Climate change is keeping food from our plates. It's time for big business to step up

I like shrinkflation stories. It’s the unalloyed fury they unleash. They come in earnest around Christmas. Somebody will find a box of Celebrations or a multi-pack of Mars bars and rant about the size. They are too small. There are too few inside. There are TOO MANY BOUNTY BARS – and they’re the same price as before. IT’S THE END OF DAYS!!

The contents may diminish but the interest in hashing out the stories remains bullish – a seasonal essential.

Get ready for a rash of them. There is a global coca shortage. Stockpiles, according to the International Cocoa Organization, are just over a third lower than at the same time last year. This will raise prices, which is probably good for some cocoa merchants, but less good if you’re making bars of chocolate or getting annoyed at the shrinkflation of multipacks.

Weather forecasters are blaming low rain and several years of a tougher than previous Harmattan wind – an annual wind that blows from the Sahara in Africa’s north-east – for lowering crop yields in Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana. Back almost 10 years ago, climate modellers were warning that climate change could have an impact on cocoa farmers. And here we are. Almost 70% of the globe’s cocoa is farmed down around that part of Africa. Around two million people are sustained by the industry.

But this isn’t just about cocoa and anger about the volume of mini Snickers in a big tub. We keep getting food insecurity warnings, linked to climate change factors, that don’t seem to make a great deal of difference.

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Drought in parts of the Med ravaged olive production and forced up olive oil prices. Bottles of it now feel like nectar for the gilded elite, rather than a tasty extra for your salad. Olive oil was the most stolen item in supermarkets in Spain for a time last year.

Much more basic foodstuffs have been hit. In summer 2023, delayed, then heavy, monsoon rains led to a huge issue with rice exports from India. The global market was massively impacted.

McCain Foods are the largest purchaser of potatoes in the UK. They work with some 250 potato farmers across the country. Last week, seeing the damage that climate change was causing to the farmers, particularly to yields, due to recent very wet weather – what they’re calling “extreme weather events” – McCain said they’d provide £30m over the next three years to help farmers.

The issues are real and present. It’s hard to argue that steps need to be accelerated when the damage is stopping food reaching our plates. Also, more broadly, it’s clear how global costs, caused by climate, can influence food price rises and national inflation levels.

And yet, there feels to be a retreat from positive steps. In the last number of days, HSBC, the UK’s biggest bank, announced a shift from its aim to make its operations and supply chain net zero by 2030. Now, it says it’s moving the target to 2050. You could legitimately argue that one organisation, even as big an operator as HSBC, rowing back on previous climate commitments is not going to materially change the world.

However, HSBC also said it was reviewing targets to reduce emissions from polluting firms it finances, what it previously described as its “heavy financed emissions footprint”. That review will be with us soon.

Over the next number of months, as the Trump dictum to drill baby drill serves as a global clarion call to trample over many emissions targets, we need big organisations to step up and walk it like they previously talked it.

Or start hoarding ever-smaller chocolate bars.

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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