Food Security Policy

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter]

My Lords, I, too, thank my colleague, my noble friend Lady Miller, for initiating this debate. As another member of the aforementioned EU Sub-Committee D, I know that we are only too aware of the challenge of providing nutritious food in the face of a growing population, increasing resource constraints and the effects of climate change.

It has been estimated that food accounts for a third of Europe’s greenhouse gas impacts. Reducing the greenhouse gas emissions from nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane produced from agriculture is key if we are to make food production more sustainable. To that end, I welcome the £12.6 million committed by Defra and the devolved Administrations to research the impacts of greenhouse gases in agriculture. The UK Government need to co-ordinate and work with private and public partners to ensure research and development priorities support sustainable diets, looking at how we can grow crops using less water, delivering greater nutritional benefit and reducing reliance on fertiliser and pesticides. Research priorities must support both agro-ecological farming practices as well as projects for agricultural development based on cutting-edge science. Why? Because GM technology is no silver bullet, as the Foresight report, The Future of Food and Farming, rightly concludes.

Public opinion in the UK remains sceptical of the technology and without public consent products will not be sold in supermarkets. As a representative of the retail industry put it to me recently, “The public will accept GM foods only when they are on a cliff edge with nowhere else to go”. Before any decisions about GM cultivation in the UK are made, two things must happen. First, the UK Government must have the evidence on the environmental impacts and potential for cross-contamination of other farming regimes by GM crops. Two weeks ago, the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee called on the Government to set up an independent body to research, evaluate and report on the potential impacts of GM crops on the environment, farming and global food systems. The committee is right that an initial focus of such research should be on the scope for, and risks of, the co-existence of GM crops with conventional and organic farming regimes. As my noble friend Lord Taverne rightly said, this would enable us to make the science-based decisions required.

Secondly, no decisions about GMOs should be made without clear evidence of public acceptance of GM food. Food is essential to all citizens and they have the right to be part of the decision-making process. Next year marks a decade since the previous Government’s national conversation on GM food. This Government must engage now with a sceptical public in a way that ensures that they are well informed on this issue.

Consumers are central to the issue of food security in another way, too. We need to reduce global consumer demand for and consumption of resource-intensive meats and dairy and move towards a larger share of diets being plant-based. To do that, we need to empower consumers to make positive food choices. In the past decade, the Food Standards Agency created its eatwell plate to promote a healthy, balanced diet, and last year WWF produced the livewell plate, which shows the proportions of different food groups that people should consume to achieve both a sustainable and a healthy diet. Does the Minister agree that, as the right reverend Prelate suggested, this Government have a role in producing public advice and guidance on what to eat to be healthy and sustainable?

What we waste is as important as what we eat. The noble Lord, Lord Giddens, rightly highlighted that 40% of food in the UK is wasted. Up to half of that food waste comes from households. Good progress has been made by retailers and local authorities, with government support, to cut that figure, but we need to reuse food that does not need to be thrown away and recycle that which is not fit for consumption. Charities such as FareShare and FoodCycle are working hard to reduce food waste and food poverty by taking surplus food and delivering it as food parcels and warm healthy meals to people in the local community. The Government should do all that they can to promote the redistribution of surplus food to charities.

There needs to be more focus on stopping food waste going to landfill. If placed in landfill, food waste releases methane, which is 21 times more powerful than CO₂. In reviewing the UK’s waste policy, the Government should set a target date for their stated aim of no food waste to landfill. A deadline of 2020 would certainly focus minds. In the mean time, local authorities should be encouraged to increase the separate collection of food waste as well as increasing the resilience of their local food economies.

A number of major towns, cities and counties, including London, Sheffield, Kent and Brighton, are working hard to promote local food security. Bristol City Council, through its food plan, is pioneering in the UK a food systems planning process that supports the development of a resilient food system: safeguarding land for food; increasing urban food production and distribution; protecting key infrastructure for local food supply; supporting community food enterprise models; and safeguarding the diversity of food retail. I would like to see the Government encouraging every city to produce a food plan as a means to increase food resilience, support local food businesses and help more people get involved with food production.

In conclusion, tackling the challenge of delivering food security in the UK will require action at all levels: the Government, local authorities, industry and consumers. An important step to delivering co-ordinated action by all those players would be for the coalition Government to produce their own national food strategy. There is widespread support for such an initiative, including from producer representatives such as the NFU and major retailers. In his reply, I hope that the Minister will comment on whether the Government intend to produce such a strategy and a delivery plan that should focus on both the sustainable production and the sustainable consumption of the UK’s food.