Agriculture: Global Food Security

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords of my own and my husband’s interests with our farm and of my role as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agro-Ecology. I congratulate very warmly the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, not only on securing the debate but on framing the question as she has. She framed it in a very accurate way, and it is particularly well framed because it raises the right issues. It does not suggest that we as a nation or even Europe can have food security without it being global security. We are not suggesting pulling up the drawbridge and just being quite satisfactory on our own. This is an incredibly timely debate, too, with food prices soaring; even though we have seen a slight drop this week, the overall trend in staple foods has been upwards at a rate that quite outstrips earnings here in the UK, in Europe and certainly throughout the world.

When the Minister was kind enough recently to reply to my Written Question about the increase over the past five years in staple prices and the factors that he saw as the reasons for that, his reply reflected the complexities—but the underlying trend was due to the unpredictable climate happenings. So the urgency with which we must address the effect of climate change on food production is there for all to see in the prices. The link between oil and food prices shows graphically why we must break the massive dependence of food production on fossil fuels. So there are immense challenges.

The reason why I struggled slightly with the question before us today is that our British agriculture has a long and proud tradition of improvement and innovation and many examples of excellence—and I am sure that we will hear about many more of them in the debate today. There is the quality of stock-breeding programmes, welfare and the excellence of all sorts of individual practice as well as research and knowledge. But no Government since the Second World War have really had a comprehensive food policy, so all that excellence in agriculture is not reflected in our diet. We recognise that we can produce the food in quantity and certainly in high quality and we can store it well. The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, mentioned the amount that is lost globally. The inadequate storage issue means that globally we are losing upwards of 40 per cent of food produced, and probably much more than that, which means that adequate storage could answer a lot of the need for increased production to feed an increasing world population.

The overall effect of our agriculture is not reflected in the effect on consumers in the country today. There are more and more obese people—about 13 million now—eating the wrong sort of food in the wrong sort of quantities, and at the same time there are malnourished people. Also more and more food is wasted. A significant proportion of food waste, about 6.5 million tonnes, is produced by domestic households, and retailers are generating a further 1.5 million tonnes. Supermarkets have been criticised in particular for wasting damaged or unsold items, which the industry calls “surplus food” although it often remains edible. Most of the 7 million tonnes have been not only produced but transported, then probably wrapped, sold and transported again only to be thrown away. That is an expensive way to make compost or biofuel. While turning waste food into compost or biofuel is certainly better than throwing it into landfill, the aim must be to drastically reduce that waste mountain. In mentioning that, I commend the work of WRAP—especially its online toolkit, which shows those wishing to reuse food waste how to go about it.

As for producers, smaller and family farms have to rely on working outside the farm for much of the time to produce even a living wage for the family. At the same time, the profits of those nearer the market continue to show that there is money in food. I know that this statistic is often quoted, but Tesco is currently on record as making profits of about £10 million a day. I therefore join those who call for the speedy introduction of the groceries code adjudicator. Farmers also have to cope with the unpredictable weather that climate change is producing. As I speak, I am particularly aware of those whose crops have seen no decent rain for over a month, with temperatures last month being nearer to the post-harvest levels of August than to April’s.

There have been new entrants. However, if anyone is brave enough to go into farming today, they will discover that unless they have a family farm, finding new land is like finding hens’ teeth. The number of local authority tenanted farms has halved since the 1940s, covering about 100,000 acres today. The current financial squeeze on local authorities is likely to diminish the number further still; and, disgracefully, the previous Government decided not to take up the support offered under the new entrants’ part of the rural development regulation. Life for farmers in the UK is also made difficult because of a tremendous lack of support for co-operatives—for machinery rings, marketing co-operatives and all the other things that make life easier for the smaller producer. Those are problems for all of us because this is about assets for the future of food production.

Finally, we still have to work on soil and water quality in this country, let alone in the rest of the world. We also have our own problems with biodiversity. Defra, for example, has been measuring the number of farmland birds as an indicator of farmland health. It says that these bird populations are a good indicator of the broad state of wildlife on farmland because they are near the top of the food chain. Still, the number of farmland wild birds has decreased at a rate of about 10 per cent over 10 years. That may not sound much but it is an awful lot of birds to be lost in 10 years. Those who listened to “Farming Today” this morning will have heard about the plight of the bumblebee. The general health of that population is very worrying indeed.

Although our agriculture model is fit for export and could make a contribution, it is not a model that the rest of the world would want to take up more generally in relation to diet.

Perhaps the jewel in our crown is our knowledge and research base. On this point, however, I differ from some of the other speakers. I would worry tremendously if we concentrated only on GM research. I would not rule it out, as it might have a part to play in the future, but in view of what is happening with some of the other incredibly valuable research going on, there are other things to worry about. For example, in a letter to the Times last September, the leading academics in the world of entomology underlined how drastic the situation is:

“There are now less than ten pest management specialists teaching in all UK universities”.

If you think of where pests are likely to be, the increases that will happen under climate change and the threat that insects pose to our global food production, that is really serious.

I make a plea that research does not concentrate on GM and that it starts to address the wider issues as well. Another example is the Rothamsted Institute, home to much excellent research, which saw a win-win situation when it looked at the issue of stem borers in east Africa and striga weed. The ecologically based system of intercropping that it came up with increased animal forage, increased soil quality and fertility and managed the borer problem, so it was a win-win-win. If it had simply had a crop that was resistant to borers, those other things would not have been realised.

It is important that our contribution to global food security is to underpin with resources the research base that this country has given the world throughout the past decades—indeed, the past century. That is in danger. What is the project in real terms over the next three years for research funding for UK agriculture, food storage and, in particular, entomology?

Adapting to Climate Change: EU Agriculture and Forestry (EUC Report)

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I must remind the House of my interests; my husband and I own and run a 40-acre vineyard, and I am chair of the All-Party Group on Agro-Ecology. I warmly thank my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford for her knowledgeable and passionate introduction to the report, as it came to some important conclusions that were rather hidden behind a slightly anodyne summary and a less-than-passionate introduction. I am glad that she has redressed that today.

Agriculture and forestry are tremendously important; after all, they occupy the vast proportion of the entire land surface of the EU. For that reason alone, they offer tremendous opportunities for climate change mitigation to be incorporated into our land use. There are also some dreadful penalties to be paid by future generations if we do not manage to get adaptation right. Those penalties will be paid in food production, flooding and the very ability of future generations to able to produce food at all.

Is the Commission capable of altering the CAP in order to address some of this? That is where my worries lie. The difficulty was spelled out in some of the evidence that the committee received from Ms Andugar, which is on page 158 of the report. She said:

“The CAP is not a climate change policy, so it is impossible for this policy to provide all the tools, incentives or instruments”.

That is the crux of the issue.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Teverson that the debate hovers unhelpfully at the moment around pillars—pillars are depressing—and whether we should green Pillar 1 rather more or move further towards Pillar 2, where environmental goods are recognised as a desirable outcome. I am worried that the Commission might simply settle for the compromises that are needed to achieve any CAP reform by 2013. Those compromises will fall far short of what it must deliver in order to start addressing some of the critical issues that climate change puts before us and which your Lordships have touched on today. Here, I disagree with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. Even without climate change, the issues of profligacy and waste would be no less critical. We cannot go on using water as we have. we cannot go on using artificial fertilisers as we have, and we would need three planets in order to farm as we have. I think that the noble Earl is nodding assent. Even if we set climate change aside, the CAP would still need radical reform.

It was cheering to hear in our evidence sessions of the multiple wins to be had from incentivising land users and farmers to take the right measures that address not only climate change but the crucial issues of soil quality, water stress and waste. For example, green cover crops slow down water run-off, stop soil erosion and allow better water absorption, with leguminous plants reducing the need for artificial fertilisers. All these provide more opportunities for beneficial insects and encourage biodiversity.

The report gets very excited about biochar—I agree that the evidence from Mr Prodi MEP was among the most exciting and compelling that the committee received. However, the committee could have extrapolated more fully the biochar lesson, which was that there should be no such thing as waste in the agricultural process. Waste at the start of the food chain is compost, mulch and manure; at the end of the food chain, and under some of the new technology coming forward, it is biofertiliser from the anaerobic digestion of food waste. We all agree that there is far too much food waste, but while it exists, let us use it. Biofertiliser is a liquid containing nitrogen, phosphate and potash, along with other trace elements, and it can be applied to farmland, reducing drastically the need for purchased fertilisers. That is another example of a win, win, win situation.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, this report needs to be read in conjunction with the recent government report from Foresight entitled The Future of Food and Farming. That report contains a critical, almost throwaway, sentence. It states that there is nearly as much carbon in the organic compounds contained in the top 30 centimetres of soil as there is in the entire atmosphere. That deceptively small statement contains an enormity of importance on which the UK Government and the Commission need especially to focus.

There are dangers in badly managed soils and potential in properly managed soils. In order to manage soil, farmers and land managers need the skills and knowledge, and indeed the right incentives, to restore its health and its properties. We have had more than 50 years of throwing on to it as much imported and artificial fertiliser as a farmer could afford. That has resulted in degraded, eroded soils and an industry addicted to artificial fertiliser.

I disagree with my noble friend Lord Taverne, who has offered biotechnology as the solution to the problem, but it will not restore the soils or supply more water. Before he is tempted to intervene, I should say that I have a very short time in which to speak and that I have kept my remarks as moderate as I can. We have to consider other ways of addressing this issue.

The UK response to the Commission communication and consultation, published in January 2011, also contained a worrying phrase. It said that,

“a minimum level of direct payment for small farms—however defined—would provide a perverse incentive to such farms to remain small and would impede consolidation”.

However, there is nothing magic about consolidation. Small farms might have seemed undesirable in the 1980s monoculture philosophy of maximising one-crop production as cheaply as possible without worrying about externalising the costs. Now we are thinking about carbon outputs, soil compaction from enormous machinery and, indeed, unemployment as the workforce is reduced. In today’s world, small farms can be seen as highly efficient units. Indeed, some studies of innovations on farms in south-east Asia have discovered highly efficient units of mixed production that re-use animal manures; they have a mixed polycultural approach and spread the risk for the farmers.

They also deliver a landscape that is attractive and rich in biodiversity. You do not find many tourists demanding to see the wheat fields of the Ukraine, but mixed farming areas such as Tuscany, Devon, Dordogne and County Waterford are attractive to tourists and wildlife alike—and they produce high quality food.

There is a huge amount of training to be done, knowledge to be imparted and research to be undertaken, and that message from the report is incredibly valuable. As noble Lords have mentioned, we need to build on the best of modern knowledge. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, mentioned drip irrigation, for example. How simple, but how very important. We also need to build on the tradition of what grows best where, not only geologically but climatically. Again, biotechnology cannot deliver that for us.

The EU and its member states had better address fast the appalling situation that has arisen whereby vast tracts of land—most recently, for example, 50,000 hectares in Kenya—are being sold off to European companies to produce biofuels. Smallholders in those areas are being dispossessed to become the urban unemployed. That situation is utterly immoral. It might be about meeting the EU climate change targets, but we cannot accept it and we should not encourage it.

Finally, I ask the Minister: what are our preparations for Rio 2012 on the agricultural side of the equation?

Draft United Kingdom Marine Policy Statement

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Wednesday 15th December 2010 Grand Committee

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

First, I welcome this draft marine policy statement as a concept. I also welcome the fact that it is a draft, and the reasons for that will become apparent as I continue with my comments. I particularly welcome the opportunity for a plan-led approach to marine areas. The Minister quite rightly said that the marine policy statement is a landmark. I hope that my noble friend will not take the quite critical remarks that I am about to make as criticism of the effort to move forward in this area; they are meant to be constructive criticism, because we are at a draft stage.

The marine policy statement is of course a follow-up, as the Minister said, from the Marine and Coastal Access Act, which itself followed the draft Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Greenway, who will speak later, chaired the Joint Committee on the Draft Marine Bill with such skill. In both the Joint Committee and the subsequent discussion in both Houses, there was a very in-depth discussion on what was needed in marine areas and where the conflicts lay. There are conflicts in the environmental, social and economic demands for dredging, spawning grounds and so on. However, the draft marine policy statement does not really reflect the depth of our discussion but starts almost from a point before any of those debates took place.

In my view, a policy document should lay out the choices that need to be made and should then say which one the Government are likely to choose. The point of having a consultation on a draft policy is that people can react to the choices that are likely to be made. A policy document is, if you like, a route map that gets you from A to B by a chosen route, but it allows others to argue that a different route would be better. The draft marine policy statement is more a description of the landscape than a route map and it is quite hard to discern a firm policy in it. The Minister gave a clue as to why that might be when he talked about across-Whitehall work. I fear that, where the departments started out with a very firm view, the need to arrive at a consensus has meant that those views were watered down until we are left with, in many cases, a series of platitudes.

Only when we get to the summary of the appraisal of sustainability do some of the options start to be laid out—or even an example of what the options would be—such as in alternative proposal 6 on page 86, where the option of multiple uses is discussed. That is my first problem with the draft marine policy statement. It would be good if the Government asked departments to decide which policy would take preference. The Minister may say that that is for the more detailed marine plans, but I believe that the marine policy statement is meant to be an overarching policy document so those details should appear in the MPS.

For example, the marine policy statement talks about the integration of marine planning with terrestrial planning regimes. That integration will need to be considerable because the marine plans will apply up to mean high water, which in many cases is right up river estuaries and into some of the busiest areas of use. Therefore, shipping might need to be balanced with environmental demands such as migrating birds as well as with recreational activities and so on. The draft policy statement says:

“marine planning systems will sit alongside and interact with existing planning regimes … both systems may adapt and evolve over time”.

That is an example of a platitude. The statement needs to specify who will resolve any disagreement where those plans sit alongside but come into conflict. Will it be for the Minister to resolve the conflicts that will undoubtedly arise?

Another example might be a marina development, which may be highly desirable socially and economically but possibly undesirable in environmental terms. The terrestrial planning system—which has the biggest vote, if you like—may be vociferous while the environmental side may have much less of a voice. What happens when the two regimes cannot agree?

To take another example, a wind farm at sea might be said to concern only the marine planning system, but the amount of terrestrial servicing that such wind farms need is substantial, so the effect on terrestrial planning could be considerable. Integrated coastal zone management is a very good idea and has been a good start, but integrated coastal zone management has no powers and no resources so it will not bail us out.

Box 1 in chapter 2, which deals with the vision, lists the “high level marine objectives”, which the Minister went through. I do not know whether his order was random or particular because he started by referring to the economic and the social objectives. Does the marine policy statement have to stick with the high-level objectives as laid out in box 1, or is there room for manoeuvre? Let us remember that a lot of the drive for the marine Act came from the environmental sector and from the fact that entire species and ecosystems were being wiped out. Besides the need for a planning system for marine areas, the drive for a marine Act was to preserve and to recover a network of coherently viable ecosystems in the seas around our coast. That ambition is not realised at all in the high-level marine objectives, although Chapter 3 suggests that that issue is an important objective. I do not find much synergy between those two chapters and I wonder which takes priority.

Paragraph 2.5, “Economic and social considerations”, tries to be all things to all people. It talks about,

“building strong local communities and improving access to, and enjoyment of, their marine areas … marine planning will contribute to securing sustainable economic growth both in regeneration areas and areas that already benefit from strong local economies, by enabling the sustainable use of marine resources”.

That sounds wonderful. My problem is that those things will often come into conflict. That paragraph is one example of the starting point that I mentioned before the Act went through, which was before we came to understand that the policy could not be all things to all people. Very hard choices will have to be made.

Noble Lords who speak today will no doubt talk about some of those hard choices, but one that concerns me is marine protected areas. In any consideration of areas that represent something valuable in ecological terms—we are trying to create a network of ecologically coherent zones—some activities will have to be banned. That will not be economically or socially desirable, but it will be necessary if we are to recover the ecosystems at sea.

The other side of the argument is that we are a busy shipping nation and there are pinch-points for shipping. Something not mentioned in the document is the great intensity of shipping in the Channel, where—this is a fact, I think, that I picked up from somewhere—there are more serious accidents than anywhere else in the world. Clearly, shipping is incredibly important to this nation, so it may be that a designated environmentally protected area occasionally has to give way to shipping interests. That is the type of thing that should be laid out in a proper policy statement, which would state that, in those cases—although it would be a hard choice—a plan should come down on the side of the argument that, for example, we depend on international shipping.

I wish to make a couple of other points of detail. As regards ports and shipping, safe marine navigation is incredibly important, as I have said.

One of the best sections in the document is paragraph 3.5, “Marine aggregates”, which contains the surprising statement:

“In addition there are no practicable alternative sources to marine aggregate for the maintenance of coastal defences required for climate change adaptation”.

That sweeping statement assumes that we will continue to maintain hard coastal defences, whereas I thought that, in many cases, we are now more interested in managed retreat. The document also lists a number of potential impacts of dredging and aggregate extraction, which include,

“loss of seabed habitat; impacts on fisheries”.

However, the comprehensive list that is given does not refer to the fact that the process of extraction may by its very nature threaten coastal defences. The document states that it “may alter coastal processes”, but that is very unspecific. That may seem a small detail, but it is important, given that we are spending more and more money on coastal defences. We need to ensure that we are not defending areas on the one hand while adversely affecting them on the other.

A great deal could be said about fisheries, which I hope other noble Lords will speak about. I hope that the Minister will address my fear that the draft marine policy statement does not contain hard choices and that the problem will be rectified in the final—as opposed to the draft—statement.

Common Agricultural Policy

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the half-owner of a 40-hectare vineyard for which we do not receive any subsidies. I am very grateful to my noble friend for not only bringing this debate before us but his broad-brush approach. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Williamson of Horton, for reminding us of some of the history, especially given his insight into it.

I want to concentrate my remarks on why I believe that the greening of the CAP is not just an option, but an absolute necessity. There should be a mandatory greening component of direct payments right across Europe. That is essential because the CAP is supposed to enable us to move towards a future with food security, but all the threats to that security lie in four areas: soil; water; plant and animal diversity, and hence resilience of species; and pollinators.

We need area-based payments that recognise the urgent need for land management that can serve and build on the ability of land to continue producing food—not just in 10 or 20 years’ time, but in 100 years. I shall talk first about soil. Historically, soil management was maintained by techniques such as crop rotation and using manure, which allowed soils to regenerate naturally. I was disturbed at the call by the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, for farms to grow larger and larger and be more monocrop-based, because I believe that to be one reason why we have such difficulty with our soils. Over time, technological advances such as artificial fertilisers and huge compacting farm machinery have allowed production on poor-quality or degraded soils. That approach, as Defra now recognises in its soil strategy, published last year, is no longer sustainable in the long term—not only because the cost of inorganic fertilisers has increased steeply but because our soil is washing straight off the land into streams and rivers at an alarming rate. Can the Minister provide the latest estimate of soil loss in this country?

As I have said, Defra has made a good start with its soil strategy, but there is an awful lot more that the CAP could do to underpin the cross-compliance approach. We are in the very early stage of this. Under the entry-level scheme, a farmer has to do his own assessment of his soil and say what he is going to do to solve the problem. He receives a 52-page soil protection review assessment form, which states:

“Please note that you do not have to return your completed SPR”—

the form—

“to … Defra. You must keep your completed SPR on farm. You will be asked to show this to an Inspector on an inspection”.

The difficulty with that approach is that it leaves very much in the air Defra’s assessment of what is happening on each farm, but, worse, it does not provide the urgency that is needed for new thinking and training for farmers to put into practice essential soil management techniques.

I turn to the issue of water. Of course, the CAP is not designed to address any of this, but nevertheless, catchment management—now recognised as being essential to the quality of our water—is all about land management. The truth is that land management equals water management. Without a certainty of water supply, food production will not be possible. Intensive irrigation has led to very poor soil, and the issues of soil and water are so intertwined that they must be addressed equally.

When you consider climate change and you discover that UK soils contain 10 billion tonnes of carbon—more than all the trees in the forests of Europe and equivalent to 50 times the UK’s current annual greenhouse gas emissions—you realise that well managed soils have the potential to sequester more carbon than we can imagine. However, much more needs to be done to understand and optimise this process. The CAP needs to be linked into the EU’s efforts on climate change. We cannot regard it as being simply for food production, when the land itself will be such a key element in our fight against climate change. Of course, climate change will drastically affect our ability to produce food.

I do not believe that there is much time to get round to the enormity of the changes needed, and the CAP needs to be designed to lead to agri-ecology, as opposed to agri-industry.