World Food Prices

My Lords, the whole House will be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, for the compelling way in which he introduced the debate. I want to follow him and speak about the global context, particularly the implications for sub-Saharan Africa, of high world food prices. I must declare an interest as a farmer and as the chair of an intergovernmental programme of research, Living with Environmental Change, which is funded by all the research councils and by a number of departments and agencies. Of course, food security is very much part of the environmental change we are addressing. These high prices amount to a wake-up call, as the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, has told us so compellingly. We are facing a stark inability to feed the world. We are already failing to feed more than 800 million people, who are persistently hungry. We are seeing a failure to invest adequately in agricultural infrastructure, particularly in developing countries with a food deficit. The millennium goal to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015 is looking increasingly like just a dream. In the medium to long term, leaving aside for the moment the short term, we need to deal with emergency food supplies. The immediate requirement is to meet the stark requirements for food, which we can project forward, as we have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Taverne. Think about it: if there are to be 2.5 billion extra people by 2030, as we are assured there will be, and if you allow for increased consumption because of increased ability, in India, China and elsewhere, to purchase food, and therefore an increased standard of living, and if you allow a margin for climate change and increased urbanisation, which means that fewer people will be involved in food production so we will have to feed more people in cities—forget about biofuels for the moment as they are almost an irrelevance—there will be a need to double or even treble food production. That is no easy consideration. We have to plan now, or probably should have planned yesterday, how to make global agriculture much more productive. The conference in Rome last month identified, as have previous conferences, the need and called for more aid, more research and much else besides. One has to ask what fundamental change we have to make to policies in order to do any better than we have done over the past decade or two. I shall concentrate on water requirements. In order to produce extra food—double or treble the amount—water will have to be used more efficiently and more water will have to be found. One litre of water will produce one calorie, roughly. With 2.5 billion more people and all the extra margins I have allowed for, we will need another 2,000 cubic kilometres of fresh water to feed the population. That means we will have to do a lot of research on the efficient use of water and spend an awful lot on infrastructure: water storage, water harvesting, large-scale reservoirs, small village ponds and, above all, efficient irrigation systems that do not waste water. At the moment, there is evaporation and loss and most of the water does not end up where it should: on the crop. There are already solutions. There are good systems. The Israelis, the Indians and many others have demonstrated low technology solutions, but they have to be rolled out. There has to be technology transfer and somebody has to invest. There has to be water regulation that works. In sub-Saharan Africa, not necessarily in other parts of the world, we are seeing a failure to invest in basic water infrastructure. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, that GM crops may well have a contribution to make, but even drought-resistant GM crops need water. Every plant needs water, and until the basic water requirement is sorted out, we will always be fighting a losing battle. If we and all western economies are to be persuaded, as we should be, to invest more heavily in agriculture and global food production, we must give priority to water. The great advantage about water storage and systems is that we can see where the money has gone. There is something tangible. We know that so much of the aid in the past has been frittered away. That is not to say that we should not also support grain storage, transport, roads, fertilisers, animal health, markets and much else, but if an international agency or a national government is going to prioritise and wants to make the most effective long-term contribution to meet these almost insuperable problems, it should concentrate on addressing hunger and poverty through water. Globally, 70 per cent of the water we extract ends up irrigating crops. That is what we do with water, although it is often not used very efficiently. It is not true to say that all developing economies are failing to invest adequately in their agriculture. Countries such as China and Thailand in south east Asia and Mexico in North America have some impressive improvements in yield. They have done that by investing in agriculture, including in water storage. They have not kept up with demand because demand is increasing faster, so the problem is becoming very difficult. Nevertheless if we look at the graph of yields, which starts from a very low base compared with what we are used to in developed economies, particularly those in the northern hemisphere, they are catching up in terms of yields because they are using appropriate technologies and agriculture systems and, above all, they are harnessing appropriate agricultural research and technology. However, the irrigated area in Africa is very small and the proportion of arable land compared with other regions around the world is desperately small. In Ethiopia, a desperately poor country, water storage per capita is 38 cubic metres. The other extreme—and it is an extreme case—is Australia, which has 5,000 cubic metres per capita. If we want to resolve the problems of Ethiopia and so many other sub-Saharan countries, we will have to provide water storage, harvest water efficiently, reuse it and much else besides. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, that much relevant research is going on around the world, including into GMs, although, as he acknowledged, biotechnology in itself is not necessarily the sole solution. Crop protection, animal health, and plant and animal genetics all have relevant applications which have been used very successfully in the West. Much as the common agricultural policy is disliked around the world and by our Government, sometimes for good reason because of its protectionist aspects, it must be credited with having achieved what was its primary goal: to ensure that we were efficient producers of food using a smaller labour force. Again, there is criticism that sometimes the impact on the environment from leakages to soil, air and water was unacceptably high. Nevertheless, those are the issues that we continue to address, as well as protecting biodiversity. That should be the objective of all agriculture around the world. We do not necessarily transfer the same technologies as we use in this country—they would be inappropriate for some parts of the world—but without doubt, the basic plant science, the sort of work that we are so good at in this country in plant genetics, molecular biology and much else will very soon have application in those countries. One of our roles, which is not actually very expensive, is to look to our science base, which, I have to say, has been whittled down considerably since I chaired what was then called the Agriculture and Food Research Council in the 1980s—that was 25 years ago—now subsumed into the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. Nevertheless, we still have a science base which is extremely important. We punch well above our weight and there are already applications around the world with a very low added cost to transfer those technologies. If you want to reduce your dependence on fossil fuels and your carbon emissions, reduced tillages have a very appropriate application. Mixed cropping will sometimes give you advantages on crop protection that you will not get from a monoculture. Those are systems that are being researched in this country and elsewhere around the world. We must concentrate on research and on providing investment in agricultural infrastructure. I have concentrated very much on water, but I repeat that we must invest in many other aspects of agriculture. Those economies around the world where people fail to understand that no civilisation can exist without ensuring that it has an agricultural base will face a crisis. We have a wake-up call now. Why on earth do so few countries and so few international agencies recognise that if we do not invest now in the agricultural infrastructure of sub-Saharan Africa and other countries, the problems will be very much worse?