Agriculture: Organic Farming

My Lords, I welcome this debate, during which I have been accused of having Defra put words in my mouth. I will use as little of this brief as possible. I will not be able to deal with some issues, but I shall try to answer as many of the detailed points as possible. On any points that I am unable to address, I will do a note. On declaring my interests and in terms of being pro-organic or anti-organic, I make no bones about it: I am pro-GM, but I declare an interest as a member of the Soil Association. I do not see anything incompatible in that. I became a member out of solidarity some years ago. I had a family member who was having chemo and wanted to have fewer chemicals in their body. Going organic was one way to assist with that. Organic cannot be one-size-fits-all. Some claims made on both sides of the argument are quite ridiculous and are not based on any science. Nor do I subscribe to the anti-science view around the country, particularly of those who do not want trials to take place because they are worried about the information that might be gathered from experiments. To that extent, I oppose and criticise the people who rip up crop trials. How do we get information if we do not do trials? Not wanting the information to be out there because it destroys one’s original concepts or prejudices is not on. I also want to make it clear that there is no unsafe food on sale in this country. I repeat: no unsafe food is on sale. No one can make a claim that their food is safer than anyone else’s. Any unsafe food would be illegal if it was on sale. It is as simple as that. However food—whether it is crops or meat—is farmed or produced and wherever it is produced in the world, there are checks and surveillances of residues and other matters that are beyond the imagination of the public in terms of the numbers and the quantity in the policing of the system to protect the whole food chain. We publish the results, so there are no secrets, including where we buy produce from. To that extent, John Krebs was right. No one can say that because a food is organic it is healthier. It can be claimed that because a food is organic there may be less chemical residue. But if the residues are within the limits, they are perfectly safe. The two things are not incompatible. No one can claim that commercially produced, ordinarily produced, intensively produced food is any less safe than organic food. That cannot be the case. Going with the science is important. As for some of the prejudices that are around, the other week I was in a 12.5-acre greenhouse, which was next to the site of a 14-acre greenhouse that was being constructed. It will produce one product—tomatoes—in England between March and November. Those tomatoes will be grown on our land and everything used will be the by-product of another food—the carbon dioxide, water and heat. Even the bees for pollination are home-grown. In every calculation, the produce out of that greenhouse would be organic if the root was in soil. But it does not classify because the root is not in soil, even though the product is as organic as any organic tomato. It is a by-product of sugar production at the largest, most efficient sugar plant in Europe, which is in Norfolk. So there are prejudices about the way in which the product has to be produced. The organic movement is a voluntary movement. It is highly regulated—the Soil Association is just one of the certification bodies. But because it is a voluntary movement, it can make its own rules. There are European standards now and that is important. The noble Lord, Lord Taverne, did not push very much on the monetary aspect in his attack on the concept of organic farming, but in our view there is a public good out of the money that the Government use to support organic producers. It is an infinitesimal amount—£30 million to £40 million a year—in terms of environmental goods, but the single farm payments to farmers stand at £1.5 billion a year. The idea that we are paying out this money for the public good only because the produce is organic is wrong. It is an infinitesimal amount compared to the overall scale of public support for farming, and quite rightly so, because we are buying an environmental good.