2][3].

No real discussion on how European shelves don't appear to have this problem.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64718826

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/22/aldi-asda-m...

[2] https://news.sky.com/story/tesco-and-aldi-to-ration-some-veg...

[3] https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/food/1737097/Supermarke... ... etc

[londons_explore]

A big chunk of the problem is competition law preventing prices increasing in events like this.

Supermarkets in France just increase the price for tomatoes for a few months and pay suppliers slightly more to get the stock they want.

In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption, meaning suppliers prefer to direct scarce goods to France instead, where they earn more. That makes scarcity in England worse.

[mmarq]

The UK: the place where it is never the fault of Brexit but there is always an obscure and self-contradictory justification for crazy things that started happening the day after Brexit and that never happened before.

Today is the turn of competition laws that, we are told, don’t allow supermarkets to increase prices - while food inflation is in the double digits.

[notahacker]

UK competition law does not prevent supermarkets putting up prices, and the Competition and Markets' Authority to intervene in cases of abuses of market power does not extend to UK supermarkets being banned from paying more for imports than French supermarkets

[msie]

Citation? I've seen two articles on UK price inflation and none of them mention this problem of competition law. Price inflation does exist in the UK.

[moremetadata]

[1] "According to the BBC report, the UK “imports around 95% of its tomatoes and 90% of its lettuces, most of them from Spain and north Africa, according to trade group the British Retail Consortium (BRC).”

Morocco has responded to the shortage claims by noting that the extreme weather that has been sweeping the country has had a huge impact on fresh produce."

>In the UK, competition law prevents jacking up the price during a supply interruption

UK Supermarkets have contracts with suppliers which are not brilliant, its how supermarkets have become the controlling middleman in the food supply chain in the UK, and as they also employ large numbers of people in the UK, some 2nd only to the NHS which is the largest employer in the world making the USSR seem febrile, they can hold the British Govt to ransom with employment figures, like one did in the 90's when Labour got into power.

Just about the only thing they have honoured in the past is the MOD orders for food get picked first at the expense of the store's orders, during the Balkans conflict.

If a law or regulation does not exist for some activity, it will be exploited if it can make the supermarket money and they are so slow paying, ignoring your supplier credit terms, typically taking 6 months to pay up. They offload admin costs onto you by making you submit your invoices into their systems, but you can pay for a more streamlined efficient way to submit your invoices as another example.

They are not alone though, all big businesses have their questionable tricks, and one of the major causes of these shortages is lack of investment in the supply chain for extreme weather, in this case cold weather that hit north Africa and Spain. The UK has been living too cheaply, through efficiency and lack of investment, something COVID also highlighted to the world with JIT supply chains.

Elements of the global supply chain had little to no redundancy built into it for "natural" events, which COVID highlighted and ionosphere heaters[2] continue to highlight under the guise of extreme weather events! [3] The science is out there if you want to be informed and not be fed your opinions.

[1] https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/02/354180/food-shortag...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionospheric_heater [3] https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=846f8785-9613-4...

[nivenkos]

A lot of Europe is suffering shortages the same though, it's just that in the UK the supermarkets refused to pay more.

Whereas like here in Sweden you can buy tomatoes, but they now cost $10 per kg.

[Stephanemw]

Production costs varying over the seasons or supply availability I can understand.

I can't understand how /every/ UK supermarket chain made the same decision to decline the higher costs without asking myself if they spoke to each other about it. Emergent behaviour caused by racing to the bottom?

[londons_explore]

Anti price gouging laws prevent them jacking up prices when there is tight supply. They literally can't offer to pay more.

[notahacker]

This is nonsense. There is no UK "price gouging" legislation applicable to paying more to import foodstuffs

[londons_explore]

The law is against 'unfair business practices', but the Competition and Markets Authority took action when businesses raised the price of hand sanitizer when there was lots of demand in 2020.

Now businesses generally can't make big price shifts due to increased demand or constrained supply.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cma-and-trade-bod...

[benj111]

Except that isn't a law. Although if they were all shown to be acting in concert, not buying tomatoes in order to get a better price. That would be illegal.

[HPsquared]

What laws? Would be interesting to see some analysis of this.

[msie]

And yet there is price inflation. How is that any different?

[Agingcoder]

Well, it's winter now - I'd expect off season fruits and vegetables to be more expensive? Or do you mean that tomatoes are more expensive now than last winter?

[favaq]

"off-season tomatoes" hasn't been a thing in decades. Tomatoes are available at affordable prices all year long.

[Agingcoder]

Well, I would hardly call 10$/kilo affordable.

Where I live ( France), at the height of the season, and assuming you live in the south, good tomato will cost about 2-3$/kilo. In winter you can indeed buy tomatoes (for more money) which look like tomatoes but are tasteless and are therefore a different kind of product. It might be possible to get good tomatoes as well, but I assume this will incur a significant premium, at which point I no longer consider them affordable.

[orwin]

You should try canned tomatoes.

I sometimes use tomatoes for my winter dishes (pizza, Ukrainian borscht and Indian Dahl), it used to be terrible. I've since learned that most canned vegetables do not have anything added when canned (not even salt or similar, it's just hot water basically), changed to that, and now I cook almost as much in winter than I do during summer.

[favaq]

>Well, I would hardly call 10$/kilo affordable.

They have always been affordable, now they are not

[captaincaveman]

Grown in massive greenhouses require electric etc thus the cost has gone up because the cost of fuel has gone up, including transporting these things across the continent.

[Agingcoder]

Thanks, this is very interesting. So basically the on/off season cycle gets a lot worse because off season requires more power.

[timeon]

I still do not get why people buy those sad pale tomatoes in winter.

[MonkeyClub]

Tesco tomatoes are a bright, happy red - and remain so even after six months in the fridge.

[captaincaveman]

Yes can't easily use the colour to judge how tasty tomatoes are, some of the best ones I've ever had were a big green looking, but were grown in the Portuguese sun naturally.

[ben_w]

I've never seen a "sad pale tomato", regardless of the season.

[bzzzt]

The dutch greenhouse tomatoes were so sad and pale in the 90s our eastern neighbours called them 'holländische Wasserbombe' (dutch waterbombs). They're better nowadays. As it turns out it's more profitable to plant tomatoes people actually want to eat...

[contextnavidad]

I live in the UK and do not follow the news. I am not aware there is a food shortage!

[captaincaveman]

Be careful not to read the news, your larder and fridge will suddenly be bare ...

[MattPalmer1086]

I like to blame Brexit. In reality it's a combination of things going on, but Brexit certainly exacerbates them.

[fmajid]

Brexit is a symptom of the underlying incompetence of the British political class, not a cause.

[Gordonjcp]

> Brexit is a symptom of the underlying incompetence of the British political class, not a cause.

It's not incompetence. It is deliberate sabotage.

The economy is being smashed to pieces so the Conservatives can steal it and sell the bits off for a quick fix of cash. They're all junkies, who will steal whatever public property they can to sell, and now they've worked out they can do it to the whole country.

[benj111]

I think there's a complex interplay between their incompetence and maliciousness.

They are both, but the incompetence means that the maliciousness, while intended ends up manifesting in some unintended way.

[Gordonjcp]

> They are both, but the incompetence means that the maliciousness, while intended ends up manifesting in some unintended way.

Oh yeah absolutely, the whole idea of Kwasi Kwarteng deliberately tanking the pound sterling by about 60 billion so that his wee pals at Odey Asset Management could clean up a few million quid was absolutely premeditated sabotage, but everything that followed on from that was like some fucked-up lovechild of The Sorceror's Apprentice and some malign bottle genie's implementation of the "Invisible Hand".

[throwbadubadu]

Who would dare to.. but then some have great ideas like one would need an ""economic NATO"" (if such thing would just exist... against China ofc) like Liz Truss recently... lol satire cannot make this better.

[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Supply-Chain/Economic-NATO...

[captaincaveman]

There is a shortage in some out of season fruit/veg, I really have not been impacted at all. Importing less food staples, and eating/growing food within our climate range is no bad thing.

[hkt]

Partly Brexit, but partly our model of capitalism is broken. Our energy prices going wild means that local growers who rely on LED lighting out of season simply turned the lights off as there was no conceivable way of them producing economically.

That, in turn, is because despite the "subsidy" we have allowed our energy market to be designed around investors rather than consumers. Most of the continent has shielded consumers from the brunt of price rises: we haven't.

Really, it is just the brokenness of a British ruling class that prefers the success of the financial sector to a decent quality of life for citizens. It isn't caused by Brexit, Brexit is just a symptom.