8th September 2026
Angela Eagle's warning about food supplies may sound alarming, but perhaps the bigger question is why it has taken a potential weather crisis to make us think about resilience.
When a government minister tells people to keep extra food and water in the house, it is bound to attract attention.
When that minister is the Environment Secretary and the reason given is the prospect of an exceptionally strong El Niño, people are entitled to ask a simple question: how worried should we actually be?
Dame Angela Eagle has urged households to have enough food and water to keep them going for a while if an emergency affects essential services. The comments came as the Met Office warned that the developing 2026 El Niño could become the strongest in living memory.
It would be easy to turn this into another story about impending disaster. That would be a mistake.
There is no suggestion that Britain is about to run out of food, nor is El Niño expected to empty supermarket shelves simply because the Pacific Ocean is unusually warm.
Britain's food system is remarkably efficient, but efficiency and resilience are not always the same thing.
El Niño is not a British weather forecast
El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon originating thousands of miles away in the tropical Pacific. Its effects spread around the world by altering atmospheric circulation, rainfall and temperature patterns.
For Britain, the effects are indirect. The Met Office says El Niño can increase the likelihood of milder, wetter and windier conditions during autumn and early winter, although it can also be associated with colder and calmer conditions later in the winter. Importantly, El Niño is only one of several factors affecting Britain's weather.
That distinction matters.
It would be wrong to suggest that El Niño means Britain is destined for a particular winter.
What is much less uncertain is that a major disruption somewhere in the global food system can eventually affect Britain.
And that is where the warning becomes rather more interesting.
Britain does not grow everything it eats
Walk into almost any supermarket and the apparent abundance is extraordinary.
There are bananas from overseas, coffee, rice, citrus fruit, vegetables from Europe and a vast range of processed foods whose ingredients may have travelled through several countries before reaching the shelf.
Britain has a substantial agricultural industry, but it is not self-sufficient in food. Around two-fifths of the food we consume is imported, according to analysis cited earlier this year.
That is not necessarily a weakness.
International trade is one of the reasons modern Britain can enjoy such a wide variety of food throughout the year. If one country has a poor harvest, another may have a surplus.
In fact, history shows that international trade can be part of the solution when crops fail.
The problem comes when several producing regions are affected at the same time, or when food is available but transport, energy, shipping, fertiliser or international trade are disrupted.
That is a very different problem.
And the world is already under pressure
The timing of Angela Eagle's comments is significant because food prices are already showing signs of renewed pressure.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index rose sharply in August, reaching its highest level since late 2022. Cereal prices reached a three-year high, while sugar prices rose particularly strongly. The FAO also reduced its forecast for global cereal production.
El Niño is only part of this story.
There are wars and geopolitical tensions, disruption to shipping, higher energy costs, fertiliser pressures and increasingly unpredictable weather.
That is why the real concern is not necessarily El Niño alone.
It is what happens when El Niño arrives in a world already dealing with several other problems.
The same principle applies to energy.
A country may be perfectly capable of dealing with one problem. But if fuel prices rise, a major shipping route is disrupted, crops fail, electricity supplies are interrupted and extreme weather damages infrastructure at roughly the same time, the calculation changes.
Resilience is about surviving the combination, not just one event.
Perhaps the minister is actually saying something sensible
There is a danger of mocking the advice to keep some extra food and water at home.
After all, most people already have food in their cupboards.
But that misses the point.
The Government is not necessarily telling people to build underground bunkers filled with baked beans.
It is suggesting that households should be capable of managing for a few days if something interrupts normal services.
That is not particularly revolutionary.
Indeed, many older people probably remember a time when keeping a reasonable stock of basic food was simply normal behaviour.
The modern economy has encouraged the opposite approach.
Why keep a month's supply of something when the supermarket is ten minutes away?
Why store spare batteries when everything can be ordered online?
Why keep extra water when the tap works every morning?
Why worry about disruption when supermarkets appear to replenish their shelves almost magically?
The answer is that the system works extremely well until it doesn't.
Rural Scotland may see this differently
There is also a particular relevance for rural and remote areas.
A disruption to a supermarket distribution centre somewhere in central Scotland may be inconvenient in a city where there are several alternatives.
It can look rather different in a remote community.
A road closure, ferry cancellation, severe storm, power cut or disruption to deliveries can quickly become much more significant when there are fewer shops and longer distances between them.
This is one reason why resilience should not simply be viewed as an individual responsibility.
If the Government wants households to prepare for emergencies, it should also be asking how resilient the country's infrastructure actually is.
Are food distribution networks sufficiently diversified?
Are ports capable of continuing to operate during severe weather?
Do we have sufficient fuel supplies?
How vulnerable are supermarkets to computer failures or cyber attacks?
What happens if electricity is unavailable for several days?
Can rural communities still receive essential supplies if roads are blocked?
These questions have little to do specifically with El Niño.
They are questions about national resilience.
There is another danger: unnecessary panic
There is, however, an important counterargument.
Telling millions of people to stock up can itself create problems if the message is badly handled.
People remember the panic buying during the Covid pandemic and the shortages of fuel and other essentials that have occurred during previous crises.
If everybody suddenly decides that they need three months' worth of food, the resulting surge in demand can create shortages that would otherwise never have occurred.
That is why government messaging needs to be exceptionally careful.
There is a world of difference between saying:
"Keep some basic supplies at home in case of disruption."
and saying:
"Britain is facing food shortages."
The first is sensible contingency planning.
The second could become a self-fulfilling problem.
Angela Eagle therefore deserves some credit for raising the issue, but the Government also has a responsibility to explain the risks calmly rather than allowing headlines to do the explaining for it.
What about farmers?
There is another part of the debate that should not be overlooked.
If Britain is concerned about food security, domestic agriculture is strategically important.
Farmers cannot control El Niño. They cannot control global commodity markets and they certainly cannot control the weather.
But the country can decide how much productive agricultural capacity it wants to retain.
Every time farmland is lost, agricultural businesses disappear or domestic production becomes economically marginal, Britain's dependence on international supply increases.
That does not mean Britain should attempt to produce everything it consumes. That would be unrealistic and probably very expensive.
But food security is rather like energy security.
You do not necessarily need to produce everything yourself.
You do need enough domestic capacity, alternative suppliers and strategic resilience to cope when international markets become disrupted.
Perhaps this is the bigger lesson
There is something slightly ironic about the timing of the warning.
For decades, consumers have been encouraged to expect constant availability, low prices and enormous choice.
The supermarket shelf has become almost invisible infrastructure.
We notice it only when something is missing.
But the food on that shelf depends upon farmers, processors, lorries, warehouses, ports, fuel, electricity, refrigeration, telecommunications, computer systems and international trade.
Remove enough of those links and the apparent abundance can disappear surprisingly quickly.
That does not mean Britain is heading for famine.
It means that modern life has become dependent upon an enormous number of systems continuing to work simultaneously.
And that is the real reason Angela Eagle's comments deserve more serious consideration than simply asking whether people should buy a few extra tins.
So should we be worried?
Probably not in the sense that people should panic.
But perhaps we should be concerned enough to prepare.
A sensible household having a modest supply of food and water, some basic medicines, torches, batteries and other essentials is not evidence of paranoia. It is ordinary contingency planning.
Governments should be doing exactly the same thing on a much larger scale.
The strongest argument for taking the warning seriously is not that El Niño will necessarily cause a British food crisis.
It is that we do not know which disruption will test the system next.
It could be extreme weather or another cyber attack.
It could be war or an energy crisis.
It could be a shipping disruption or another pandemic not to mention several relatively minor problems occurring together.
The sensible response is therefore neither panic nor complacency.
It is resilience.
And perhaps that is the real message hidden inside the Environment Secretary's rather alarming announcement.
A country does not become resilient because it predicts the next crisis correctly. It becomes resilient because it is prepared when the next crisis arrives.
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