British Agriculture and Food Labelling

I am grateful for that intervention, because it strengthens the point that I am trying to make. There should be a mandatory framework, mandatory definitions, mandatory penalties and a mandatory time frame. The last thing that any of us have is the luxury of another 42 years of meandering around, systematically going nowhere. [Interruption.] None of us has that luxury, although we may wish to. There has been a terrible sense that labelling has been abused in this country. I feel sorry for Patrick Holden, the director of the Soil Association, who in June 2007 found himself denounced in a Guardian article. The newspaper had put a trail on the locally, organically grown carrots from his farm in mid-Wales, which were purchased by Sainsbury's supermarkets for sale. It found that the carrots had been taken to a super-packer in East Anglia and that by the time they finally reached the shops back in mid-Wales, they had travelled 230 miles—which stretches the notion of ““local”” beyond credibility. The same applied to carrots bought at Waitrose, which were labelled as having been selectively chosen from ““local growers””; those growers happened to be local in Italy. So, too, with bags of parsnips: they were labelled ““Organic English””, but sourced in Scotland. Watercress, labelled as having been grown by the sparkling chalk streams of Hampshire, had been imported from Portugal.