FOOD-SECURITY, and the prospect of food shortages, mean Wales should take more than a passing interest in Rachel Reeves’s plan to concrete over large chunks of English countryside to meet the Starmer government’s promise to build 1.5 million homes within five years.

Development on that scale would swallow up greenfield sites twice the size of Milton Keynes, and more if brownfield land was not used, according to David Rudlin, an expert on new towns who has been talking to the new government. Continue the process into a second Labour term, and an area one-and-a-half times the size of Birmingham would be consumed.

Of special concern to Wales must be its heavy reliance on grain crops, particularly wheat, grown in the east of England. Less than three per cent - about 22,000 hectares - of farmland in Wales is used to grow wheat, meaning the country is about 53,000 hectares short of self-sufficiency.

However, a steep increase in house-building in eastern England, driven by apparently unceasing housing demand, and serious crop setbacks caused by climate-change, could mean Wales’s wheat shortfall will no longer be met by East Anglia. In that region, long known as Britain’s breadbasket, wheat acreages last year fell by 5.1 per cent, with the 14 million tonnes harvest 10 per cent lower than in 2022. 

The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) think-tank, meanwhile, reminds us that climate scientists are warning that wetter winters like the sodden one just experienced are projected to become increasingly common as the world warms, raising concerns about the impact of climate change on UK food security. 

Looking at prospects for this year’s wheat harvest, ECIU says an expected reduction in wheat self-sufficiency could see imports rise from 1.9m tonnes to 4.8m tonnes, an increase of precisely the kind we don’t need if self-reliance in a world riven by instability and turmoil is to be a serious goal.

An unwelcome sign of an uncertain future is the current warning by flour-millers that the higher-grade milling-wheat harvest could fall by as much as 40 per cent, perhaps resulting in dearer bread and other baked goods. An outlook underlining the reality of Wales’s dependence on crops grown in a region where wheat production is in decline.

 On top of climate-change, demand for housing, and therefore for land, is likely to continue to be driven up by high UK net migration, which last year reached 685,000. 

A nightmarish picture emerges of a relentlessly growing population that will need not only food but houses, but with the houses eating up the land needed to grow the food. A vicious circle which politicians need to grapple with urgently.

Meanwhile, drive through Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire, and the large-scale obliteration of former prime arable land to accommodate development is plain to see. An ever-widening A14 trunk road, new towns and villages and big new housing estates, all in open countryside, all on what was high-yielding grain country, increasingly eat into the landscape. More of the same is lined up, with 57,000 new homes planned for Cambridgeshire, more than in Cambridge itself.

Battle-lines are being drawn. Backers of a radical loosening of planning rules to trigger an upsurge in house-building in England are weighing in behind the new chancellor. 

Opposing them are people dead against wholesale ruination of irreplaceable countryside, linked to a worsening of the already very serious biodiversity crisis. But let no-one think this is opposition orchestrated by nimbys (not-in-my-backyarders). This is an issue that goes far beyond matters of personal preference, potentially affecting the basic well-being of us all.

Hardly anyone, on either side of the argument, is talking about food-security. About vast acreages of farming land we depend on for the food we eat being struck out, permanently, by the new towns and housing estates now being hailed as the best things since sliced bread.

More housing is needed. We just need to be very clever in the way we provide it. For a start, by going all out to re-purpose the very many office-blocks and long boarded-up shops that litter towns and cities. Always remembering that, while many people want a house and garden, lots of others others would prefer a flat.

Wales needs to take stock. Because, if unchecked, the Starmer government’s benignly-motivated, though tunnel-visioned, housing ambitions could bring in their wake a whole trail of unintended consequences. Ones from which more than three million people living 250 miles to the west of Britain’s breadbasket would certainly not be excluded.

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