I shall speak to Amendment 16 and to Amendment 15 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, on which we have just heard her speak. I am grateful for the support of the noble Lords, Lord Randall of Uxbridge and Lord Curry of Kirkharle, as well as the noble Baroness, who have added their names to my amendment.
In introducing my amendment, I pay tribute to Amendment 34, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton, on mitigating risks to the environment of food safety, which I support as highly relevant to the amendment that I have tabled and will talk about briefly today. Amendment 16 would ensure that the pesticide testing regimes at the UK borders are fit for purpose, when we have an increased number of food stocks for animals and humans arriving from CPTPP member countries. It specifically aims to ensure that our testing regimes are robust enough to monitor and prevent those foods that have these pesticides on them—because they have been used in the production of the food type—entering the countries.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, just said, our UK pesticide standards are some of the strongest in the world, and we should be very proud of that. In fact, they are stronger than those of all other CPTPP member countries. If noble Lords have not seen it, I recommend the Toxic Trade report, published in 2021 by the Pesticide Action Network. It revealed that 119 pesticides were banned from use in the UK but were still permitted in CPTPP member countries. Even more worrying than this, 67 of these are classified as highly hazardous pesticides, a UN concept that identifies pesticides that cause significant human harm.
I shall give two examples from when we ask whether we are over-worried about significant human harm. The first is Chlorpyrifos, an insecticide. To give noble Lords a hint of its problems, it was originally developed as part of a family of nerve agents during World War II and is now one of the most toxic and widely used pesticides globally. It is used by our CPTPP partners in Australia, Chile, New Zealand and Peru. What does it do? It has been identified through scientific research as a developmental or reproductive toxin. I checked through the good research on this, which demonstrates that it can permanently and irreversibly damage the developing brains of children. It is also a suspected endocrine disruptor, which means that it may interfere with the body’s hormone functioning. It is a cholinesterase inhibitor, which means that it may interrupt normal nerve signalling in the body. For all these reasons and due to this scientific evidence, it was banned by the UK and the EU in 2019.
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The second example is Carbaryl, another insecticide still used by a number of our CPTPP partners. It is a carcinogen that has all the potential health effects I have just listed and was banned by the UK in 2007 because of them.
However, we were promised that we would maintain our standards at the borders and that these things would not get through. This reassurance was given to us by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, in his very good maiden speech as Secretary of State. He said of the Bill:
“Will it lower our own high standards on food and product safety, animal welfare, the environment or workers’ rights? No”.—[Official Report, 21/11/23; col. 675.]
He suggested that our quotas and transitional safeguards would be negotiated for agricultural imports. The problem is that we have a two-tiered system at the border for any foods that come in. The first, which I think everyone will be happy with, is mandatory testing via border control. The second is risk-based surveillance run by the port authorities. I give this detail because we have lost sight of this, despite a lot of the promises we hear about how it will all be fine at the borders.
Mandatory sampling is part of retained EU law. It requires certain countries’ commodities, such as beans from Kenya, to be added to the regulator’s annexes. That means that these products have increased paperwork such as export health certificates. Critically, a percentage of the product is tested at the border and, if the shipment exceeds those levels or has any of the pesticides I have just listed, it will be rejected. Another really important point is that the local authorities under which the border control operates can apply directly to the Government for funding for this.
That all makes sense, and I would be reassured if we were just using that system, but we are not. The second system, risk-based surveillance sampling, is applied to all food imports that are not in the annexes. This is a desk-based process. Officials go through case studies and use a WTO alert system, but there is no mandatory requirement for testing the foods that come in via that system. Even worse, local authorities are required to take the money out of their own budgets to test these products in this risk-based surveillance. Who will say, “Let’s prioritise testing wheat from Australia over social care or refuse collection”? It will not happen, and there is a lot of evidence to show that it is not happening.
The question is this: which route will potential CPTPP food and feedstocks coming into the UK go through? This is where the problem really emerges. The vast majority of agricultural imports coming in via CPTPP member countries will go through the risk-based surveillance system, not the mandatory testing system. In fact, only six crops are currently on the annexes, out of all those 119 pesticides that I mentioned, including some herbs from Vietnam—coriander, basil, mint—and Vietnamese dragon fruit. That is it. As things currently stand, everything else will go through the risk-based system, with the problems that I have highlighted. This is extremely serious,
because the vast majority of foods being grown in these environments will come into our country with no testing.
These are not random, bizarre things that we have never heard of. They will include grapes—which come in from Australia, Chile, New Zealand and Peru and are grown in environments that use Chlorpyrifos—and wheat from Australia and Canada which is grown in environments using Carbaryl. That list of effects I mentioned earlier is what they do when they get into the human food chain.
With Amendment 16, I have tried to put in place a system to tighten up this review process at the border. It requires the Government to review this dual system for testing banned pesticides at the border and, when a potential risk is identified, to move those risks on to the annexes so that mandatory testing becomes part of what we do and we do not allow these pesticides to come into our country. We urgently need this. Going through the literature and the scientific evidence base has made me think that I will not buy some of the products from these countries, given the risk of the pesticides they will have on them. This is a very serious issue. We wrongly assume that our border control checks are currently fit for purpose. They are not and we need to look at this.
We have heard some assurances from the report of the Trade and Agriculture Commission on 7 December that this trade will have no adverse effects. I do not know where it got that from, but we should also note that it states
“the mere fact that CPTPP will increase imports from a variety of countries raises the question of whether it will have an impact on that regime”.
It notes that the increase of food sources coming in may well overwhelm the border control checks. That is a really important point.
I hugely support Amendment 15, tabled by my noble friend Lady Boycott, on deforestation. These forest risk commodities pose huge threats to biodiversity and our carbon drawdown. They also pose a risk to indigenous communities, as many of them come from areas where there are indigenous and forest people. There is so much evidence of dispossession of their collective customary lands, territories and resources in a number of CPTPP countries, including Peru, Mexico and Chile. The evidence base is strong. I hope the Minister can reassure us that recognition will lead to action and agrees that this amendment provides the Government with the opportunity to ensure proper monitoring and protection of these indigenous people’s rights. I look forward to his response on both amendments.