planteria wrote: ↑Sun Sep 12 2021 11:00am
empty stores in Australia,
Caused by panic buying (or a 'surge in demand' as their government would prefer to call it) with each snap lockdown. Eased almost immediately as soon as supply chains catch up.
The difference with the UK is that we are not panic buying, yet still have gaps on shelves.
Brexit is not the only cause of the food supply issues. As you state, there are supply chain problems globally, mainly due to covid interrupting harvest, manufacture, processing and distribution operations. The European driver shortage has long been an issue, but is now even more acute and impactful.
All of Europe is affected by this. But the UK has an additional constraint - Brexit. We have got rid of our cheap labour supply, so now we have limited resources with which to patch up the supply chain gaps.
We have three choices: 1) allow foreign workers in again, 2) reduce the amount of food on shop shelves, 3) increase wages for the unskilled labour in the supply chain, to attract more people into those roles; this cost will mostly be passed on to the retail price of food.
The anger is because this was dismissed as 'project fear' and we took back control with no plan to deal with this problem. Sovereignty and control are apparently not appropriate substitutes for affordable food supplies.