I warmly thank all noble Lords who have spoken and the Minister for his very detailed and thoughtful reply. In doing so, I congratulate him on securing that £250 million for the science budget. It cannot have been easy, and the interview today on “Farming Today” with the director of the BBSRC was a good one, because it showed how the budget would be distributed very generally. We will be glad to see that, and to know that it will not be over-focused on one thing.
I am grateful to noble Lords for focusing on the issue of waste. As so many contributors said, it is ridiculous that we are worrying about feeding more people when we have almost enough food in the world to feed the 9 billion that will be. It is just that we waste it by throwing it away here or it failing in storage in the developing world.
This was an incredibly useful debate. I would very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, about commodity speculation. That probably
merits a whole other debate in itself. I hope that we can look forward to a more regular debate on food security and think that this afternoon will have proved the worth of having one.