{"id":603700,"date":"2026-08-25T02:06:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T02:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/603700\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T02:06:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T02:06:10","slug":"john-gibbons-ireland-needs-an-emergency-food-stockpile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/603700\/","title":{"rendered":"John Gibbons: Ireland needs an emergency food stockpile"},"content":{"rendered":"

At any given time, around 1.7m tonnes of oil are held in the Irish State\u2019s national reserve, most of it stored in facilities around the country.<\/p>\n

This strategic stockpile is managed by the National Oil Reserves Agency (Nora)<\/a> and is designed to provide a 90-day emergency buffer in the event of a dire emergency in which Ireland is unable to import liquid fuels for an extended period.<\/p>\n

Nora is funded by a levy of 2c per litre of fuel sold. This levy might best be thought of as an insurance policy to hedge against disaster. And, like all insurance policies, it\u2019s a total waste of money \u2014 until the day you need it.<\/p>\n

While there is occasional grumbling about the levy<\/a>, few have ever suggested it would be a good idea to shut down Nora, sell off its reserves, and cross our fingers in depending totally on the international energy and shipping markets to always run smoothly.<\/p>\n

Yet, when it comes to food, this is exactly what we are doing. Propelled by the marketing mythology of being a \u2018food island\u2019, Ireland has stumbled into a position of acute vulnerability to food system breakdown with no backup plan in place, no serious political discussion, and a deafening society-wide silence as to just how dire our situation is fast becoming.<\/p>\n

CLIMATE & SUSTAINABILITY HUB<\/a><\/p>\n

Warning shots from covid, Ukraine, and Iran<\/p>\n

The warning shots have been landing with ever-increasing frequency, from the covid<\/a> pandemic to the Ukraine<\/a> war and the Iran<\/a> imbroglio.<\/p>\n

Looming over these crises is the fathomless global climate emergency, which has been simmering ominously in recent years, but which this summer boiled over, with severe drought conditions and multiple heatwaves sweeping Europe, Asia, the Americas, and much of the world\u2019s oceans.<\/p>\n

And then there’s climate<\/p>\n

France is a European powerhouse of cereal production, but its 2026 harvest<\/a> is likely to be 4m-5m tonnes below normal. Apart from severely depleting soils of moisture<\/a>, intense drought conditions have seen four of Europe\u2019s largest rivers, the Rhine, Danube, Po, and Loire all hit record low levels, with major impacts on these arteries of commerce.<\/p>\n

Wildfires last year consumed well over a million hectares across Europe, and all indications point to this year being worse.<\/p>\n

In 2027, with a powerful looming El Ni\u00f1o<\/a> bringing even more extreme conditions to Europe and beyond, it could be worse again.<\/p>\n

Spokespeople for Irish farming organisations in interviews in recent days stress the \u201cunprecedented\u201d nature of this year\u2019s drought, the unstated assumption being that things will be back to normal next year.<\/p>\n

\"HarvestsHarvests across Europe\u00a0\u2014 here it’s sunflowers in France on August 7 \u2014 are being hammered by heatwaves. States could begin curbing exports to feed their own populations. Picture: Nicolas Guyonnet\/Hans Lucas\/AFP\/Getty<\/p>\n

However, the stable climatic conditions that made agriculture so predictable and productive are gone and are likely never coming back.<\/p>\n

A long-term pivot…<\/p>\n

And, however unpalatable some may find it, the new reality for food production in Ireland and across Europe is going to be vastly more challenging. I believe the Irish model consisting almost exclusively of monocultural, export-based intensive livestock production that in turn depends heavily on imported inputs will prove to be a monumental error.<\/p>\n

We need to urgently pivot to a diversified system of mainly plant-based mixed farming that works with, not against, nature and is capable of meeting the essential food needs of the Irish population, while exporting modest surpluses.<\/p>\n

That, however, is not the focus of this article.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even if we could start next week, it will take time to begin this transition in earnest \u2014 time we no longer have.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But first: The immediate crisis<\/p>\n

Long before we have made the switch, we could be facing the spectre of spiralling food prices, food shortages, and empty supermarket shelves, occasionally at first, but more and more often over time as many of the world\u2019s major food producing regions sharply curb exports to feed their own populations.<\/p>\n

Global temperatures are beginning to edge past the 1.5C danger line climate scientists have long warned of, thus ushering in the end of the era of cheap, plentiful food.<\/p>\n

A 2024 report for the UK government drawn up by an expert group of civil servants concluded there was a realistic possibility of the \u201ccatastrophic failure\u201d of its national food system by 2030 as ecosystems crumbled. Yes, 2030.<\/p>\n

While UK planners are alarmed that nearly half of the nation\u2019s basic food needs depend on imports, why have their Irish counterparts nothing whatever to say about a situation where more than four fifths of our total calorific needs are imported?<\/p>\n

Why the omerta?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s because our politicians have been colluding with the industrial livestock sector in peddling myths about our uniquely efficient, clean, and green food systems for so long that they now fear losing face should they try to point out the obvious at this late stage.<\/p>\n

After the Second World War, many European countries maintained strategic food stores, especially when the shadow of the Cold War hung over the continent, but in recent decades, many of these giant stores were abandoned as globalised trade and just-in-time logistics ushered in an era of highly efficient food distribution.<\/p>\n

Just-in-time efficiency versus resilience\u00a0<\/p>\n

The trade-off for efficiency is the loss of resilience. Nordic countries, notably Finland, maintained their stockpiles, mindful of their proximity to Russia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"EmptyEmpty shelves in an Irish supermarket in March 2020, as\u00a0covid hit supply chains. Covid, this year’s fuel crisis, and climate change should prompt Ireland to emulate other European states and set up a 90-day food stockpile. File picture: Brian lawless\/PA<\/p>\n

Since the Ukraine invasion, Norway and Sweden have rushed to rebuild emergency food stocks. Poland, Switzerland, and Germany also maintain state-managed reserves of non-perishable food.<\/p>\n

Few of these countries are as remote from supply chains and as import-dependent as Ireland.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Curragh would be an ideal location\u00a0<\/p>\n

With ample cash available to our Government for critical projects, surely now is the time to commission to build or purchase a series of giant warehouses, similar in scale to the scores of data centres that have sprung up in recent years.<\/p>\n

It may make sense to co-locate them with existing security infrastructure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Curragh military camp in Co Kildare, with ample land and ready access to the greater Dublin area, would be one obvious place to build, given the need for these facilities to be absolutely secure.<\/p>\n

Food stockpile half the tonnage of our oil reserve\u00a0<\/p>\n

If we follow the Nora model of holding 90 days\u2019 supplies in storage, fully meeting the food needs of our population of 5.5m would require warehousing around 750,000 tonnes of food \u2014 which is less than half the tonnage of oil in Nora storage, so this is far from an impossible task.<\/p>\n

The task of managing this food reserve could be given to a new ministry of national food security, one I would suggest we create by dissolving the existing Department of Agriculture as well as Teagasc, the state agri research agency.<\/p>\n

‘Nine meals’ between us and anarchy<\/p>\n

Both are ossified within the existing productivist paradigm and neither appear remotely capable of responding to the dangerous new circumstances we face.<\/p>\n

More than a century ago, US journalist Alfred Henry Lewis wrote: \u201cThere are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.\u201d Let\u2019s never have to find out how true that statement is.<\/p>\n

John Gibbons is an environmental journalist and author of \u2018The Lie of the Land \u2014 The Truth About Farming, Climate & Power in Ireland\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At any given time, around 1.7m tonnes of oil are held in the Irish State\u2019s national reserve, most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":603701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1153,2885,426,63615,61,11829,60,43,3589,2040],"class_list":["post-603700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-sustainability","tag-climate-change","tag-food","tag-fuel-prices","tag-ie","tag-iran","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-russia","tag-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=603700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/603701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=603700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=603700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=603700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}