Agriculture: Global Food Security

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne]

My Lords, I remind the House of my interests as a farmer and as chair of the partners’ board of the Living with Environmental Change research programme, a collaboration of public funders and research agencies. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Byford on this timely debate. It is extremely appropriate that, only a few weeks after the publication of the Foresight project report on the future of food and farming that she mentioned in her excellent introduction to the debate, we have an opportunity effectively to address the issues that are so well analysed in that report. The Government Office for Science commissioned that report. As my noble friend reminded us, it took advice from all around the world. Now that it has made such an analysis and pointed to the global challenges that are being faced, it is, as I said, extremely appropriate that we should today address the issues of which of these challenges have implications for the United Kingdom, not just in agriculture but wider afield, and of how that should impact on our land management and agricultural policy in Europe as a whole.

The analysis points to at least four main tranches of issues, each one of which on its own would present real problems of food security. Put them together and they amount to a powerful combination. The issues are demographic, economic, environmental and political. Never underestimate how little support agriculture gets in the parts of the world where one would assume it would be a high priority. Together, these four pressures amount to substantial challenges, and the UK must consider how we can contribute to meeting them.

What is inescapable, whether at national or global level, is that the only way we are going to be able to meet these food security issues is to produce more food from the same quality of land or less—there will not be any more—using fewer inputs, fewer resources and less demand on natural resources, particularly water; with reduced emissions of greenhouse gases, and indeed of other pollutants; and with a reduced environmental footprint. That sounds like a tall order. It is summed up in the Foresight report as “sustainable intensification”, and I like that expression. The problem is, of course, that most people seem to object to the word “intensification”—illogically so. Rather in the way in which people object to the word “pesticide”, it sounds as though it is a force that should be denied as a tool. You cannot produce the food or achieve food security without increased intensification, but it must be sustainable. We have to think through very carefully what we mean by “sustainable intensification”.

Globally, we are trying to balance future demand and supply, but we are also trying to ensure stability. It is no good having spikes up and down; they are equally disastrous. We have seen two spikes in the past three or four years. We must also ensure that, even if we produce enough food, there is adequate access for those who at the moment are deprived of it. There are areas that are exporting food alongside communities who have no access to that food themselves.

Then there are the environmental issues that have been touched on, which cannot be divorced from the issue of food security. How do we manage these food systems while mitigating the effects of climate change? And, of course, how do we maintain our biodiversity? It is asking too much for every culture to enhance biodiversity, but we must certainly maintain it and, of course, the ecosystem services on which we ultimately all depend. The national ecosystem assessment will, I believe, be published next month. That will be an enormously important document from Defra, which will remind us just what we mean by ecosystem services and what must be done by land managers and others to ensure that we protect these services.

Whatever our contribution back here in Europe, one thing that we cannot go back to is protectionism. We all recognise that. Indeed, during the food spikes in 2009 and later, countries such as Russia imposed export bans on grain, which of course exacerbated the problem. Protectionism is a disastrous reaction. We cannot promote self-sufficiency by that means. However, that does not mean that we should neglect the interests of our own population. It is perfectly legitimate for this country—indeed, it has a moral responsibility—to promote the improvements in productivity that will be needed to meet future increases in demand, always supposing that those increases are sustainable.

Agriculture has always relied on its research base. We farmers tend to take a lot of credit for increasing our yields, but a moment’s thought shows that the agricultural engineer, the animal husbandry and plant sciences and the like have served us very well. When the Prime Minister of the day, my noble friend Lady Thatcher, came to the Royal Show in 1983, she reminded us that if other sectors of the economy had been able to adopt new technology so rapidly and successfully the country would not have faced the problems that it faced then in its balance of payments and economy. Agriculture has a proud record, and it should not allow its reputation of intensification to cloud the fact that, through such intensification, we have helped disprove Malthus, who has already had a mention.

The problem is that for 30 years our research base has been whittled away, although not so much in the basic sciences, such as plant sciences, which in fact have done really rather well. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, who did a lot when he was Science Minister to ensure that the basic sciences were protected. In the 1980s, to which I referred, when the Government of my own party were so impressed by the contribution of agriculture, they were saying at the same time, “Well, really, you should be standing on your own so far as applied research and extension services are concerned. These, in effect, will be privatised”. That is what happened.

Worse than that, whole tranches of research that had been commissioned by what was then the Ministry of Agriculture were simply cut and replaced by research that was deemed more relevant to policy-makers of the day. It was certainly not cut to support agricultural production. I am sure that there was feeling that the cost of the common agricultural policy was running out of control, and that if there was nothing else you could control you could at least hit the applied research budget. That is what happened, and we were left with a research spectrum—research, development and extension—that was patchy, to say the least. It no longer had the regional representation, the experimental husbandry farms and the experimental horticulture stations. They all went, and we were left with an inability, very often, to take the rapid advances in genomics and animal health through to the farm because there was no longer the applied research.

These problems have been recognised in recent years—all too late, given the lack of capacity—not least by the Taylor review, which, again, has been mentioned. It is an excellent report, and I hope that when the Minister responds he will be able to assure us that that, in turn, is being addressed. We are losing disciplines such as agronomy, soil sciences and animal husbandry.

There are enormous opportunities for agriculture to reduce its emissions globally and nationally, and to increase its carbon sequestration. The management of soils, particularly peat soils, can with adequate research demonstrate how much more we can do to reduce carbon dioxide levels. Second-generation biomass is another very exciting prospect. I do not think that any of us are suggesting that research should concentrate on GM, although I recognise that GM will certainly have a contribution to make in global terms, at least. We need to remind ourselves of the gaps in applied research and put together a coherent collaboration between the public and private sectors, something for which there has never been an overarching plan. It is time that we had one now.