In the run-up to Easter you may have heard about the climate-driven increase in the price of chocolate. Or you might have heard that drought has caused olive oil prices to rocket. Or maybe the risks posed to bananas, tomatoes, or even beer.

The cost of food for UK households has risen by an average £605 in the last two years and the impact of climate change has been a significant factor. And unlike the temporary price rises caused by geopolitical shocks, the climate impact on food prices will almost certainly only go in one direction.

Recently the weather has been, well, weird. We swing from dry spells to downpours and between unseasonal seasons. All of which is bad news for food producers: while in Britain farmers watched their crops rot in the fields after flooding, parts of Europe were hit by drought. The National Farmers’ Union has said that recent rain has left “vast swathes” of farmland saturated or underwater.

Kitchen table politics

Over the coming decades we are likely to experience climate change as a series of rolling shocks, such as extreme weather events, underpinned by a steady increase in the cost of living. Food will not be the only factor here – but I do think it may be the most important.

I have a very strong memory in lockdown of entering my local supermarket and, for the first time, being confronted with largely empty shelves. Stockpiling toilet roll was strange, but food was different: this was a visceral reminder of our vulnerability and dependence on global supply chains to meet our basic needs. I remember thinking that if this was to continue for much longer then it would lead to social unrest.

That probably seems melodramatic now – at the time supply chains were resilient enough and empty shelves were a temporary blip. But there is a long association between food prices and social unrest, from the French Revolution to the Arab Spring. Food insecurity in the UK is already a major issue and demand for emergency food parcels has risen sharply since the imposition of austerity.

Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the European Central Bank have warned that food prices will continue to drive up inflation for years to come. If we face years of unabated food inflation – making everyone feel poorer over the long term – then the political consequences could be significant and unpredictable.

The political response

When inflation began to surge in 2021, policymakers – in this case, central bankers – turned to the standard tool in their armoury. Conventional economic thinking said that inflation happens when too much demand chases too little supply. To tame inflation, you attack demand by making borrowing more expensive: you raise interest rates.

At the time, some voices dissented. One prominent, and widely derided, opinion column by Isabella Weber argued that price rises were a result of profiteering by big business and that, rather than interest rate rises, governments should respond by introducing price controls.

This debate was slightly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine pushed inflation even further. The UK government, under considerable pressure, eventually responded as Weber had argued and introduced a temporary control on energy prices that went further than the existing system of soft-touch price controls.

This was not the only example of government’s becoming more willing to intervene in the free market. In France, food manufacturers reduced their prices under threat of financial sanction by the government. And Joe Biden has begun to use the bully pulpit to attack corporate greedflation and shrinkflation.

One of the most fundamental questions of 21^st century politics will be “who pays?”. In the case of food, there are four groups who may share the burden of rising costs: the consumer, the farmer, the corporations, or the government.

I don’t think this is an issue that the environmental movement can, or should, be neutral on. Instead, we should be building common cause with both the consumer and the farmer. Farming must be kept viable, which means adapting to a warmer world while mitigating the sector’s own emissions, and many small farmers should be better paid for this. At the same time, ordinary families shouldn’t be forced into food insecurity by rising costs.

Looking at existing data, one study has found that governments who are able to shelter their population from price spikes are less likely to experience civil conflict. Sooner or later I expect this will become a major political issue and governments may need to move past old orthodoxies to find a suitable response.