Agriculture: Royal Society Report

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Byford for bringing this report to the attention of the House and for giving us the chance to debate it today. I declare my interests as a livestock farmer, particularly one in what are called the "less favoured areas". The report exemplifies the high standards and expertise that we all expect from the Royal Society. Particularly impressive is the survey of the world’s current and future constraints on food production. For those involved in food production, it is not all for our comfort or complacency. As the report says, ""Current approaches to maximising production within agricultural systems are unsustainable"." It also quotes from a report by the FAO, the UN and the World Bank which says that, ""the dominant model of agriculture needs to change"." The encouraging side to this is that farmers in this country are always ready to respond to change, and take a great interest in innovation. The context of where we are is encapsulated by the statistics that the report gives: while 1 billion people are currently malnourished, 1 billion are overweight. To take further the quote mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, about the people who die of starvation and related illnesses, I have a figure of 35,000 in the past 24 hours—but the finer point is really academic. As many noble Lords have mentioned, in British agriculture we find that production in many areas is shrinking and we are relying increasingly on imported food. The outstanding characteristic of the report is the emphasis on sustainability and the contribution of science and technology and a major part of this has to be the uptake of new ideas in areas of the world where there is poverty and malnutrition, as the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, mentioned. I have always been impressed by the work of a Scottish academic friend of mine who teaches at the University of Harare. Some of his evidence, on pages 31 and 32 of the report, deals with the elimination of diseases and viruses. For over 20 years he has been training Africans in modern methods of crop improvement. Using technology that initially meant, for lack of funding, that he was using jam jars instead of Petri dishes to produce virus-free stock, he has helped to found an indigenous biotechnology company in Zimbabwe whose products are now feeding 3 million people. This pioneering work has increased the sweet potato and cassava yield from six tonnes to 30 tonnes per hectare. This means that 1.2 hectares is sufficient ground to feed a family for a year. Financed by local and international NGOs, including Save the Children, virus-free plants have been supplied to 60,000 African smallholder families. After the first harvest, each family is able to sell to 10 other families. Taking each family as five people, that means that one-third of the population of Zimbabwe is being reached with the economic means of commercial farming as well as their own sustenance. The plant material is distributed along with graduate-level trainers who understand the farmers’ culture and guide them in the new processes. The FAO has now commissioned Agri-Biotech to supply 50 million rooted cuttings to 77 separate projects across the country. I do not know whether this will offer any comfort to the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, but the report draws an interesting distinction with regard to that emotionally loaded phrase, genetic modification. It distinguishes between transgenetic GM and cis-genetic GM. Some elements of cis-genetic GM have been used for centuries, but now it is able to be carried out with much more precision. Even now, I would feel that should be much more acceptable to the sceptical European public. Just think what my Harare friend would do if presented with a few cis-genetic solutions. The question of how much already-available technology is not being transferred to poor farmers around the world is vital. Virus elimination by means of simple biotechnology should work for a number of crops. Aid channels such as DfID, as well as the countries themselves, could do more to enhance the status of young scientists, and Zimbabwe, once settled in a productive new phase, could again be a hub for agricultural advance in the region. As my noble friend Lord Plumb has pointed out, there has been a contraction of livestock production in the UK. That has contributed to some statistics that are rather relevant today, when we are talking about Copenhagen. These were provided to me by NFU Scotland, which points out that agricultural emissions of methane and NO2 have fallen by 17 per cent since 1990, with CO2 falling by 5 per cent since 2006. Yet in some areas, that approach is really unsustainable. Taking figures from the Scottish Agricultural College’s report Farming’s Retreat from the Hills, it has been achieved mainly by a 12 per cent drop in beef cow numbers and a 23 per cent drop in sheep numbers. Yet in the half of Scotland which is the Highlands and Islands, the contraction of the sheep flock is nearer 30 per cent—and, in some districts, it is 60 per cent. While it is always a virtue to consider what our farmers can do to enhance our national food security, is it not time that we began to think more of what, by pioneering technology, our farmers could do to alleviate the fate of the starving people in the other parts of the world?