My Lords, I will endeavour to be brief: we have an awful lot to get through. I am grateful to see Clause 1(4) in the Bill. It was remarkable that, in its early iterations, a Bill about agriculture had no specific reference to the provision of food. My Amendment 71 would merely improve upon that provision of food by the specification that it should be both “healthy and nutritious”.
I am grateful for the support of the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Bennett, on this amendment. I understand that all the amendments in this group are directed to a very similar goal. There is clearly strong support across the Committee for making sure that the food whose production we are encouraging is healthy and nutritious, and not the sort of food that causes ill-health, obesity and so many other issues that are being brought into full focus with the onslaught of coronavirus. At this time, of all times, it has become clear that the health and well-being of our nation are a result of the healthiness and nutrition of the food that we eat. This is therefore not just about agriculture; it goes to a much wider issue.
Some may say that the health and nutrition of the food could be secured by the fact that the clause provides that it must be environmentally sustainable. Of course, the two things are vastly different. It is perfectly possible to produce food in an environmentally sustainable way and it not be healthy and nutritious. There has been much talk over recent days of insect farming and novel agritech. You could certainly see insect farming as a very environmentally sustainable means of farming. It is the feeding of waste product, typically to insect larvae, which are then mashed up for their protein. That is the production of food in a very environmentally sustainable way, but I am not sure that it is either healthy or nutritious food, albeit it has an important role to play in the feeding of fish, for example, and other larger animals.
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I want also to speak briefly to Amendment 47. As a farmer from Devon, I will obviously resist any suggestion that the farming of livestock be discouraged. The west of England has some of the finest pasture in the world and our livestock farming stands competition with that of anywhere in the world for its carbon footprint, and the health and vitality of the meat produced thereby. Rather than discourage the production of food by livestock farming, we should encourage it, because in the global marketplace we have a product that very few are able to match.
On Amendment 53, I am obviously interested in and am a keen proponent of urban, vertical and such farming types, but I wonder whether those are necessarily public goods. As I said in debate last week, many exciting agritech areas are getting lots of investment and support, all of which contribute positively to the options available to us, but I am conscious of the definition of “public goods”. I would appreciate it if the Minister could address whether such agritech products are necessarily public goods.