Food, Farming and the Environment

I compliment the hon. Member for Blaydon (Mr. Anderson) on a moving speech, in which he alerted us to the importance of integrating the environment and farming in the context of the exploitation of his lovely part of Northumberland through the example of the red kite and the benefits of its reintroduction and farmers' work to sustain interest from urban dwellers in rural Northumbria. He also reminded us poignantly of the human situation, which has tragically evolved, of Dairy Farmers of Britain. The hon. Gentleman put his finger on a crucial issue as we debate some of the long-term factors that affect the security of supply of food and the short-term developments in the marketplace, which operates on a day-to-day and sometimes an hour-by-hour basis. One of the challenges that I would like to address is how to reconcile the long-term aspiration of a safe and secure food supply with the fact that, on the journey, the marketplace will have its ups and downs, as the hon. Gentleman just discussed. I stand before the House as the president of the Shepherd Road allotment society in my constituency. I know from bitter experience the genuine problems that the producers of agricultural produce have to face. In August, I face an army of caterpillars. If I am not there immediately to administer the coup de grâce, that rampaging horde undoes all my hard work to ensure that I have a brassica crop ready to eat in the winter. I mention that little personal anecdote because when we consider the provision of food, we realise that we have all become entirely reliant on somebody else producing our food for us. More than 40 per cent. of our food spend in this country is outside the home. Mention has been made of supermarkets, and when we go down to Sainsbury's, Tesco or Marks and Spencer, we see that they are absolutely full, seven days a week, of an unbelievable array of produce. I can remember my mother taking me when I was a little boy in the '50s to a fruiterer's shop in York, where I grew up, and showing me an avocado pear. In those days they cost £1, which would be 10, £12 or £15 now. Today, people can buy avocado pears for less than 40p. They have become a commodity. In those days there was wonder—there was something different; there was seasonality—but today we have a 52 weeks-a-year supply of a glittering array of produce, because the world of agriculture has so adapted to meet the demands of the consumer. That is one of the dimensions of the debate which has been missing to date, so let us reflect for a moment on what the 21st-century food consumer is asking of the supply chain, of which farmers are a key part. However, that perhaps also reflects the context in which I make that remark, because the food and drink industry in the United Kingdom is worth a staggering £162 billion. It generates the equivalent of 7 per cent. of our GDP and employs 3.7 million people. Food and drink is very big business. Depending on which estimate we use, the food part of the industry is worth somewhere between £65 billion and £80 billion. If we consider that on a global basis, we see that we are dealing with a very big industry indeed, which employs many millions of people globally, and that ensuring that the supply chains work on the 24/7, 365-days-a-year basis on which we operate is incredibly complicated. When we as politicians give our views about the industry, we have to take into account the aspirations of the consumer. Consumers want affordability, availability, high quality, variety and choice. They also want things that taste good and they want to know more about the provenance of their food. We could have a debate on any element in that list. Ensuring that we in this country enjoy the food that we have is a complicated business. Indeed, given certain other targets, which I shall talk about in a moment, we have some genuine challenges for the future. It is against that background that I want to address a remark that the Secretary of State made, which I wrote down. He said, "I want British agriculture to produce as much as possible." One of the problems with which I have concerned myself, and which the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, which I have the honour of chairing, also looks at, is the difference between the declaratory statements of politicians, who perhaps believe that if they say all the right supportive things, something will happen, and the policy levers that they have to pull to make things happen. Saying that we would like something to happen is very different from actually making it happen. One of the themes underpinning agricultural policy is a withdrawal by politicians from the decision-making processes by which farmers decide what to do with their land. The reforms of the common agricultural policy; compulsory modulation; the ending of payment schemes based on the quantity of agricultural produce that a farmer grows or, in the case of livestock, raises on his land—those days have gone. Farmers throughout the European Union now have to make their own commercial decisions. Because of the scheme under the mid-term review that we adopted, the United Kingdom is further down the road than more or less anybody else in Europe. Against that background, it is interesting that, in discussing the arguments that will shape the 2013 reforms, Mrs. Fischer Boel, the Agriculture Commissioner, is talking about possibly withdrawing the Commission's agricultural remit further, by not using the public's money for anything that affects what farmers produce. However, we face certain challenges that will pose important questions for political decision makers about how they can meet the consumer's aspirations for a safe, long-term, sustainably produced food supply, yet as legislators have less and less to do with the commercial decisions that farmers make daily. We understand from the debate on the Dairy Farmers of Britain that short-term fluctuations in the market could affect the long-term achievement of those aspirations. In this debate, we have heard about the restructuring of the dairy industry and about the decline in the number of pig producers and in the number of animals produced in the livestock sector in general. We can see the difficult interplay between the short-term market situation and the long-term aspirations of consumers, who hope that the decision makers will play their part in fulfilling them. Some of these matters have formed the work of the Select Committee. We have covered fields as diverse as animal disease, the reform of the common agricultural policy, the milk industry, and, more recently, pigs and the rural economy. The work that we are undertaking on food security at the moment is highly germane to this debate. I do not want to anticipate the findings of the Committee, because our work is still at a formulative stage. However, hearing a great deal of evidence on the subject has inevitably conditioned my own reaction to some of the issues that we have been discussing today. One of the most interesting aspects of this work was the Secretary of State's appearance before the Select Committee last November to talk about his Department's policies. Given that climate change had been removed from his Department's principal areas of activity, I asked him what his main priority had become. He hesitated briefly before answering, "Food". It was almost as though DEFRA had rediscovered one of the key activities for which it was responsible. It is, after all, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. I do not blame the Government for having attached a high priority to climate change issues, but I think that that had resulted in the Department taking its eye off the ball when it came to its food policies. The fact that we last debated this subject in Government time in 2002, as my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) reminded the House earlier, perhaps tells its own story. I am glad that DEFRA has rediscovered food, because the Select Committee was concerned about the joint DEFRA-Treasury document produced in 2005, which suggested, when discussing reform of the common agricultural policy, that everything would be all right because the world's markets would ensure supply and that we should not worry about food security. Only a short time later, in 2007, we saw the first signs of what became a major increase in world food prices, at which point real questions started to be asked about the world's food supply chain. A combination of crop failures in places such as Australia, the intervention of speculation in buying commodities such as wheat and rice, the sudden restrictive activities of countries such as Argentina, which decided not to export their products, and the rise in the price of fertiliser in China as it attempted to deal with its own agricultural problems meant that, after a decade of falling prices for food, we suddenly had a price spike. All of a sudden, decision makers around the world got very interested in food. In the United Kingdom, the Cabinet Office was commissioned to undertake a study. It produced a remarkable document which dealt with everything one ever wanted to know about food. It did not contain much about farming, but it had a lot about food. Then, we had "Food Matters", another glorious publication from the Cabinet Office, after which DEFRA entertained us with the start of the process that the Secretary of State has said he will soon bring to a conclusion, with the publication of its own strategy. Behind all that, there has been a plethora of activities, meetings and all kinds of other things that I shall come to in a moment. So, all of a sudden, now that we have rediscovered food and had a kick up the backside from what was happening in the world markets, food security is marching up the agenda and we have to do something about it. What worries me is that, having got past the food price spike, we might well relax. It is perhaps worth reflecting on the fact that the world food price index produced by the Food and Agriculture Organisation stood at 208 in April 2008, but had fallen to 143 just one year later. For cereals—a key ingredient of concerns about food and food security—the index was at 274 in April 2008, but has dropped to 179 today. The paradox is that during that period, farmers responded and increased the amount of cereal that they were producing. Some American farmers produced perhaps a bit less biofuel, deciding that the food-fuel paradox could be put to one side for a moment, and we saw an increase in production. In the short term—surprise, surprise—prices fell. It is against that background that I draw again on my theme of the juxtaposition of the long-term supply challenges we face and the short-term operation of the market. The Rome summit of 2008 was a response to and addressed world food security issues. I had the honour of representing the Select Committee in Rome over two days, and it was a remarkable meeting. There was such a diversity of opinion that it illustrated the intermingling of complexity in dealing with food supply chain issues, the relationships between modern western agriculture and development issues, the problems of sub-Saharan Africa, the challenge of developing economies around the world and some of the important political issues that are starting to emerge and influenced the conference. Let me draw the House's attention to a worrying development, which was a sub-plot to what was going on in Rome—the development of food colonialism. The phrase "the world will supply" in the vision document, to which I referred earlier, was predicated on the facts that organisations such as the World Trade Organisation would come to a conclusion, that we would have a more liberalised trade regime, that everybody would play fair and that the rules would apply. It is also very clear—and borne out by the Select Committee's visit to Brazil during its recent inquiry into food security—that an awful lot of international investors, particularly from countries such as China, are going around the world and buying up productive capacity in other people's back yards. International investment is making its way to places such as Brazil because of the country's huge potential, but that begins a transformation of the supply chain of food in the world in a way that could be quite threatening to our quarter of the globe. If we view that against the background of what we should be doing to bring us full circle back to questions about the common agricultural policy and our domestic agricultural policy, it is evident that we have a more complex situation to deal with. Let me make it even more complicated by saying that there was, sadly, no DEFRA representative at the conference; the Government were represented—very ably, I am sure—by the Department for International Development. This demonstrated that the UK Government's perspective at the time of the conference was that it was more about development issues than about making a rounded response to food security issues. Targets were set at the conference by both the FAO and the UN General-Secretary, Ban Ki-moon, demonstrating that we needed a 50 per cent. increase in food production by 2030 and a doubling by 2050. That made me stop and think for a moment. I am getting on a bit—I am in my last year in the House; this may be the last speech I deliver on a major subject. Here we are, I thought, nearly on the doorstep of 2010—to make the maths right—and we need to achieve a 50 per cent. increase in our food supply in another 20 years. If we add on another 20 years, we have to double it. By the time we have addressed the technological and sustainability challenges and a good many policy issues, time starts to run very quickly indeed. When we add to that the complexity of global warming, which we discussed earlier today, we have an interesting mix with which to deal. When the Committee was working on its report, we went to Rothamsted and talked to the scientists there about the potential of UK agriculture. They made the point that while we are very good in the arable, livestock and dairy sectors, we should ask ourselves how we can maximise those advantages against the background of the demands of sustainability, but also within the complex world picture that I have painted. A fact from which we cannot run away in a debate such as this is that, however much we may urge our own Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to do all that it can to support UK farming potential, in a world of uncertainty where, for example, an unknown animal disease can suddenly decimate a particular part of our livestock sector and climatic change can dramatically alter the food chain, we must ensure that we have security at home. That does not mean saying, "I want to keep out Johnny Foreigner's food," but it does mean saying, "I want our population to be safely fed." We need to exploit both our national—in the sense of large-scale—agricultural potential and our localised food chains, because that will add another dimension of security. If big fails, small can at least make its contribution. In our discussions about policy, we need to focus just as much on smaller-scale as on large-scale agricultural activity. Before I became a Member of Parliament, I made my living in horticulture. The enterprise for which I worked as marketing manager had 12,000 acres of horticultural crops to manage, and 400 acres that we grew. I understand what it is like to operate in the non-subsidised sector—to live or die according to one's ability to meet the demands of customers or consumers—but I recognise the incredible change undergone by our horticultural industry in order to survive. We have the world's largest indoor protected facility in Planet Thanet, which is a remarkable facility to have in this country. It shows that we can be innovative in a way that enables all parts of our agricultural potential to contribute to the task of securing our long-term food supply. I want to say a little about reform of the common agricultural policy. One of the subjects on which the debate on the Lisbon treaty, for all its controversial nature, chose not to alight was a change in the treaty obligations. I welcome the new Minister to his post. He follows the right hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Jane Kennedy), who did a great deal of work to get up to speed with a complex brief in as short a time as possible. One of the issues that he will have to tackle is the question of what drives Europe's agricultural policy. The question posed at Rothamsted can be widened slightly. What is the responsibility of western agricultural nations for meeting their share of the long-term targets that I mentioned earlier? That does not mean British Ministers going along and pledging an X per cent. increase in production. They cannot do that. It is not like setting an aspirational target; they must do something else to encourage our farmers to play their part in helping to meet the challenge. But what about the rest of Europe? We know how politicised French agriculture is, and how domestic Italian agriculture can be. We know that there is big agri-business in Germany. All those countries have very different perspectives, but they must all operate within the terms of the common agricultural policy. Article 38 of the Lisbon treaty refers to the establishment of a common policy for agriculture and fisheries. Article 39 states:""The objectives of the common agricultural policy shall be…to increase agricultural productivity by promoting technical progress and by ensuring the rational development of agricultural production and the optimum utilisation of the factors of production, in particular labour"." That is shorthand for "Let's keep lots of small farmers in Germany going because it's politically difficult to do otherwise." It talks about assuring the availability of supply, and the particular nature of agricultural activity that results from the social structure of agriculture and from structural and natural disparities between the various agricultural regions. I could go on, but the treaty makes no mention of sustainability, climate change or the kind of global challenges we face. Commission officials and commissioners are fond of terms such as "multi-functionality" at which the eyes of most people in this country would glaze over, as they would not recognise it as an expression that tries to describe the integral role of agriculture in rural communities, providing the glue that holds them together. I am sad that the Lisbon treaty did not address the need to bring up to speed the approach that will guide the common agricultural policy for some time to come, and make it a 21st-century treaty obligation to help with the reform process, which must get real; in fact, the comments from both Front-Bench speakers about, for example, the pesticides directive, the tagging of sheep and so on illustrate the fact that in the short term the things that drive change in the CAP do not give much chance to enable Europe to address the fundamental questions in a part of the globe where we have a tremendous productive advantage and where, against a background of climate change, we will be able to produce. We will have water and we have good soil. We have the techniques and the technology, but what are we going to contribute to meeting the global targets when Ministers cannot press buttons to set targets for individual farmers? That brings me to the question of how DEFRA is organising itself to interact with that matter. One of the things on which we cannot fail the Government is that apart from the documents that I mentioned earlier, we now have a Cabinet Sub-Committee dealing with the matter; we have an official food strategy task force and a council of food policy advisers and so on. The only slight problem is that apart from the council of food policy advisers, nobody has a clue what the rest of these good people have been doing. Nobody knows how many times the ministerial Sub-Committee on food (DA(F)) has met, let alone what it has been discussing. I heard today on the radio—I think on the "Today" programme—that we are in the decade of transparency. If we are, can we have some transparency about what this Cabinet Sub-Committee is actually doing? If DEFRA is using this as a chance to reassert leadership in terms of the UK Government, that is good, but can we know what it is actually trying to achieve? Rightly, the Department of Health is involved; dealing with food security means that we have to address questions such as how much food we do not eat and how much more food we should not be eating—the obesity issue. Many of the business issues that affect our great food companies are more in the province of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills than that of DEFRA. I have touched on DFID, which is also important in the issue. The Sub-Committee is made up of the right players, but we need to know its agenda and what it has been doing. Likewise, I know through meeting people from the food industry that the food strategy task force's meetings pop up all over the country. I do not know what the outcomes of those meetings are, or what DEFRA has been discussing. The Department has a real opportunity to start achieving one of its objectives: helping the food chain to respond to long-term challenges and to know what the agenda is. I looked at DEFRA's own document "Ensuring the UK's food security in a changing world", and some of the questions are so general as to make one wonder whether it has thought through some of the issues. However, I am sure that it has, and I look forward to the publication of the strategy, and I also hope that our Select Committee, which aims to have its report out before the summer recess, will be able to make a contribution to that exercise. We recognise that an agenda for action must be set, and that we will not solve all the problems of our food and farming industry overnight. I shall now concentrate on an issue that underpins all that I have said. In order for farming to achieve the aims and deal with the challenges of world food security, the Food and Agriculture Organisation targets, global warming, world disease, pandemics and the growth in population, and to do so in a sustainable way, it must have the right degree of knowledge. It is ironic that within the last few days we learned that Manchester United had sold Mr. Ronaldo—yes, a talented footballer—to Barcelona for, it is alleged, some £80 million, as that sum somewhat exceeds DEFRA's annual research budget. That puts into context where our priorities lie. The budget of John Innes, a remarkable research institution, is £25 million. It is among the world leaders in analysing the DNA of our plants and dealing with the diseases that could threaten crops on a global basis, yet how much money can it rely on annually from Government? The answer is £12.5 million. The other £12.5 million of its earnings have to be derived from competitive contracts. I want the best scientists we can get hold of to be working on these problems, for this country and also for the world. I say "for the world" because, although Rothamsted made it clear to us that the paucity of funding in this area is making it difficult for it to keep its talented scientists, we know that those that we have are recognised internationally as among the best. That is why the Brazilian EMBRAPA organisation, which handles all its agricultural research and spends some £375 million a year on research, has invested in an exercise called Labex at Rothamsted. It wants to work with our scientists to help solve its problems. That is an indication of the quality of our science, but it needs to have some support. I acknowledge that in addition to DEFRA's money, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council put £185 million into agricultural research, but the chief scientist, Professor Beddington, indicated that we needed to have an uplift of some £100 million a year of spending on agricultural research. Although the BBSRC sums have increased, we know from evidence that the Committee received from the National Farmers Union that between 1986 and 1998 there had been a 45 per cent. real-terms cut in publicly funded agricultural science in the UK. I say that that situation is unacceptable. A lot more investment than we are currently making is needed if we are seriously to take on the task of securing the world's, and our own, food supply, because we must have more knowledge if we are to learn how to increase sustainably, and securely so as to deal with crop disease, the potential of UK agriculture from, for example, our 4 to 4.5 acres a hectare arable to perhaps 9 or 10 acres. That came out when the Committee visited Pirbright to look at the whole question of how we can deal with the world challenge of transmissible diseases. When I found out that DEFRA had pulled out of the redevelopment of Pirbright, leaving that to the BBSRC but only giving Pirbright an annually renewable £5 million contract for monitoring animal disease, that told me that somewhere in the middle of Government we are, yet again, not getting right the sustenance of one of the world leaders in monitoring animal disease. We are the reference point in the world for foot and mouth outbreak. We are also dealing with avian influenza, bluetongue and West Nile disease, and various other diseases are out there champing at the bit to get into this country. We need to make our defences as strong as possible. If, when the new Minister is looking at his diary, he decides that he wants to spend a profitable morning, he should go to see what is being done at Pirbright, and he should visit Merial to see how to defend against animal diseases. That would allow him to understand without a shadow of a doubt why, if we are to be able, as we have been, to deal effectively with our animal diseases, and if the sharing is to mean anything in terms of cost, we must ensure that places such as Pirbright are properly equipped with the right scientists, we must reform the Institute for Animal Health properly, and we must establish a proper working relationship with the Veterinary Laboratories Agency. Those are high priorities for DEFRA if we are to have a comprehensive and viable livestock sector. Hon. Members will be aware that this is a challenging subject, and I shall conclude by making one or two observations about what we saw in Brazil, because it is sometimes extremely useful to see how other people do things. Brazil is very different from the United Kingdom. Brazil is an agricultural giant in terms of its potential. There, one can visit a farming enterprise that has 220,000 hectares under cultivation, which is, by my calculation, about 500,000 acres, and meet people who will say that they want to expand—for example, in soya, cotton or coffee production—by doubling the amount of land on which they operate. That is put into context by the fact that Brazil could bring into production anywhere between 90 million and 200 million hectares, which allows one to understand not only the potential but the need for capital, science, infrastructure development and sustainability. One can see the need for the west to give Brazil sufficient assistance—but not to direct it—to safeguard the rainforest and ensure that the removal of certain forest areas and the turning of them into savanna is done in a sustainable way. All that emphasises the fact that if we are to draw a modicum of security from the fact that Brazil is out there with the potential to help our food supply, we need to contribute to what it is doing. Brazil takes its responsibilities seriously; it contributes to help sub-Saharan Africa deal with its agricultural problems and overcome the lack of productivity, the difficulty of post-harvest handling and so on. I make that point merely to say that the UK has a role to play in helping, but it also illustrates the global nature of food, farming and the environment, which is the subject of this debate. We cannot solve the problems on this subject on our own; we have to solve them, in policy terms, in both a European and a global context. We must develop the right bilateral relationships with other countries if we are to be assured of a safe, secure, affordable and sustainable supply of food, which would be a source of pleasure to consumers, and indeed electors, in this country.