Global Food Security

Alison McGovern Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2014 Westminster Hall

[Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Clark. It has been a pleasure to hear all the contributions from hon. Members. This debate has been postponed several times, which is no reflection on its importance. It was postponed once to accommodate the commemorations of the life of President Mandela. However, it is right that we now have the chance to discuss the report, which deals with the vital issue of food security. As others have said, the issue has impact both here at home and abroad. I am often struck by how many policy issues that we think affect people far away are, at heart, the self-same ones of public policy that we grapple with week in, week out in the House of Commons.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that about 842 million people, or one in eight of the global population, suffer from chronic hunger. Although the global trend of hunger is, thankfully, downwards, all too frequently there is a lack of resilience in food supply, which can put millions of people at risk of tipping into hunger as a result of external influences, whether due to a spike in food prices, as the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) mentioned, to climate change or to conflict. It is worth noting that 1.3 million people in the Central African Republic, for example, are now at risk of hunger—that is a huge number; 40% of the country’s population—as a result of the ongoing internal conflict there.

As this debate has shown, food security is a desperately important issue. As we have heard, it is connected to infrastructure problems and to people’s income and position in society. I was pleased to hear the hon. Member for Stafford correctly judging Malthus as wrong. Malthus made a mistake; he forgot—or did not know or work out—that we would use technology to meet the challenge presented by the world’s finite resources as the population grows. That is what we have done down the years: it was true at the time of the industrial revolution, which changed where people lived and how food was produced, and is true today for Africa and other countries around the world. It is sometimes frustrating to hear people repeat as common-or-garden knowledge the idea that there is only so much space on the planet, so there can only be so many people, and that the problem is countries with growing populations. Those people make the self-same mistake as good old Reverend Malthus did all those years ago. We ought not to forget that our responsibility is to support the development of infrastructure and technology, rather than spreading doom and gloom about the inevitability of food insecurity.

The Committee’s report is welcome and wide-ranging. It demonstrates not only the urgency of tackling food security issues but the breadth of policy areas, both international and domestic—from transport policy to food waste, from social protection to co-operatives and climate change—that have an impact on ensuring that food resources are used sensibly and sustainably and are distributed globally in an equitable fashion. We heard something of the breadth of the report from the Chair of the Select Committee earlier.

The report rightly emphasises the impact of the two major recent food price spikes, in 2008 and 2011. The 2008 spike in particular caused a stagnation in the fight against global hunger and significantly set back efforts to meet the millennium development goals. The spikes demonstrate clearly the increasing volatility of food prices in an era of lower food stocks and a tighter balance between supply and demand. I encourage the Minister to speak with her colleagues in the Treasury if possible to investigate the impact that commodities trading has had on food prices. It is another symptom of the fight about financial services regulation—a fight that must continue—that the ever more complex products being bought and sold cause prices to become disconnected from fundamentals.

The Committee is also right to take a strong position on the impact of biofuels on food prices and supply, by concluding that the increasing use of agriculturally produced biofuels is driving up food prices and increasing their volatility. By using land that could be feeding the world’s poorest, the growth of those fuels makes the fight against global hunger far harder. Further, the report rightly notes that their use is potentially even more environmentally damaging than the use of fossil fuels—a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz). The report makes a strong case for a revision to the renewable transport fuel obligation’s equivalent target for biofuels in transport fuel volumes, to disincentivise the use of agriculturally produced biofuels. The Government’s response to that recommendation is disappointingly non-committal and appears to play down the impact of biofuels on food prices. When winding up, will the Minister commit the Government to revising the RTFO, or at least set out a timeline for doing so?

Further, the report urges Ministers to push for the EU to revise the renewable energy directive, or RED, to cap use of food-based biofuels and stop those fuels counting towards the RED target. There was a difference of opinion between the Commission and the recently ended Lithuanian presidency over whether the cap should be set at 5% or 7%. What discussions have Ministers had with EU counterparts recently on revising the RED and where do the Government stand on the level of the cap?

It is disappointing that the Government reject, out of hand, the Committee’s recommendations for statutory targets and sanctions for the reduction of food waste, which although declining still stands at over 20% at a household level in the UK. Is there a point at which the Government would consider waste to be unacceptably high and, as a result, reconsider their position? Food waste reduction is an important challenge that does not always receive the attention that it deserves. We could all shine a light on that issue.

It is encouraging that the report calls for greater support for farmer organisations and co-operatives in developing nations, to help strengthen small farmers’ bargaining positions with large corporations. In particular, it calls for support to assist women and marginalised farmers. Although Ministers have not rejected those proposals, their response, particularly on co-operatives, feels lukewarm at best and makes no proposal to expand support for such organisations. Worryingly, the response fails to mention the positive impact of co-operatives for women and marginalised farmers. Will the Minister give some practical examples of how DFID is supporting farmer co-operatives and set out how the Department intends to expand that work? Again, the way that co-operatives can help to support food production and equitable distribution of its rewards is a lesson that we have learnt in this country.

Both the hon. Member for Stafford and my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith mentioned the importance of Fairtrade, with Fairtrade fortnight coming up. My hon. Friend made a specific recommendation about payment in instalments. Will the Minister comment on that?

As the hon. Member for Stafford mentioned, the Committee’s modest recommendation that the Government undertake further research into how small-scale, judicious use of food stocks could act as a buffer to some of the worst impacts of food price volatility seems to have met somewhat of a brick wall in the Government’s response. The idea that we should go back to the common agricultural policy is a bit of a straw-man argument. There is potential value in smaller-scale food stocks for poorer nations. Perhaps Ministers should have a think about their approach to that issue.

The report rightly argues that social protection schemes have a vital role in protecting the food security of the poorest, but Ministers’ ambitions seem to be a bit limited. Fundamentally, two things stop people starving: money in their pockets and food in the shops that they can afford to buy. We have systems of social protection in place in this country, and countries as diverse as Liberia and Brazil and south American countries have been investigating building up such systems. Social protections inevitably mean that food price spikes are less catastrophic for the poorest. The report notes that DFID plans to support social protection schemes in only 14 of the 29 countries where it has bilateral programmes. The Government response to the report states:

“It is important that DFID does not move ahead of local political and practical reality in seeking to support social protection programmes.”

That does not feel like an ambitious commitment. Will the Minister set out whether she sees DFID as having an activist role as an advocate for and supporter of social protection schemes, whether they are governmental or community-based?

This report once again reminds us that development issues do not exist in a vacuum. Our domestic policies on a wide range of areas can feed into food insecurity issues overseas. It works the other way round, too: food price spikes, speculation and insecurity of supply impact on our constituents as well, as they struggle with the cost of living crisis. The Select Committee has made some very worthwhile suggestions on how the British Government could step up their efforts across the board to tackle food insecurity. Unfortunately, in certain cases, the Government’s response seems lukewarm. However, I hope that through today’s debate and the Committee’s good efforts in its report, we can bring a greater focus on the important issue of food security.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alison McGovern]

I have a brief question on incomes. The Minister did not mention anything about systems of social protection. Would she like to do so?

[Lynne Featherstone]

I am coming to that. I have a whole list of points to get through. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Sir Malcolm Bruce) asked why it was that only 14 countries are in the programmes when there are 29 DFID countries. I hope to get to that.

The Government believe that functioning markets are a better way to manage food stocks than Government interventions. The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) made a number of points that went above and beyond the recommendations made in the report. One idea he mentioned was the World Food Programme holding universal stocks to improve availability. He also mentioned involving neighbouring countries and so on. As he said, those ideas go beyond the report’s recommendations. The evidence we have is that universal stocks are not the most effective use of money.

I will not return to the cap as an example, because it is clear that Members did not favour that view, but Malawi, for example, has recently had food shortages. They hold stocks, but when push came to shove and they looked at their grain stock reserve, it was not as high as they thought. Much of it had disappeared. There are a number of issues outside of simply whether stocks are held for emergencies. We do not have the evidence to say that that proposal is an effective use of money, but my experience is that a whole range of unintended consequences come from stockholding.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lynne Featherstone]

If the hon. Gentleman will forgive me, I will not, because I want to give a couple of minutes to the Select Committee Chair at the end and I have a huge number of points to get through.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon asked about the scaling up of safety nets, as did the hon. Member for Wirral South. DFID is more than doubling the number of countries where it supports social protection programmes. We had seven countries in 2009 and we will reach 15 in 2014. It may be that that support is the answer everywhere, but with the best will in the world we cannot scale it up on our own without the mother countries agreeing with us, and not just in policy terms. Even with 0.7% of GDP spent on aid, we do not have infinite funds to do everything in every country without research and without working with mother country Governments.

We will continue to support such programmes. We think that they are excellent and are demonstrating great benefits. We use evidence of that, where appropriate, in conversation with Governments that are new to the idea of social protection. I have been to some countries that do not want these protection programmes introduced. We disagree with that, but we are not a colonial institution that says, “You must have this.” We try to demonstrate the evidence of how successful and useful the programmes are and how they work in those countries.

[Alison McGovern]

Will the Minister give way?

[Lynne Featherstone]

No, because I will not get through any of these points if I do.

On the Government’s support for the Fairtrade Foundation, we absolutely recognise the important work that it does to promote smallholder access to global markets. We welcome the attention it has brought to finance for small-scale farmers. The UK provides core funding to the foundation and we look forward to working with them and discussing the Committee’s recommendations.

On meat, the key to a healthy diet is getting the balance right. That means eating a wide variety of foods in the right proportions. Red meat can form part of a healthy diet and is a good source of protein, vitamins and minerals, such as zinc and B vitamins. It is also one of the main sources of vitamin B12.

However, not all meat is good. Some meats are high in fat, especially saturated fat. I think it was the right hon. Member for Gordon who mentioned UK farmers. Encouraging people in the UK to eat less and to eat more healthily would not impact on UK farmers. UK commodity prices follow those in the wider international market, so trade flows would adjust. That, at least, is the evidence we have. The fortunes of UK producers are more dependent on their competitiveness within the wider market.

I am glad that the work that DFID does on land and property rights has been recognised. We have signed a new agreement with Ethiopia to go the same way as we have with Rwanda. We are scaling up our land programmes in at least six other countries and we intend to continue our partnerships.

I make a grateful nod in the direction of the Chair of the Select Committee for his recognition of our work on beekeeping. The “World at One” bumped me on Christmas eve, when I was going to expand on our international work on beekeeping. The weather in Britain took precedence.

I am sorry that I have not spoken to all the points, but, to conclude, my Department is working with international partners to prepare for the next series of international development goals after the millennium development goals. The IDC report helps my Department to remain challenged, focused and a world leader in international development policy and practice. I thank the International Development Committee for its continued engagement with the work of DFID and its insightful and useful observations and recommendations, and I thank all Members here today.