Food Security

I happily say, since the right hon. Gentleman invites me to do so, that trade is indeed a good thing, which is why I have just told the House that we need an open global trading system. However, I also said to my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, East (Kerry McCarthy) that individuals have a choice. If they are going to eat apples, which lots of people do—doing so is very good for them—they can decide where they want their apples to come from. [Interruption.] ““Kent””, says my hon. Friend the Member for Chatham and Aylesford (Jonathan Shaw) from a sedentary position—and who am I to argue with him? In bringing my remarks to a close, I want to come to the question whether our food supply is secure. Currently, the answer to the question is yes, both because we produce a lot of it ourselves and because we are able to buy the rest of the food that we need on the world market. Will the answer to the question be yes in the years ahead? The truth is, none of us can answer that question for sure, which is why this debate matters so much. We should therefore ask ourselves how we can watch what is happening and set up a system of warnings—if I might use that word—to alert us to changes that we ought to be worried about. That is the starting point for this debate. In the document that I promised the House at the last departmental questions, I intend to suggest what those warnings might look like. I intend to produce the document alongside the Strategy Unit's report on food, and I genuinely look forward to contributions. As a starter for 10, the things that we might want to watch include the overall global availability of food compared with population growth; the pattern of UK food imports and supply diversity; the changing patterns in domestic land use here and elsewhere in the world; the energy dependency in our food chain and food chain resilience; affordability of food, and especially whether low-income households can afford nutritious food; and public confidence in the food system to deliver. There will be many other suggestions—