Minimum Urban Land Fractions for Import-Exposed Fresh Produce in Great Britain

Abstract

The resilience of fresh fruits and vegetables in Great Britain goes beyond merely considering the area of urban green spaces. Various crop classes suitable for cultivation outdoors differ in terms of productivity, level of imports dependency, storage behaviour, and urban governance requirements, while exotic produce is always structurally reliant on imports. The current study attempts to calculate the shares of land subject to supply pressure from each of six crop classes of produce suitable for cultivation outdoors. The calculation combines data on crop yield, domestic production, imports, current supply, inferred productive area of urban green spaces, and the town’s capacity for the production of crops in question to identify the share of land needed to compensate for the current imports and current supply within each of six compatible crop classes. In this way, land shares have been calculated at 25.9%, 4.7%, 10.4%, 11.5%, 18.2%, and 29.4% for orchard fruits, soft fruits, roots and onions, brassicas, legumes, and other vegetables respectively. National production in case of fully utilised productive potential would amount to 21.568 million tonnes per year – this equals 36.4% of domestic production plus imports and 394.0% of the current supply of the six compatible classes. While the latter figure seems unmanageable, its practical implications are more moderate. Thus, 16.2% of productive green space area in all towns could be sufficient for importing the amount of produce specified, while 32.4% would be needed to produce all this produce domestically. By altering the crop mix in 26 towns/cities, a production volume of 164.2 to 271.1 kg per person per year may be achieved, which surpasses the annual mass equivalent of daily guidelines in all cases.