Tomato Crisis in Britain! The Fragile System Behind Cheap Food

In the UK news of 2022, beyond the Queen’s death, Charles’s accession, skyrocketing gas and electricity bills and the revolving door of prime ministers, there was the “egg shortage” towards the year’s end — for several weeks between November and December, egg supplies across major British supermarkets ran critically short, leaving shoppers to face nothing but empty shelves.

Well, well — these old Western powers can’t even get their eggs! There is something rather ironic about that.

In early 2023, the UK was hit by a new wave of shortages. This time, vegetables were in the spotlight.

From late February onwards, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers went into short supply across Britain’s major supermarkets, with tomatoes hit the hardest. In early March, my friend L, who lives in East London, told me he had struggled to find tomatoes for weeks. The moment the tomato shortage struck, shelves at the nearby Lidl and Tesco went completely bare, and other vegetables were nearly sold out too.

On 21 February, the Manchester Evening News dispatched a reporter to buy tomatoes. After trawling every supermarket in the city, they found only a handful on Tesco’s shelves. The reporter wrote, with a touch of irony, that rocket — the variety nobody usually reaches for — was the only thing left in any decent quantity.

By the second week of March, tomato supplies had begun to recover, but most major supermarkets had imposed purchase limits of three or five per customer. Some officials suggested the vegetable shortage would ease within a few weeks, though other accounts were more pessimistic: the BBC quoted a growers’ association predicting the shortfall would last until May.

● Beside the empty shelves, a notice read: To make sure everyone can get what they need, each customer may purchase a maximum of three. Image: Reuters

I. Is It Really That Short on Vegetables?

In fact, the scale of this vegetable shortage may not quite match how it is perceived from the outside. The empty shelves captured by the media were almost all in supermarkets; other outlets had not run out of stock at all.

In the first week of March, Prabhu, an Indian friend of mine in North London, told me that the shortages nearby had been concentrated in supermarkets, while the small corner shops around residential areas still had tomatoes and other vegetables to sell. My friend L, also in London, said that he sometimes spotted several large crates of tomatoes on display in the little shops nearby. Unlike the supermarkets, these were all independent, non-chain businesses, often run by ethnic-minority owners — Iranians, South Asians, West Africans, Turks and others.

Tomatoes at these corner shops were considerably dearer than in supermarkets. Prabhu explained that a six-pack of cherry tomatoes cost 85p (around 7 RMB) in a supermarket, while the same pack sold for £1.20 (around 10 RMB) at the shop near his home. As the shortage worsened, the small shops raised their prices one after another.

● Food journalist Joanna Blythman retweeted a post from an independent grocer in Yorkshire on Twitter, noting that there was no shortage in independent shops.

● On 13 March, tomatoes on sale at an organic shop in London (De Beauvoir Wholefoods, Southgate Rd, Islington, London) were priced at £4.99 per kilogram (about 42 RMB) and £6.99 per kilogram (about 59 RMB). Image: Tingting

Supermarkets were cheap but short of produce; small shops were expensive but well stocked.

In a report published in early March, the Manchester Evening News interviewed several independent greengrocers. All of them said that if they raised their prices, tomatoes — whether imported or locally grown — were easy enough to come by. In their view, the reason for the shortage was plain: supermarkets simply refused to pay more.

● A tweet from a fruit and vegetable merchant on 2 March: “(Seeing) us small independent traders scrambling to source produce from all over, the supermarket buyers must be embarrassed by their empty shelves.”

II. Producers Squeezed by Supermarket Orders

The reason supermarkets are reluctant to raise prices is the low-cost procurement strategy they have maintained over decades. The Manchester Evening News quoted a greengrocer who said that supermarkets had already signed quarterly contracts and agreed on purchase prices well in advance. At the height of the crisis, changing their pricing model was simply too difficult.

Since the 1970s, Britain’s supermarket system has been built on a procurement mechanism reliant on long-term contracts: supermarkets leverage their enormous and stable sales volumes to pressure producers into offering cheaper long-term supply agreements.

This enables supermarkets to sell agricultural produce at lower prices than ordinary shops and dominate the market. At the same time, however, the profit margins of agricultural producers have been squeezed dramatically, leaving them acutely sensitive to cost fluctuations. The moment costs rise, they cut back production because they can no longer turn a profit.

● The British supermarket system, epitomised by Tesco, largely determines the market price of agricultural produce.

The impact of fluctuating costs is first felt in energy. Britain’s winters are long, and growing out-of-season tomatoes and other vegetables requires greenhouse infrastructure, which often relies on natural gas for heating. The war in Russia and Ukraine, compounded by the government’s disastrous energy policies of recent years, has sent domestic energy prices soaring since 2022. Faced with sky-high energy bills and fixed supermarket purchase prices, many growers simply “quit”. The National Farmers’ Union reported that 10% of growers have left the industry outright this year.

Recently, a producer who grows tomatoes at scale using LED lighting took to the newspapers to air grievances, arguing that the government should invest in this sector as essential infrastructure. Just a few years ago, the Daily Mail had covered this innovative approach to agriculture, hailing it as a way to dramatically boost Britain’s domestic vegetable output. Yet now this high-investment, energy-hungry method has become a hot potato.

● A greenhouse growing winter tomatoes with LED lighting and natural gas heating. Image: oreon-led.com

The supermarket model has made the entire food supply system fragile, amplifying even the uncertainties of weather. According to the British Retail Consortium, Britain imports 95% of its tomatoes and 90% of its lettuce during winter. These imports come primarily from Spain and other southern European and North African countries. This winter, the Mediterranean region first experienced unseasonably hot temperatures, followed by cold spells in early spring, devastating vegetable yields and indirectly triggering the shortages in Britain.

While some media outlets have argued that the complex customs procedures and inspections introduced after Brexit slowed vegetable transport and supply, and were the main cause of the shortage, comparing European and British supermarket business models reveals something else: the long-term fixed-price contracts that British supermarkets sign are not a common practice elsewhere in Europe. And perhaps that is the overlooked factor that matters most.

III. Vegetable Production Dependent on Cheap Labour

Labour shortages have added insult to injury across the entire production chain.

Before Brexit, Britain’s fruit and vegetable industry relied heavily on migrant workers on Seasonal Worker visas. These workers carried out the labour-intensive, highly seasonal tasks of picking and tending crops. Many of them were residents of Romania, Ukraine and other eastern European countries. According to Bloomberg, in 2021 — before the war — 67% of the 30,000 short-term agricultural worker visas issued each year in Britain were granted to Ukrainian citizens. After the conflict broke out, with Ukrainians finding it ever harder to leave the country, sourcing agricultural labour grew still more difficult. Meanwhile, Brexit itself had raised the barriers to entry for eastern European workers.

The result is Britain’s current labour shortfall. A 2022 parliamentary report on agricultural workers noted that, as of August 2021, there were 4.1 million jobs across agriculture-related sectors in Britain, yet 500,000 of those positions went unfilled — spanning growing, processing, transport and retail. Although that year’s labour crunch did not cause a vegetable shortage per se, many products, including livestock, had to be disposed of before reaching the market. By the time the report was published in March 2022, MPs had already sounded the alarm about widespread rumours that winter vegetable planting areas and yields were falling due to labour shortages. Little did they know that just a year later, Britain would be facing a genuine vegetable shortage.

In truth, it is not just Britain — the entire European agricultural system is heavily dependent on migrant labour.

A 2018 Oxfam report found that in Italy’s fruit and vegetable sector, many workers are refugees in desperate need of employment, and the industry is riddled with “wages far below the statutory minimum wage” and “systematic breaches of working-hours limits”. In her recent non-fiction work Ciao Ousmane, Hsiao-Hung Pai, a Chinese-British journalist at The Guardian, chronicles how Italy’s tomato industry exploits migrant workers: “For every 300 kilograms of tomatoes picked, workers earn 3–4 euros — 50% below the minimum wage. Shifts often run 8–12 hours, while statutory working hours are six and a half hours a day.”

● In southern Italy’s Puglia region, a group of foreign workers picking tomatoes. Image: Reuters

In her book, Pai points out that the tomatoes these workers pick are ultimately canned and destined for Europe’s chain supermarket system. The supermarket obsession with cheapness is once again the driving force behind the scenes: as supermarkets relentlessly drive down prices for agricultural producers, the axe of cost-cutting inevitably falls on the workers — and exploiting migrant labour trapped in a legal grey zone is the most convenient way to keep costs down.

But clearly not everyone is in favour of offering these migrant workers better conditions. While Britain’s parliamentary report recommends incentive policies, including more visas, to prevent labour shortages, it simultaneously laments that rising worker costs since Brexit have made British produce less internationally competitive. In the long run, if supermarkets continue to buy at rock-bottom prices, forcing producers to suppress wage costs, these incentive policies will amount to little more than lip service.

IV. Social Problems Under the Supermarket System

The fragility and exploitative nature of the supermarket system were laid bare by the tomato shortage. But the problems with supermarkets are not confined to agriculture alone; they cut deep into society at large.

In her book Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, British journalist Joanna Blythman describes how the supermarket revolution since the 1970s transformed the whole of British society: middlemen were wiped out, small corner shops were squeezed into the margins. Meanwhile, poorer households had no real choice but to buy the cheapest supermarket products. The supermarket pricing system became a terrifying force, pushing everyone’s profits and wages ever closer to the edge.

The same story plays out across the Atlantic. American journalist George Packer, in The Unwinding, noted the awesome power of the Walmart model. Packer summed up Sam Walton’s retail philosophy in a few words: buy cheap, sell cheap, high volume, fast cash turnover. As giant retailers expanded recklessly, the Walton family’s fortune grew to almost equal the combined wealth of the bottom 30% of Americans. By contrast, Packer wrote, “small towns grew poorer, and that meant their consumers increasingly depended on everyday low prices”.

● Supermarkets do not merely supply cheap food; they also supply an affordable vision of middle-class life. It was precisely after the rise of supermarkets that tomatoes became available year-round and took their place as a staple in the British diet. In the 1950s, the vegetables eaten by the British working class were mainly turnips and swedes; tomatoes were seasonal and expensive. Today, Britain consumes 500,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year — an average of 160 grams per person per week. Pictured: beefsteak tomatoes at New Smithfield. Image: Manchester Evening News

In agriculture or commerce alike, the procurement model of major supermarkets or similar large platforms follows the same logic: leverage scale to capture the market and extract profits, yet do nothing to genuinely improve the production process itself. On the surface, consumers do enjoy cheap food, but the hidden costs behind that cheapness are easy to miss: migrant workers are exploited, commercial landscapes grow ever more homogeneous and concentrated, and production and transport consume vast quantities of energy.

Once the small producers and small traders — those who offered greater autonomy and a wider range of career choices — have been driven out of the game by supermarkets, the result is a system that captures all the profits and fuels the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. The cheap choices supermarkets put on offer simply make it easier for workers to tolerate the generally low wages that are the norm.

Seen from this angle, the supermarkets’ cheap vegetables have most of the time seemed like a kind of “welfare” for the poor — except that this “welfare” rests on a premise: since the Thatcher era, the British government has come to regard its existing state welfare system as a growing burden and has placed its faith in market allocation to spontaneously arrive at the “optimal solution”. The upshot is that supermarket prices have become a sort of “welfare for the poor”.

And yet the tomato shortage proved that this “welfare” is far less stable and dependable than the polished façades of the big corporations suggest.

And the irony is this: when not a single supermarket in the entire country could find tomatoes, and the crisis had grown into a social problem, it was the very small corner shops — driven to the margins by supermarkets — that were still supplying them. Beyond these traditional retail models, Britain is also home to consumer and food movements that champion “the nearby”, seeking to mend community ties, build local autonomy, blunt the supermarket system’s destructive impact on society, and escape the grip of this “monster”. Given how things stand, the British perhaps ought to be grateful that these little shops were not squeezed out after all, so that they had something to fall back on in a crisis. Short of touching the machinery of distribution and redistribution, this is one of the best ways available to soften the harm the supermarket system inflicts on society.

After all, when the winds howl and the waves crash, you cannot expect those who created the storm to come to your rescue.

References

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/went-supermarkets-across-greater-manchester-26297009

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64743704

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/the-supermarkets-dont-want-pay-26383380

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.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/uk-farmers-look-farther-afield-to-replace-ukrainian-workers#xj4y7vzkg

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/9580/documents/162177/default/

https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/human-suffering-in-italys-agricultural-value-chain-620479/

https://www.britishtomatoes.co.uk/british-tomato-fortnight-2022