Badgers
Lord Dixon-Smith Excerpts(12 years ago)
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Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I have referred to costs already. I can only repeat that the cost of not bearing down on TB in cattle through, among other things, controlling the badger population is currently about £90 million a year and is increasing.
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Strathclyde)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Soulsby, is trying to get in.
Agriculture: Global Food Security
Lord Dixon-Smith Excerpts(13 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I declare an interest as a farmer, still practising, and landowner in Essex. Essex is a peculiar place and not particularly well understood. When I discuss my rainfall average with foreigners—I have kept records since 1961—or even with Londoners, who never have to think about this sort of thing, they say, “But that is arid”. My rainfall would suggest that it is arid. My average rainfall over that period has now pushed up to about 19 inches per annum. Anywhere else in the world, that would be semi-desert. We need to remember how enormously privileged we are in this country to live in a temperate climate. I farm land that is highly productive.
My life has to some extent been coloured by the experience of accompanying my father, who was an active member of something that most people have forgotten: the War Agricultural Executive Committee. I used to accompany him on farm visits during the war. Those people began the revolution that has brought in modern agriculture as we see it, with its highly productive state. However, I fear that if we ever face another crisis such as that which we faced in 1940, we no longer have the capacity to expand our output to meet such a crisis. When we consider the way in which our population is developing, when we are already highly dependent on imports, and look at the global economy, with a world population of 6.5 billion going up to 8.5 billion, becoming more prosperous and therefore competing more for the food imports upon which we depend, we need to worry.
It is perhaps worthwhile putting ourselves into perspective as a nation. I pulled some figures off Wikipedia, which put us right in our place. The global landmass, including Antarctica, is roughly 148.5 million square kilometres; of which 49 million square kilometres are classified only as agricultural; of which 14 million square kilometres are classified as arable land. In this country, our total area is 41,000 square kilometres. We have 1 per cent of global population. In 2050, by neat coincidence, we will still have 1 per cent of global population. We are bit players, but we are of course highly vulnerable to international competition for food supply as the global food circumstances become more difficult. It is estimated that agriculture must double its global output to meet demand in 2050. We have no capacity to double our output so we shall become increasingly dependent, which means that we will have to develop our economy in other ways to sustain the people who will live in our islands in the future.
As my noble friends Lord Selborne and Lady Byford stressed, if we are to increase our farming output we will have to rely hugely on technical developments, technical change and intensification. Indeed, we do rely on them hugely. We face particular problems. We have extremely good plant breeders in this country but they will not undertake research if they know that their remit is limited. On my wish list is something that would revolutionise global agriculture. I desperately want to see a nitrogen-fixing wheat with the same characteristics as plants in the legume family. That would enormously reduce the need to apply artificial fertilisers and would increase soil fertility and enable us to produce good nutritious food. Such a wheat does not exist and cannot be achieved through conventional breeding. That implies that genetic modification must be used, yet, on a psychological level, genetic modification is not accepted in Europe. One hears people speak of dreadful Frankenstein foods. However, our future survival will depend on developments such as I have mentioned. Therefore, I ask my noble friend, when he winds up, to say how he proposes to persuade the European institutions that rule our agricultural lives to change their ways. We need these developments if only because, as the rest of the world increases its output of genetically modified agricultural products, we will cease to be able to purchase the non-genetically modified imports on which we depend. There will be no alternative.
The same attitude applies to herbicides and insecticides. In the old days I used to burn every field of straw on the farm, which I found exciting. I took extreme care over it as a main road runs through my farm but I never had a problem. However, that practice was stopped, and rightly so because one of its bad effects was that it increased what I call the mining aspect of farming—that is, the amount that we extract from our soils. One of the benefits of stopping that practice is that all our waste organic material now remains in the soil and our soils have reverted to the condition they were in when they were originally ploughed up and converted from permanent pasture. That has happened in the past few years and constitutes a highly beneficial change. If we are to maintain our farming going forward, we have to look at that. I have always envied the Fenland farmers who farm highly organic soil. However, they are “miners”, and that practice cannot be sustained.
The use of agricultural by-products for energy production has not been raised but is worth mentioning as a lot of people talk about it. Given the factor that I have mentioned, certainly those of us who farm in the solidly arable parts of the country have no biological waste products as we need to put them back in the soil. The other day I heard it said that even if we used all the agricultural land in the United Kingdom to produce energy, apart from the fact that we would produce no food, we would be able to produce only half the energy that we require. That represents an even lower proportion of our national requirement than is the case with food so we would be better off by far sticking with agriculture and finding our energy from other sources, of which there are plenty.
Speaking from a narrow perspective, we need to keep a very close eye on our long-term vulnerability. Although I have some sympathy with those who want to keep the countryside pure, unsullied and environmentally friendly, I have to warn them that in the longer term that simply may not be practical. The attitude that prevailed in my youth, with which my noble friend Lord Plumb will certainly be familiar, when food output had to take priority over planting trees and other such measures, may well have to be reasserted. If we do not, we may not be able to survive in the way that we would wish.
Draft National Policy Statement for Waste Water
Lord Dixon-Smith Excerpts(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, if I could follow my noble friend with a slightly different question to the—
Lord De Mauley
My Lords, I am sorry to interrupt. Perhaps noble Lords are not aware that there is a speakers list. Having said that, I am sure that if the Grand Committee—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Morris of Bolton)
My Lords, there is a speakers list, so it is possible to speak in the gap. We are in the gap now.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, that is an amusing correction: to find myself up in the right place and being corrected for it. I would like to follow on a little from what my noble friend Lord Teverson has said to my noble friend the Minister.
The question here is the definition of an infrastructure project. I wonder whether, in his response, the Minister could give us some inkling as to why the national infrastructure policy is defined as covering projects affecting a population of more than 500,000. Why is it not some other figure? I ask this question with deliberate intent, because we will be putting major projects through a somewhat simplified but none the less well-defined planning process that will work much more rapidly. Whatever its future legal status may be as a result of coming legislation, we think that this process will work more rapidly than the normal planning system.
I suspect that I could make a good case for suggesting that the threshold of 500,000 people affected should be reduced to 250,000 people. This would bring a much greater number of schemes within the scope of this policy statement. It would, therefore, make accessible to the provision of those schemes an accelerated planning process, which would facilitate improvements to water quality across a wider field.
That figure, to me, is the critical figure in this report; all the rest of it, you might say, is procedure. However, we are dealing with how you define a national policy statement. I accept that there is always a difficulty with that sort of definition and the judging of nationally significant projects, particularly in the field of electric lines and so on, given that they affect a large number of people. However, I am not sure that you could always say that a particular electric line, which would come within the scope of the national policy statement for power generation and transmission, would always affect more than 500,000 people. I strongly suspect that many of those schemes would impact on a much smaller number of people, but, none the less, they are part of the national policy statement structure.
I would be grateful if the Minister would take away with him the thought that that figure should be considered a bit more. I sincerely ask him to consider whether it would be practical to put in a lower figure to facilitate the accelerated planning process that would then come forward to help major schemes. A scheme that affects 250,000 people is still a major scheme.
Bovine Tuberculosis
Lord Dixon-Smith Excerpts(14 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Dixon-Smith
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the practice of skin testing for bovine tuberculosis followed by the slaughter of reactors will eliminate the disease from the national herd.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord Henley)
Tuberculin skin tests are the internationally accepted standard for detecting TB. Many countries have eradicated TB using a test and slaughter approach. In England, evidence suggests that without addressing the disease in badgers, it will be impossible to eradicate TB in cattle. The department has committed to developing affordable options for a carefully managed and science-led policy of badger control in areas with high and persistent levels of bovine TB.
Lord Dixon-Smith
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for that response. There is evidence that the present testing regime correctly identifies the presence of tuberculosis within a herd, but no longer identifies all the infected animals so that after a series of tests, a residue of infection is left within the herd which can continue to spread the disease despite the removal of the identified animals. Will the noble Lord ask the Government to conduct a thorough review of the implications of this? The existing regime is not satisfactory and there are managerial consequences for biosecurity on the farm. Although this programme was very successful half a century ago, it is not working now. We are effectively burning pound notes.
Lord Henley
My Lords, I accept that there are occasions when using the current test—what I have described as the internationally accepted comparative test—that some cattle are missed. If we move to another test, known as the single test, there is a possibility of a greater number of what are described as false positives, which again would not be satisfactory. A further test is used, a blood test which is known as the gamma test, and we can look at it. I can give my noble friend an assurance that we will look at all three, but for the moment we think that the comparative test is the best one to use.