Food Security

I shall take careful note of your remarks, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and be as brief as I possibly can, particularly as I rehearsed my arguments in the debate that we had on 3 June, as my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs knows. I shall make my speech and he can make his, and we can reconsider food security. I wish to address some matters that are different from those that I raised that day, at the time of the Rome conference. I am delighted to follow the comments of the right hon. Member for Fylde (Mr. Jack), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, on the conference. I shall park the matter there, but it was an important conference and it is good to hear for the first time the contents of some of the speeches. I wish to address some of the major themes and discuss some slightly different issues. It is a pity that my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North (Dr. Gibson) is no longer in his place, because he does the science bit and I do the anti-science bit. Long may that continue—we are very good friends, but we do not agree about everything. I wish to say a few things about GM crops, as people would suspect. I shall begin with a couple of points that are more general. As I said in the debate on 3 June, I never felt that the era of low food prices would last for ever. I also felt that low food prices sometimes have counter-productive effects. We have abused food and used it in ways that we should not, and it has been taken for granted. As the most basic of all God's supplies, we have taken far too liberal a view of food and of how to face up to future challenges. I would argue that at least we can now debate the matter—I suspect that, a year ago, we would not have held such a debate. Perhaps the Government took food security for granted, and there was a general context in which it was believed that food would remain cheap, that that was a good thing and that we would never have to debate the matter. However, that is clearly not the case and we are having the debate, which concentrates the mind. The reasons for being where we are have been well rehearsed. As no one else has done so, let me give a plug to the Cabinet Office paper, which the Select Committee examined. It remains a good analysis of the different criteria whereby our food is produced, who can buy it, the international consequences and the impact on health. The latter has not been mentioned, but it is important and we ignore it at our peril. We talk about food security as a global or a national issue, but it is sometimes highly personal. I shall say a little about the impact of rising food prices on the poor, which should concern us, shortly. There is a live debate about what we should do with the school meals service. The School Food Trust now says that it can do nothing with the money that it has set aside to provide school meals, and that, despite Jamie Oliver, there has been a decline in the take up of school meals. That has a huge impact in two respects. First, it means that some children will have inferior food and, more particularly, if we cannot educate children appropriately at school about good food and catering, there is little chance, given the way society has gone, that they will have that education. I am grateful to July's edition of Green Futures, which states that Washington state has decided to put $600,000 into locally grown food and vegetable snacks for the school meals service there. The Americans had no hesitation—partly because they support their agricultural system in that way, but also because, when they have a problem, such as rising food prices, they put resources into it—in subsidising those who most need it. Such initiatives, which are perceived as ““nanny state”” if this country introduces them, are part and parcel of the operation of American states. We should take more such action. Let us consider the impact of rising food prices on the poorest. Again, the Americans have had food stamps for generations. If we consider the link between production and support for the producers, we might like also to examine the impact on those who buy food. The impact of rising food prices in the past few weeks and months has been greatest on those who buy. I do not suggest food stamps per se, but one of the advantages of a deficiency payment system was that we provided food to those who could least afford to buy it. The whole EU has moved away from that to a minimum price system, and that has an effect. Those who cannot afford to buy food of quality and variety are adversely affected. It is therefore a great shame that we do not consider a more flexible system. As a long-standing opponent of the EU, I wish we had more national control because there can be reasons for intervening. For example, I have considered the school meals service, supporting the poorest through flexibility in providing food, and the price at which the food is being made available. To some extent, we are still debating the last war, although things have moved on. As the hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) said, there are new opportunities for production and new people are going into production. People are growing more in their gardens and trying to get allotments. Community agriculture means that people are genuinely coming together—there are two examples in Stroud, as hon. Members can imagine. People are making the best use of their time and are willing to consider how they can produce food. That is at least interesting, and we need to encourage it and see it as a different way of really localising the food chain. Again, I stress that we must not see food security as a global or national issue, but a local one. It was interesting to hear some of the things that Sir Iain Anderson said about biosecurity and biosafety in a private meeting last week. I have felt for a long time that the biggest threat to this country is animal disease, whether imported or created indigenously—we all know about the impact of that. I have never been sure what we would do if a series of animal diseases all hit at the same time. I did not receive a terribly satisfactory answer to my question a week or so ago, but I continue to bang on about how important it is to look at the strategy, because I do not think that we will get animal diseases in single order anymore. Rather, it is quite possible that we will have a number of them all together. We need to have the means to bear down on them, otherwise our whole food chain will suffer. But on to GM. I heard what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said about the issue being safety and the environment. I also heard what my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich, North said about how we must continue to experiment. I would introduce a third factor, which has always worried me, which is this: who owns the means to propagate GM? My greatest concern has always been about the concentration of our retailers and supermarkets—we are increasingly seeing this with the globalisation of the control of seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and the rest of it. Until we can break those monopolies, I will always be fearful. That is my fundamental opposition to GM. It is interesting that people have recently begun to look into both the entry costs and the exits costs of GM. There is always the terminator gene, too. I know that it can be greatly exaggerated, but it is nevertheless something that we must face up to. In conclusion, I am not nearly as sanguine about GM. I do not see it as the answer. More particularly, the worrying thing is that GM is moving in the direction of increasing concentrations of power and the ability to influence the food chain in a completely different way from how I would like it to develop. That way would be to encourage localisation, encourage more people to do things for themselves, and recognise that there are farmers markets and ways for communities to come together and effect changes in what we now call food fundamentals. Again, those things are happening out there, but it is a great shame that we in this place do not look at those local initiatives and see them as important to the huge strategic issues that we face regularly. As long as that is heard and understood and as long as there is some recognition that the issue is as important as some of those other debates, I will be quiet and let others continue the debate.