Climate change to push fruit & veg prices up by 170% by 2050, research claims

Climate change is “on course” to price shoppers out of buying fresh fruit and vegetables over the next two decades, placing already faltering ‘5 a day’ ambitions even further out of reach, a stark new report has warned.

Fresh produce prices could rise so sharply that healthy eating risked becoming unaffordable for millions of shoppers, claimed a study by thinktank The Autonomy Institute, titled The Price of 5 a Day, published this week.

Modelling by Autonomy – based on projected heatwave-driven crop disruption under a high-emissions climate scenario – revealed the average price of the UK’s top 20 fruit and vegetable lines could rise by 11% by 2035.

Imported tropical fruit alone, such as melons, oranges, bananas, easy peelers and grapes would become between 12% and 14% more expensive by 2035, due to heatwave stress on crops, it added.

Under the same high-emission scenario, prices could rise by 68% by 2050, with tropical fruit increasing by between 80% and 93%, the report claimed.

Compounded with estimated CPI inflation, the total average shelf price of an overall basket of fruit and veg could reach upwards of 170% above today’s levels by 2050, it warned.

This meant ‘climate-flation’ would contribute to 40% of total inflation across the basket of basic goods by 2035 and over 60% of it by 2050, the thinktank claimed, with climate change going from “a junior contributor to the dominant driver of shelf-price inflation on fresh produce inside the working lifetime of someone in their thirties today”.

Autonomy stressed its modelling was also “conservative” and did not factor in other climate-related impacts on food production such as flooding, as well as second order effects, including infrastructure degradation, soil erosion and water quality, and geopolitical impacts on inflation.

Ultimately, a “state strategy for reducing prices” was “needed to maintain affordability” through the period in which climate factors were still rising, the thinktank argued.

“We have been cautious in our assumptions – looking only at heatwaves, and only against a stable inflation backdrop,” said Dr Will Stronge, Autonomy Institute CEO.

“The conclusion is still stark: within 15 years, climate change will be the biggest single factor driving up the cost of fresh food. Politicians cannot afford to wait and see. The time to build food resilience into our industrial strategy is now, before the pressures become acute.”

Responding to the report, Green Party leader Zack Polanski accused the government of “just not getting it” when it came to the crisis facing the UK’s food system.

It comes as the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit this week warned more than a tenth (13%) of the UK’s food imports were at risk from the impact of the upcoming El Niño weather event this year. The 15 top suppliers from that group alone made up 11% of UK food imports, worth £7.4bn.

That included rice, for which India is the UK’s biggest supplier, as well as soft and citrus fruits like grapes, lemons, oranges and nectarines from South Africa, Peru and Egypt, coffee from Vietnam and Brazil, cocoa beans from Ivory Coast and Ghana, Colombian and Ecuadorean bananas, and Kenyan tea.