Farming Industry: Support

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for securing this debate. It is a delight to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott; she said many of the things I was going to say, so I have done a quick rejig.

I start with the words of Minette Batters, the NFU president, at the Oxford Farming Conference a week ago: “We have trade policy here and we have agricultural policy here—they are a million miles apart”. We are well used to a lack of joined-up government, but this is a truly extreme example not of failure to join up but of absolute contradiction in government policy.

I will focus on Australia, for reasons made obvious by my accent. Building on the points of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, the use of antibiotics as growth promotants poses a huge risk to antimicrobial resistance—it is a risk to our medicine. There are only voluntary guidelines for stocking density of broiler chickens and laying hens. For carbon emissions, Australian beef is 1.5 times as bad as British beef. Tree cover and biodiversity destruction is 180 times higher in Australia than it is in the UK. I have much experience of Australian agriculture. I have mustered paddocks—fields, sort of—of 10,000 hectares; sheep or cattle run on them and are mustered two or three times a year. How will your Yorkshire Dales farmer, who calls a vet every time an animal gets ill, compete with that?

The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, suggests that this debate takes us back to the 19th-century corn law debates. He is certainly going back to 19th-century ideas about food and farming systems. Those of us seeking to improve the health of our food—to have high animal welfare and environmental standards—speak for the citizens of the 21st century.