Yes, Extinction Rebellion. That was not where the emergency amendment that we debated last week came from. I will speak to Amendments 92 and 102, and I thank very much the noble Earl, Lord Dundee, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support.
As the amendments specify, their purpose is to strongly raise the profile of agroecology, which is very important for the way agriculture moves into the future. It is very striking that when we think about trees in a rural context, we think of forests and also farmland that on the whole does not have trees or may have trees around the boundary, young trees as part of hedgerows, or maybe the odd copse in the middle, at the sides or in the corner of a field. But that need not be how we practise our tree planting and growing and our harvesting of the products that come from trees.
At the moment we have that divide, but agroforestry is very much a combination of those types of agriculture; it is farming with trees, not farming and forestry. There are great benefits to this. Clearly, it is not right for the whole of the British countryside—I would not argue that at all—but some strong benefits come from it. Those are that we can plant more trees, and more diverse types of trees, and they are not necessarily trees just planted within meadows or pastural land; they can be, for instance, a grove of hazel trees within an arable field too. There are a number benefits from this, in terms of climate change, sequestration, water management, soil health, animal welfare, shade and retention of water. Clearly, there is also the extra income to farming from what those trees can produce, such as fruit, nuts or timber, from the types of wood that can be used for timber, then replanted and replenished. There is a wide range of benefits to using agroforestry and bringing it much more predominantly into farming systems in this country.
In 2016, a survey showed that, in Europe generally, agroforestry accounted for some 9% of land use, whereas within the United Kingdom that was down to 3%. So the purpose of these amendments is to raise the profile of that form of agriculture in England by way of the Environment Bill, but also to have the benefits that flow from it.
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I have something to ask the Minister. One of the concerns is that, with the rollout of the environment land management schemes, which we covered in discussions on what is now the Agriculture Act, there are lots of pilots going on but few decisions have yet been made. I understand why decisions need to be made carefully, based on pilots, but there is more and more concern among farmers and land managers about understanding what ELMS will mean at the end of the day to them. In agroforestry, as in other areas of conservation, there is a concern that anything done now means that there will not be extra compensation to them under ELMS in future. So I ask the Minister to give some reassurance that those who implement agroforestry systems now will not be effectively penalised once those ELMS systems come into operation over the next few years.
I do not expect the Minister necessarily to agree with my Amendment 102 for a specific strategy for agroforestry—although it would be great if there were one—but will Defra, as part of its continuing 25-year environmental plan, look carefully at this area and make sure that it is promoted as an important way in which climate change is tackled and biodiversity loss is reversed in England’s land and agricultural sector in future? I beg to move.