Agriculture and Food Industry

Baroness Scott of Needham Market Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)]

My Lords, I join the thanks to my noble friend Lord Plumb for securing this afternoon’s debate. As chair of EU Sub-Committee D, which has agriculture within its remit, I appreciate enormously his long experience of both agriculture and Europe and really value his contribution to the work of the committee.

Many millions of people around the world are hungry. In some places it is because of natural conditions and in others it comes as the price paid by ordinary people for the ambitions and mismanagement of their leaders. Close to home, an estimated 5.6 million people are struggling to afford food. Many more people in this country have plenty to eat but are probably malnourished or on the verge of it because they are consuming food which is high in calories and low in nutrients.

It seems strange, given that food is essential to life, that we have no strategy for it. It is certainly true that the food sector is heavily regulated. It is not the Wild West out there. Everything from hygiene to labelling and packaging, from competition law to the Groceries Code Adjudicator, is regulating food, but there is no discernable strategic approach to food production and distribution which looks at our food from local, national, European and global perspectives into the future.

The assumption is that the free market will deliver for us because it is in its interests to ensure that we continue to have easy access to a range of cheap and plentiful food. Retailers have done a great job in providing this. The variety of food on offer has increased enormously in my lifetime, and as the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, noted, we spend significantly less on food than we used to. However, cheap food comes at quite a high price, and the price is often paid by growers in developing countries who are tied into unfair contracts and by exploited workers in sectors such as tea and coffee, cashew nuts and prawn fishing. The price is paid in rooted-up rainforest, soil depletion and other environmental degradation. In places, people are going hungry because their land is more profitable to fill our food and energy demands, not their needs.

This is a matter not for government to address through legislation and regulation, but for retailers and consumers to give much more thought to the impact of their purchasing decisions. I welcome the fact that the major retailers are really starting to focus in on the ethical and environmental consequences of our food consumption.

Our sub-committee recently carried out an inquiry into food waste. It became evident that much of the problem lies within the nature of the food chain. Farm to fork has become something of a cliché, but long food chains consisting of individual businesses, each of which is concerned with its own bottom line, can result in practices which are bad overall. In the case of food waste, we identified the relationship between supermarkets and growers as a major problem, particularly where cancelled orders and overzealous specification results in growers being left with surpluses of food which they have had to produce to avoid penalty, which has then not been used. Without a market for that food, it gets ploughed back or anaerobically digested.

Those lengthy food chains are also where safety and verification problems come in. The horsemeat scandal was a real wake-up call both to the public and industry because, as supply chains become longer and extend geographically, the enforcement of regulation becomes harder. Will the Minister update the House on Professor Elliott’s report into food supply networks?

The sub-committee thought that the Government could do a lot more to understand food chains better and to promote expertise and understanding. Witnesses told us that expertise in food chain management is in short supply, and this is partly why tackling food waste and other issues has become so difficult. It is not just retailers. Equally problematic are the large food service companies, which provide meals in our schools, hospitals and prisons, and the hospitality sector.

One of the issues identified by many witnesses in our food waste inquiry is that people understand food far less well than they used to. In the context of food waste, it means they do not know how to use leftovers, and they do not understand basic facts around the storage of food and particularly when it is safe to eat it. It goes far wider than food waste. Many people do not know how to cook any more, so they spend far more than they need to buying expensive prepared food and take-aways. Ironically, this is hitting the poorest hardest. A recent report from Kellogg’s showed that 45% of children said they do not learn about food at home or at school, although 79% said they would really like to. I would like the Government to give much more thought as to how people can learn about food. Most commentators now agree that, as the global population rises, food will become a much scarcer commodity. With basics such as land and water coming under pressure and the impact of climate change and agriculture making dramatic fluctuations more common, basic food security cannot be taken for granted. This is not in the distant future. Asda’s corporate affairs director recently told a conference that 96% of the fresh food that Asda buys is already at risk from changes to weather patterns.

We need to think long and hard about this. Are we right in our assumption that, somehow, we western countries will continue to take priority in global food markets and that we will have the same access to food? Can we just leave it to supermarkets to ensure plentiful food and, if we do, what is the price we are likely to pay financially, environmentally and socially? We need to consume more food produced closer to home. There are already growing signs of the impact of improving diets of people in China and India. Competition for food is becoming much more of an issue and it is already happening. Parts of the fishing industry in Asia are no longer prepared to supply EU markets because they can easily supply markets closer to home, where the ethical and safety demands are much less stringent.

For those of us who care about carbon footprints, how do we reduce them when less of our food is being grown close to home? The Government should give a high priority to research in agriculture, working with academia and industry to improve yield, reduce food losses and waste, and improve storage processing and packaging. There are a lot of very valuable partners in the EU, which can build with organisations such as the University of East Anglia, closer to home. I was delighted to see the Prime Minister’s announcement, earlier this week, of a new agricultural research fund and I believe that should focus on yield, food loss and waste and particularly, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, and others have described, the question of land stewardship. We need social research to try to understand how best to nudge consumers into making choices which are safe, affordable, healthy and sustainable. A number of noble Lords have talked about the future. The Kellogg’s survey showed that just 1% of the Kellogg’s children wanted to be farmers so where, I wonder, is the next Henry Plumb coming from?