European Union (Amendment) Bill

My Lords, I would like to cast an observation, because we are talking about the common agricultural policy. I have always thought, and increasingly thought, that that is a disaster. It is not common at all. I have never understood why everyone has said that in order for the European Community to co-operate and work together there must be a common agricultural policy. I do not see any connection between the working of the Community and having a common agricultural policy any more than a common steel or coal policy. When one sees, as we saw some years ago, milk in the United Kingdom at 13p a litre and milk in Holland at 27p a litre, one can only say: what is common about that? There is nothing common about it. We have seen our own agriculture decimated by the common agricultural policy. We have seen our own fisheries decimated by the common agricultural policy. People have been allowed to come and fish grounds that were always ours. They have taken the fish out, but because they are not allowed to land more than so many, they have put them back into the sea, dead and useless. The argument ought to be that you should not gather out of the sea more fish than you should, not that you should not land those fish and then throw back into the sea a whole lot of fish that would have been perfectly good but are now dead. The common agricultural policy is, as my noble friend Lord Taylor said, over-centralised, over-bureaucratised and overregulated. Anyone who has had anything to do with agriculture—I have been involved with it all my life—is horrified by what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years. Farmers do not farm their land any more as they used to. They used to farm and had the support of the Government. The only farmer now is the Government and the Government pay people to do their work: ““If you plant so many metres of hedge then we will pay you so much. If you do such and such, we will pay you so much””. In other words the Government are dictating what the role of agriculture should be and it is a disaster. Let us return to thinking about the wine lakes, butter mountains and wheat mountains, and then look at one simple statistic. I am not good on statistics but I would advise your Lordships of this. In 1960, there were 3,000 million people in the world, but it was estimated that by 2000 that would double to 6,000 million and by 2020 double again to 12,000 million. Over the lifetime of those of us who are now on this earth the population of the world will have multiplied fourfold. Think back to the time of the Greeks and the pharaohs, to the Middle Ages, the First World War and the Second World War. It has taken all that time to get to 3,000 million people, but that number will be increased fourfold in 60 years’ time. It is alarming. Where will all the food come from? We have had set-aside policies to keep the food production down but that has gone now. But in a short while there will be a great shortage of food. We will turn round and say, ““What have we done? We have not provided for the future””. It is a great pity. I used to like the common agricultural policy when I used to go—as I was sometimes allowed to do when my noble friend Lord Walker was Minister of Agriculture—to the Council of Ministers. I would see the members from all the other countries sitting round—the Italians, the French, the Germans and the British. Thirty years before they were bombing people to pieces but now they were arguing about the price of a pat of butter. It all seemed to me to be good stuff. But that has gone out of the window. Now the European Community is trying to control us. I think that it is wrong and I just wish that the common agricultural policy did not exist.