Treaty of Lisbon (No. 8)

I disagree with my hon. Friend on that. I appreciate that Europe is not perfect, but it has made some substantial contributions towards improving the environment. The issue now is food shortage. We have seen a surge in food prices. There is now talk of the UN World Food Programme having to be cut back because of rising prices and a possibility of introducing rationing, which I understand Egypt and Pakistan have done. Only yesterday the price of palm oil increased by about 6 per cent., while wheat and soya prices have risen to record highs on the world market in recent weeks. That has been substantially driven by the changing climate. One of the reasons why the price of oil increased so much was the cold winter in China, which virtually wiped out the Chinese rape seed crop. That means that China has been in the market buying oil. The same applies with the drought in Australia, which has lasted for many years, and the drought in sub-Saharan Africa. We have climate change in this country, too. My right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer) now has bluetongue in his constituency, which has spread up from southern Europe and is causing a problem for our farmers. I quite agree that biofuels will prove totally unsustainable unless there is substantial reform of the way the schemes operate. Interestingly, 60 per cent. of Europe's vegetable oil—a scarce world commodity—now goes into biofuels. In the United States the figure is 20 per cent. People talk about biofuels being good for the environment, but there is obviously a fuel security issue in the United States. It seems nonsensical that issues such as fuel security should come at the expense of poor people throughout the world. That issue does not matter in Europe, where people spend about 10 per cent. of their income on food. However, the figure is 60 per cent. for people in sub-Saharan Africa, for whom a surge in prices would be catastrophic. We have had surges before. What normally happens is that the market eventually catches up. This time, however, I suspect that the gap will be quite considerable, because the effect of climate change—it degrades agricultural land, which means less land being used for food production—will be to make any surge in food prices more serious. What should Europe do about that? It needs to increase its food production sensibly. First, Europe could deregulate more. Secondly, it could continue to—