UK Parliament / Open data

Sustainable Livestock Bill

Proceeding contribution from Robert Flello (Labour) in the House of Commons on Friday, 12 November 2010. It occurred during Debate on bills on Sustainable Livestock Bill.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, but the figures depend on how one measures emissions and where one puts the marker down, as organisations such as Dairy UK are more than prepared to accept. It is not only in the UK that people are adversely affected by the issue. I met an activist from Paraguay who told me about the subsistence farmers in his country. They are forced off their land, either by the big-money soya farmers who are taking over vast tracts of their countryside, or through the indiscriminate use of glyphosate weedkillers, which are sprayed without consideration on to the genetically modified soya crops, poisoning the land and the water supply and, horrifically, in too many cases, killing and injuring local citizens. There are problems not just in Paraguay; in the cerrado area of Brazil, there were over 900 species of birds and 10,000 different species of plant. The cerrado or savannah has now been reduced to half its original size because of land clearance to grow soya and biofuels. The same applies to rainforests and other parts of the world.
Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
518 c550 
Session
2010-12
Chamber / Committee
House of Commons chamber
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