Agriculture

My Lords, I, too, offer my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Vinson, for introducing this debate at this time. It has already shown its worth. We have had a number of first-class speeches, most of them provocative. I hope not to let that tradition down. That British farming is in a mess is no secret. Indeed, world agriculture is in a mess, but I imagine that it is the national problem that we are addressing today, although the roots of our troubles lie in international economics and, to be specific, in free trade. Free trade as a dogma, as an extreme, is the invention of the Liberal Party. It is a con trick to extract the votes of the townsmen at the expense of the countryman. But like all dogmas coined by conmen, it is the corruption of something worthwhile. Extreme free trade and extreme protection are both deeply flawed. As so often, we must look for the golden mean. Extreme free trade counts as its virtues the production of cheap goods and cheap food and thereby always pays the least possible wages and does the least possible for the environment. That is the logical way in which it must progress. Extreme protection makes the rich richer, usually at the expense of the poor. The golden mean is to be found, as we are beginning to realise, in the concept of fair trade. Fair trade is free trade conditioned by care for people and the world, and moderate protectionism is protectionism where it can be justified by care for people and the world. That justification, when we are talking about food production, can be found in the doctrine of food security, which has been mentioned several times in the debate and is a concept that the older ones among us are quite used to, since it governed our survival in World War Two. Then we had to grow as much food as possible and pay in wages and profits to workers and farmers at least the amount necessary to ensure it. Since then, we have been able to neglect our agriculture, and therefore our countryside, by buying cheaply all over the world. But for those of us who look ahead further than the next 10 years, the unique window of 150 years when the world could in the short term afford the luxury of free trade, is coming to an end. The trigger for this reaction to normalcy is the end of the age of oil. But, you may say, ““The world is awash with oil””. And so it is, but the world being awash with anything non-renewable is the inevitable sign that production is at or just past its peak. In this case, the experts largely agree that it is just past its peak. Economists tell us that that is merely the signal for substitution, so that is all right then; except that in this case there are no substitutes. Nuclear power actually needs a lot of fossil fuel to set it up, and there is no way any sane man knows of disposing of its lethal waste. Biomass has its uses, as is often said in this Chamber, but it is a direct competitor with food for fertile land, and fertile land is something which we must preserve at all costs. There are various other candidates to replace oil, but they all involve using more energy than they produce. So, if we want to eat—and I think we all do—we must set about making this island as self-sufficient as possible. That involves taxing imports of foodstuffs sufficiently to make it profitable for farmers to grow food, and subsidising small farms at the expense of large ones, because small farms grow more food in quantity per unit of land and manpower than large ones. The bonus, in addition to not starving, is that we will begin to rebuild our countryside. None of this will be easy because it would involve, among other things, leaving the European Union and the World Trade Organisation. But it ought at least to unite the nation as World War Two did, since the Labour Party will be able to abandon its creation of a nannied suburbia in favour of its old ideals of increasing the welfare of the poor, and the Conservative Party will be able to perform its duty to conserve. It may be a bit tough on the Liberal Democrats, but you can’t have everything, and it ought to cure them of being carried away by dogma. Conmen can’t get away with it for ever.