The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Henley)
My Lords, I declare my interests as listed. I should add to these, since poultry has been mentioned by several speakers, the ownership of five maran hens and two Barnevelders. They are very free range and I occasionally get some eggs from them.
I start by paying tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, who, as she has just announced, is stepping down as the Opposition’s official spokesman on Defra matters. She ended with two rather tricky questions. One, on HE and the level of fees, was directed to me. Since her successor has put that Question on the Order Paper for next Wednesday, I look forward to answering it then. Her other very good point was about the extreme weather that we increasingly face in this country, and how we must adapt to climate change. I remind her that we published our own department’s report on adaptation to climate change earlier this week, which my right honourable friend the Secretary of State and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, launched here in London. I will make sure that we get hold of a copy of the report and send it to the noble Baroness as part of her retirement package. She can look forward to reading that in due course. I am sure we look forward to the noble Baroness taking part in debates of this sort from the Back Benches in the future.
Like all other speakers, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Byford for the timeliness of this debate. It was earlier this year that the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir John Beddington, issued his Foresight report. I will certainly say something about that in due course; it is very important that we cover that subject. Since noble Lords have ranged far and wide over the course of this debate, I will cover, albeit briefly, several of the subjects that have come up before I move on to the Foresight report. A whole range of different subjects, all of which are connected, have come up.
I start with water quality. Noble Lords have ranged from Essex, where my noble friend Lord Dixon-Smith lives and which is very dry, to Northern Ireland, which can be very wet. There is a range of water problems within England, but we also face a range of water problems worldwide. For that reason, it was right of my noble friend Lady Byford to talk about the problem of our imports of embedded water—that is, the amount of water that we in effect consume when we import salad crops or cotton in our shirts. My noble friend referred to the report from the University of East Anglia. I am not aware of it, so I cannot confirm or deny the figure it gave, but we use the WWF figure of 46.4 billion cubic metres of water imported in agricultural products. That is about 45 per cent of the UK’s total water use, embedded or otherwise. It is a fairly horrific figure which we should take into account in any decisions we make on these matters. I was grateful to other speakers, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, who talked about the problems of drought that people face worldwide as well as, on occasions, in this country.
The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, was the first to talk about biotechnology and GM. He was followed by a great many other speakers, the vast majority of whom—I shall not identify them all—seemed to think that we should be doing more to encourage GM and to persuade our colleagues in Europe to follow a more pro-GM route. The noble Lord quite rightly said that others overseas, such as in the United States, were “bemused” by the EU’s attitude to GM. We believe that decisions here should be taken on the basis of the scientific evidence that is before us, but it is also important—as was touched on by my noble friend Lord Arran—that we take the public with us. There is a degree of public scepticism, although I find it quite extraordinary, particularly so when it seems to be an alliance—dare I say it?—between the Daily Mail and Friends of the Earth, with their use of the expression “Frankenstein crops”. All scientists have a duty to help get the explanation over and to try to push these matters forward. It is important that we take public opinion with us in this matter. That will be important, as others have made clear, if we ever want to feed the extra people in the world during the coming 50 years, with its population likely to increase from 6 billion to 9 billion.
The noble Lord, Lord Carter, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Hereford, and my noble friend Lady Miller were all right to talk about problems of waste, particularly in less developed parts of the world—waste that comes from inadequate storage and poor transportation. It was said that something like 40 per cent of food is wasted in those parts of the world, sometimes on its journey from the farm to where it is consumed and sometimes on the farm. Some of the solutions to these problems, as many people have pointed out, are very low-tech and simple, such as improving storage in green silos—indeed, simply to keep the rats out. That should be looked at. For that reason, the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, was again right to say that these are matters not just for Defra; they should also be considered across government because they affect DfID and all those, as the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, will be aware, in the aid world.
My noble friend Lady Miller was right to talk also about the problems of food waste in this country. Where local authorities are persuaded to collect food waste and provide buckets for people to put it into, we see a reduction in the amount of food waste as people become aware of just how much they are throwing out. If we can collect our food waste in the right manner, it is right that we look at anaerobic digestion as a means of disposing of it—I shall say a bit more about AD in due course. I was grateful to my noble friend for stressing that it is far better to prevent waste than to have it to dispose of in the first place.
Supermarkets get knocked quite a lot, but they have quite a low level of waste. However, because they get through so much food, that very small percentage can seem quite a large amount. Although some of that waste will have to be disposed of by means of AD and other such methods, there are other ways of doing it. I refer my noble friend to a very worthy charity called FareShare, which takes food that supermarkets cannot use but is still perfectly viable and has not reached its sell-by or use-by date and sends it off for charitable purposes. If my noble friend wishes to know more about that, I shall certainly make her aware of it in due course.
Noble Lords expressed great concern about supermarkets’ buying behaviour and demanded to hear more about the grocery code adjudicator. However, before we knock the supermarkets too much, we should always remember what they deliver. They deliver cheap food to a very high standard and in very great variety, and we should be grateful for what they provide. However, I accept that, within the food chain, there are many people who feel that they have been badly treated by the supermarkets. For that reason we accept that there is a need for a grocery code adjudicator. I can therefore assure all noble Lords who asked about this, especially my noble friend Lord Arran, who seems to be particularly well informed, that we are close to publishing a draft Bill, which will emerge from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. I cannot give a precise date, but, for those who have been in government, I will say that it will be published shortly or very soon—that is an expression that I think most Members of the House will recognise.
I promised to return to AD when I was talking about waste. This was first raised by my noble friend Lord Plumb, who thought that we were making some progress on waste and that there was a need for more anaerobic digestion. I agree with him that anaerobic digestion is a very good way of dealing with a certain amount of farm waste and one often needs some crops, but not many, to go into it. However, I stress that the Government are very keen that we do not go down what I would call the German route, where there has been excessive growing of crops, particularly maize, purely to feed into on-farm anaerobic digesters. We do not see that as a great use of land; we would prefer for that land to be used for growing food.
Perhaps I may make just one point about the virtues of anaerobic digestion from my personal experience of visiting a number of digesters. One that I visited recently when it opened in east Yorkshire in effect provides free products from its digestates. Not only is it producing energy and saving that waste from going to landfill but it is also producing a solid, manure-type material from the digestate. It is also producing a concentrated liquid digestate that could be put on to the land or used in farms and, importantly in terms of other concerns raised earlier, clean water that could be used for crop irrigation. So there are great many things that can be produced from anaerobic digestion, which can be a very useful way of diverting waste from landfill.
The right reverend Prelate raised the problems of getting into farming. I recognise his concerns about the county farms, which came up a few weeks ago in Questions in this House. I make it quite clear that it is a matter for the local authorities and county councils that own those farms as to whether they sell them. We have no powers under existing legislation to prevent that. Again, one should be wary of implying that county farms are an effective ladder in terms of assisting people into farming. It seems that those who go into county farms tend to stay there instead of moving on. Therefore, they can be a blockage in the system.
Moving on to the importance of biodiversity, we all recognise that we have to increase food production and try to improve the biodiversity of the land that we farm. The point raised by my noble friends Lady Miller and Lord Selborne is that we need to do that while improving production. My noble friend Lady Miller talked about the problem of farmland birds and said that the numbers were still declining even after the number of years that we have had various agri-environment schemes that allegedly help increase numbers. When you look at land management practices and some of the research about what can be done—and there is possibly a case for further tweaking of these agri-environment schemes—we should be able to do something to increase the numbers of farmland birds. Again, as was made clear, they are a crucial indicator of what is going on in terms of the biodiversity of the land that is farmed and our land mass as a whole.
My noble friend Lady Byford mentioned the Taylor review. I discussed this only recently with colleagues in the department and also with my noble friend Lord Taylor himself, who was the author of that review. I assure my noble friend Lady Byford that we will be progressing it further. If she goes to the Defra website she should be able to find out exactly what is happening. A grid shows exactly how the different recommendations in that review are being progressed as is appropriate.
My noble friend Lord Shrewsbury mentioned poultry. He was right to say that we in the UK have been fully compliant with the changes that were made to cages at considerable cost to the producers. There is a worry that there will be an import of eggs in large numbers from countries that have been less compliant. We strongly urge the Commission to put sufficient enforcement measures in place to protect compliant producers if other countries do not meet the 2012 deadline. We would favour a time-limited intracommunity trade ban. We have suggested that opportunity to the Commission to prevent member states that still have conventional cages from selling their eggs outside of their borders. That is one of the enforcement options that is being considered by the Commission. I will let my noble friend know if further developments take place in due course.
My noble friend Lord Arran raised the question of bovine TB. I agree that it is having a devastating effect on many farm businesses. Last year, something of the order of 25,000 cattle in England were slaughtered because of it. We will announce a comprehensive and balanced TB eradication programme for England by July. This will include whether the Government intend to proceed with the proposed badger control policy, which we consulted on at the end of last year. My noble friend is fully aware that this is a difficult and sensitive issue and it is important to take the time to make sure we get our approach right. Many people, whatever decision we make, will consider that we have made the wrong plan.
I turn now to the amount of money spent on research. I agree with all noble Lords that this is an important matter. It is important that we do what we can through R&D. I can give an assurance that the Government spend £365 million a year on food and farming research. Defra and BBSRC are the main funders, but there is also an indicative budget allocation for global food security in the BBSRC’s delivery plan of some £104 million per annum in the next four financial years.
Sir John Beddington’s report, The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability, was published in January this year. The report identifies the scale of the challenge posed by global food security. Put simply, the global food system is consuming the world’s natural resources at an unsustainable rate.
The Foresight report highlights the vulnerability of the global food system to: population growth, which as I stressed earlier is likely to reach 9 million by 2050; changes in per capita demand for food as populations become wealthier and are likely to want more meat; governance of the food system both nationally and internationally; climate change, which we touched on earlier; competition for key resources such as land—as my noble friend Lord Selborne reminded us, they are not making it any more—energy and water; and the ethical stance of consumers, particularly around the new technologies of GM, cloning and organic farming and production methods, sustainability and biodiversity.
The report also discusses the problems caused by recent increases in the volatility of food prices—an issue that is now being studied by the G20 under France’s presidency. As my noble friend Lord Plumb made clear, volatile prices cause problems for producer and consumer alike. In particular, they make it difficult for farmers to plan the investment needed to increase capacity and competitiveness in order to cope with the challenges of growing more food with less impact on the environment. In the G20, Agriculture Ministers will be looking at ways of helping this situation.
The report concludes that if we are to be able to continue to feed the world’s population, doing nothing is not an option. Put simply, we must act now and grow more food at less cost to the environment. The report recognises that the farming and food industry in the UK contributes positively to the transition to a green economy by increasing sustainability, seizing opportunities and providing innovative solutions for the future. We should all be grateful to the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser for that report. Again, I am grateful to all noble Lords, and in particular my noble friend Lady Byford, for their contributions.