UK Tomato Crisis: The Fragile System Behind Cheap Food
In the UK news of 2022, alongside the death of the Queen, the accession of King Charles, skyrocketing heating and electricity bills, and the revolving door of Prime Ministers, there was also the “egg shortage” towards the end of the year. For several weeks between November and December, egg supplies in major UK supermarkets ran tight, often leaving shoppers facing empty shelves.
Fancy that—a leading Western power unable to secure eggs! There is a certain irony in that.
At the start of 2023, the UK experienced another wave of scarcity, this time with vegetables.
From late February, shortages of vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers appeared across the UK’s major supermarkets, with the tomato shortage being the most severe. In early March, a friend of mine, L, who lives in East London, told me that he had struggled to find tomatoes for several weeks. As soon as the “tomato famine” hit, the shelves at nearby Lidl and Tesco stores were stripped bare, and other vegetables were similarly depleted.
On 21 February, the *Manchester Evening News* sent a reporter to buy tomatoes; after visiting various supermarkets across the city, they only found a handful on the shelves at Tesco. The reporter noted with a touch of irony that only the usually unpopular rocket remained in any significant quantity.
By the second week of March, tomato supplies began to recover, but most major supermarkets had implemented purchase limits, restricting customers to three or five per person. While some officials claimed the “vegetable shortage” would ease within a few weeks, others were more pessimistic: quoting a growers’ association, the BBC predicted that the supply shortfall would last until May.
I. Is there really such a shortage of vegetables?
During the first week of March, Prabhu, an Indian friend of mine in North London, told me that the shortage was primarily affecting supermarkets, while small grocery stores around residential areas still had tomatoes and other vegetables available. L, who is also based in London, mentioned that they could occasionally find several large baskets of tomatoes for sale in nearby local shops. Unlike supermarkets, these shops are independent businesses, often run by members of ethnic minority communities, such as Iranians, South Asians, West Africans, and Turks.
The price of tomatoes in these grocery stores was considerably higher than in supermarkets. Prabhu noted that while a pack of six cherry tomatoes cost 85p (approximately 7 yuan) in a supermarket, the same pack sold for £1.20 (approximately 10 yuan) at the local grocer. As the shortage became more pronounced, these stores began to raise their prices further.
Supermarkets are cheap but suffer shortages; independent shops are pricier but well-stocked.
In an early March report, the Manchester Evening News interviewed several independent retailers. They all maintained that if selling prices were increased, both imported and local tomatoes would be easy to source. To them, the cause of the shortage was obvious: supermarkets were unwilling to pay more.
II. Producers Squeezed by Supermarket Contracts
Since the 1970s, the UK’s supermarket system has relied on a procurement mechanism based on long-term contracts. By leveraging their massive and stable sales volumes, supermarkets exert pressure on producers to secure long-term supply agreements at lower prices.
This allows supermarkets to undercut traditional shops by offering cheaper produce, thereby dominating the market. At the same time, however, the profit margins of agricultural producers have been severely squeezed, leaving them exceptionally vulnerable to cost fluctuations. When costs rise, production is scaled back as it becomes financially unviable.
Cost fluctuations are first and foremost evident in energy. UK winters are long, and producing off-season vegetables such as tomatoes requires greenhouses, which often rely on natural gas for heating. The war in Ukraine, combined with years of poor energy policy from the UK government, has sent domestic energy prices soaring since 2022. Faced with skyrocketing energy costs and stagnant purchase prices from supermarkets, many growers have simply called it quits. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) reports that 10% of growers have left the industry entirely this year.
Recently, a producer employing large-scale LED cultivation for tomatoes lamented in the press that the government should treat this sector as critical infrastructure and invest accordingly. Just a few years ago, the Daily Mail reported on such innovative agricultural ventures, predicting they would significantly increase the UK’s domestic vegetable yields. Now, however, this high-investment, energy-intensive approach to production has become a liability.
While some media outlets suggest that the complexities of customs procedures and inspections following Brexit have hindered the transport and supply of vegetables, making it the primary cause of the shortage, a comparison of the business models used by supermarkets in Europe and the UK reveals that the fixed-price, long-term contracts favoured by British supermarkets are uncommon elsewhere in Europe. This may well be the crucial, yet often overlooked, factor.
III. Vegetable Production’s Reliance on Cheap Labour
Prior to Brexit, the UK’s fruit and vegetable industry relied heavily on migrant workers on six-month short-term work visas. These workers were responsible for labour-intensive and highly seasonal tasks, such as picking and tending to crops. Many of these labourers were from countries such as Romania and Ukraine. According to Bloomberg, in 2021, before the war, 67% of the UK’s 30,000 annual short-term agricultural visas were granted to Ukrainian citizens. Following the outbreak of war, as it became more difficult for Ukrainians to leave their country, finding agricultural workers became even harder. Simultaneously, Brexit raised the barriers for Eastern European workers entering the UK.
This has created the current state of labour shortages in the UK. According to a report on agricultural workers published by the UK Parliament in 2022, as of August 2021, there were 4.1 million agricultural jobs in the UK, but 500,000 of these positions were vacant, spanning everything from farming and livestock rearing to processing, transport, and retail. While the labour shortage that year did not lead to a shortage of vegetables, it meant that many products, including livestock, had to be processed prematurely before they could reach the market. By March 2022, when the report was released, MPs were already warning of rumours that winter vegetable planting areas and yields were falling due to the lack of labour. A year later, the UK did indeed face vegetable shortages.
In reality, it is not just the UK; agricultural systems across all of Europe are heavily dependent on international labour.
A 2018 report by Oxfam stated that in the Italian fruit and vegetable industry, many workers are refugees in desperate need of employment. This sector is rife with “wages far below the statutory minimum” and “systemic violations of working-hour limits”. In her recently published non-fiction work, *Ciao Ousmane*, journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai describes how the Italian tomato industry exploits migrant workers: “Workers earn 3-4 euros for every 300 kilograms of tomatoes picked, 50% below the minimum wage. Shifts often last 8-12 hours, while the legal working day is six and a half hours.”
Yet, it is clear that not everyone agrees with improving the conditions for these migrant workers. While reports from the UK Parliament have suggested incentives, including granting more visas to prevent labour shortages, they simultaneously complain that the rise in labour costs caused by Brexit has left British agricultural products lacking international competitiveness. In the long term, if supermarkets continue their low-cost procurement and force producers to slash wages, these incentive policies will be nothing more than empty promises.
IV. Social Issues within the Supermarket System
British journalist Joanna Blythman once noted in her book, *Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets*, how the rise of the supermarket model since the 1970s has transformed British society—eliminating middlemen and pushing small grocery stores into the margins. Meanwhile, the poor are left with no choice but to buy the cheapest supermarket products. The supermarkets’ pricing structure has evolved into a monstrous entity, marginalising profits and wages for everyone involved.
Similarly, American journalist George Packer noted the devastating power of the “Walmart model” in *Last Best Hope*. Packer summarises the retail philosophy of Walmart founder Sam Walton as: buy low, sell low, high volume, and fast capital turnover. Amidst the aggressive expansion of these retail giants, the Walton family’s wealth almost equals the combined wealth of the bottom 30% of Americans. Packer writes that, by contrast, “small towns have become increasingly poor, meaning the consumers there have become ever more dependent on everyday low prices.”
As small-scale producers and traders—who possess greater autonomy and offer more diverse livelihoods—are squeezed out by the supermarkets, the system captures all the profit, further widening the wealth gap. The cheap options provided by these supermarkets, in turn, make it easier for workers to tolerate generally low wages.
Viewed this way, cheap supermarket vegetables are, for the most part, a form of “welfare” for the poor. However, the premise of this “welfare” is that, since the Thatcher era, the British government has increasingly viewed traditional state welfare as a burden, trusting instead that market forces would spontaneously generate the “optimal solution”. Consequently, supermarket pricing has become a surrogate for social security.
Yet, the “tomato shortage” proves that this “welfare” is not nearly as stable or reliable as the corporate facade suggests.
The irony is striking: while supermarkets across the UK struggled to stock tomatoes—to the point that it became a social issue—the only places still supplying them were the small corner shops that the supermarkets had pushed to the margins. Beyond these traditional retail models, there are various consumer and food movements in the UK championing “localism”, attempting to mend community ties, reclaim autonomy, and mitigate the destructive impact of the supermarket system in an effort to escape the grip of this “monster”. In light of this, perhaps the British should be grateful that these small businesses were not entirely crushed by the supermarkets, providing a lifeline during a crisis. Until the mechanisms of distribution and redistribution are addressed, this remains one of the most effective ways to alleviate the social damage caused by the supermarket system.
After all, when the storm rages, one cannot expect those who stirred up the waters to be the ones to save you.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64743704
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1738374/tomato-grower-support-perfect-storm-vegetable-shortages
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4953628/British-tomatoes-available-year-round.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4953628/British-tomatoes-available-year-round.html
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/9580/documents/162177/default/
https://www.britishtomatoes.co.uk/british-tomato-fortnight-2022
Editor: Wang Hao