Agriculture Bill

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 16th July 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[The Earl of Caithness]

73: Clause 1, page 2, line 35, at end insert “, and to reduce and sequester climate change emissions.”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that financial help can be given to help reduce climate change emissions.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con) [V]]

My Lords, Amendment 73 stands in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. This is a simple amendment. About 25% of greenhouse gases come from agriculture. That percentage will increase as more green energy production comes online. What we can grow, and what we will be able to eat, will be determined by climate change.

We are watching the rapidly changing climate in the Arctic with some horror. That is of huge importance to us, as four of the six main systems that determine this country’s weather are driven by conditions in the Arctic. One example, and a pretty sobering one, is that the “beast from the east” that we experienced in March 2018 cost the UK about half the annual budget paid to farmers.

The Paris Agreement states that countries should be

“holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C … and pursuing efforts to limit temperature increase to 1.5°C”.

We are likely to break that threshold of 1.5 degrees before the next general election.

All of the pathways in the IPCC’s special report say that there has to be the use of negative emissions; that is, the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere. This is not an alternative to reducing emissions but an essential extra if the planet as we know it today is to survive. Our land is not absorbing as much CO₂ as it could, and the priority should therefore be to restore nature to allow it to sequester increased amounts of CO₂. That is what my amendment seeks to do.

I commend the NFU on the progress that it has made on this and on its template aim of net zero by 2040. We must give every encouragement to farmers to help them meet the reductions that will be necessary, and I believe that the Bill could do more on that. I had thought that my amendment would sit well at the end of Clause 1(1)(j) relating to soil, but I prefer it where it is, so that any financial payment would be conditional on meeting the reduction in sequestration condition. That is no more than what the Climate Change Committee asked for in its 2019 report, when it recommended:

“Financial payments in the UK Agriculture Bill should be linked to actions to reduce and sequester emissions, to take effect from 2022.”


I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist]

As I have said already, from next year we will bring forward grants and new countryside stewardship and productivity schemes that will prevent the backsliding that we all want to prevent.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have participated in the debate and for the very helpful comments that have been made all around the Chamber. It was interesting to hear my noble friend Lord Marlesford’s statistics. I would only say to him that the whole pattern of rainfall is changing. Last winter, the rainfall in Caithness was significantly below average, whereas in parts of Hampshire it was about 170% or more above average—so the year’s average might equate, but the time and quantity of rain and drought that one is now getting have changed.

The noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, was absolutely right to say that the amendments are of prime importance and something should be included in the Bill. Therefore, I was a little disappointed by what my noble friend said in her reply. I will read with care what she said, but I think that she missed two crucial points that I sought to make in justification of my amendment. Her examples were all of mitigation. I am not worried about mitigation: mitigation is to make less severe or alleviate, which is but one aspect of what we are talking about. Adaptation is to adjust or modify. That is another aspect. What the Bill does not cover satisfactorily, according to the legal advice that I have had, is the word “sequester”, which is a hugely important addition that needs to be made to the Bill at the next stage.

The other point that I sought to make in justification of my amendment was that it should be a condition of financial assistance that sequestration of climate change emissions is included in whatever ELM one is talking about. We desperately need to take more carbon out of the atmosphere, not just mitigate it. I hope that, between now and the next stage, the Minister will meet me to discuss this because, as the Bill stands, it does not meet the point that I have been trying to make. Meanwhile, I am reluctantly content to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 73 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle [V]]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 90, I will also speak to Amendments 196 and 206 in the name of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, which concern animal welfare and which I commend to the Committee, and Amendment 207, which concerns the role of the Groceries Code Adjudicator.

I shall speak to Amendments 90, 184, 188, 189, 286, 287, 288, 292, 293 and 294; I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support on them. They are all about references to fungi. I have to credit the campaigning group Plantlife, which identified this issue for me and did all the fine-comb work to produce these amendments. I feel that I am contributing to successful answers to pub quizzes up and down the land in saying that there are three kingdoms in the living world—plants, animals and fungi—which together make up the eukaryotes: the organisms with complex cells with features such as mitochondria and nuclei. In fact, fungi are closer to animals than plants. They are not producers of energy but use external sources of it; indeed, the world would soon be covered in undigested waste if they did not.

On many occasions in your Lordships’ House, I say, tongue in cheek, “I am sure that the Government will agree with me,” but in this case I say it with absolute sincerity. I am sure that the Government want our legislation to be scientifically literate. As this legislation currently says, “‘plants’ includes fungi”, it is not. It is like saying, “For ‘apples’, read ‘pineapples’”. That is very easy to fix—and would, I believe, have the added virtue of legal clarity. I am sure that we all recall the arguments about the classification of Jaffa Cakes as cakes or biscuits with regard to VAT. We do not want to see similar arguments in relation to support under this Bill. This Committee must consider why we currently have such confusion. The importance of fungi is grossly understated and still little understood.

I outsourced this speech in part to social media, where mycologists leapt in to offer some suggestions. To start with the familiar, I point your Lordships to fly agaric, the red and white fairy tale favourite, but until mycologists started talking to me, I did not realise how crucial it is, to the growth of birch trees in particular. I also cannot resist noting Phallus impudicus—I leave noble Lords to look up its common name—which is thought to have a close ecological relationship with badger setts. Its scent attracts blow-flies that quickly clean up the bodies of badgers, which most typically die underground—unless there is a badger cull, of course. I note that up to a third of plants’ products of photosynthesis feed fungi and bacteria in the soil. For example, relationships between bacteria help mycorrhizal fungi to use their hyphae to seek out and scavenge particularly biologically valuable elements such as phosphorus from rocks or decaying organic matter.

These are immensely complex and little-understood natural systems. Other noble Lords have said that they imagine the countryside operating like a giant, human-directed machine, with robots buzzing around and everything controlled by chemical application and genetic modification. I would point to the complexities I just outlined to illustrate how faulty that vision is. We do not understand all that, but we do understand the basic biology and we can get it right in the Bill. I look forward to the Minister’s response and beg to move.

[The Earl of Caithness [V]]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 177, 179, 180, 182, 186, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193 and 194, which are in my name. We are moving away from fungi, but I say this to my noble friend the Minister: it is not helpful to group such a mass of contradictory and different issues together. My amendments deal with the supply chain and the collection and processing of data, which are rather different to what the noble Baroness was just talking about.

The Bill has incorporated some safeguards around the collection and processing of data to ensure that it is clear how information will be used and how it could be used in accordance with data protection legislation. However, I still have concerns that not all the purposes for which information can be processed relate directly to improving supply chain transparency or supporting the development of risk management tools to help farmers to manage volatility. I therefore want to see these purposes drafted in a more focused way to ensure that they achieve the legitimate aims of improving transparency and managing volatility.

The purpose for which information can be processed under this clause should be linked directly to the overarching objective of improving fairness and transparency in the supply chain. The requirements to provide information will inevitably lead to an increased administrative burden for businesses, and it is therefore important that any information collected is focused on helping those in the agri-food supply chain to make improvements—hence the need for Amendment 177.

Turning to Amendment 190, the Bill as currently drafted provides for information to be processed for wider environmental and waste purposes which do not link specifically to assisting those in the agri-food supply chain. This amendment would focus the processing of environmental and waste information and avoid it being used to pursue wider environmental objectives more appropriately pursued under other legislation such as the Environment Bill. It would enable the Government to collect the kind of information they have stated they are interested in, but would curtail the use of the provisions for purposes which go beyond specific issues in the agri-food supply chain in future.

The Minister will know that the data collection provisions are welcomed by farmers. They should be used in a focused and proportionate way to ensure that the additional administrative burden placed on businesses directly improves the fairness and transparency of the agri-food supply chain. Most of us will be able to remember the days when MAFF was notorious for gold-plating regulations. Therefore, it is very important that these regulations and this part of the Bill are sensibly drafted so as not to impinge too much on farmers.