Does ‘grow British’ equal ‘don’t buy foreign’?

‘Grow your own veg’ is an oddly resonant message in uncertain economic times.

I heard it first from my father, when he sent his youngest three children to help him tend to his Manchester Council allotment at Bradley Folds next to the River Mersey.

Now I’d rather have been tending to a football than fetching manure, but there is something utterly wondrous about eating a meal from your own organically nurtured crops. And now it seems, my parents may well have been far more visionary than a sulky kid may have appreciated in 1980s south Manchester.

The announcement this morning that the government is to encourage more consumption of in-season British produce, partly to address over-reliance on overseas food is an amazing about turn from Hilary Benn.

On Valentine’s Day 2007, the then Development Secretary was encouraging over sentimental Romeos to buy Kenyan rather than European tulips, because Kenyan flowers, grown in natural African sun rather than electrically-heated greenhouses had less of a carbon footprint. And there was the crucial role of trade.

Mr Benn said: “Climate change is hugely important to the future of developed and developing countries but if we boycott goods flown from Africa we deny the poor the chance to grow; their chance to educate their children and stay healthy.”

Now he says that although he won’t ban African strawberries, he hopes that more Britons will voluntarily eat more seasonal British food.

There was at the time of his former statement an almighty row going on inside the Soil Association, about whether to strip air-freighted food of its ‘organic’ label. In his former job, he was wary of the green movement emerging into a voice for protectionism that would damage development.

That said, ‘grow your own veg’ isn’t just coming from government ministers and the greens. Jim Rogers, the legendary Wall Street investor, told me to become a farmer when I interviewed him earlier this year. Farmers, he told me, would be driving Lamborghinis, and bankers would be driving tractors, in a world of food shortages and high oil prices.

And then just last week, in Elkhart, Indiana, I found some of the civic groups helping America’s massed ranks of unemployed were borrowing the gardens of foreclosed properties to create ‘community gardens’. This, they felt, would be a truly sustainable solution to rising hunger amongst the jobless of America’s Rust Belt.

The question about ‘Grow your own’ is, at what point does it become, ‘don’t buy the other person’s’ and the world returns to autarky?