Queen’s Speech

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Monday 17th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow two such fabulous maiden speeches, and I look forward to working with both noble Lords. There is much to welcome in the Speech, but there is much that still seems to be about rhetoric rather than action, as many noble Lords have said. It is probably no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am going to confine my remarks to food.

I want to give the House a few facts. These are not suppositions or the ideas of radical NGOs; these are facts and figures drawn up by the IPCC, the Treasury, Defra, the FAO and reputed world experts. It is like looking at climate change targets 30 years ago. Some 34% of emissions globally come from our food system, and it accounts for 30% of all our anthropogenic emissions. Food and drink account for 25% of the footprint of every individual in the UK, and 50% of all habitable land is used for agriculture. It is the driver of 80% of deforestation worldwide and an identified threat to 24,000 of 28,000 species, as documented by the IUCN—the International Union for Conservation of Nature. According to our own Professor Partha Dasgupta, whose report was commissioned by the Treasury, 80% of land-use related biodiversity loss is attributed to biomass extraction, of which the primary products are food and crops. Unless we change our eating and food waste patterns, we will need to double our agricultural production in the years ahead just to stay where we are. The point of all this is what it adds up to, and this is absolutely incontrovertible: even if all other sectors that noble Lords have referred to reduced their emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still overshoot the 1.5-degree target that we are all aiming to achieve at Glasgow and around the world. We must take this on board.

I understand as well as anyone does that food is a real mess, and I have spoken about this. It is in every department, it is extremely complicated, it does not fit into a box and it does not easily subscribe to a target. It is not like saying that we will stop having fossil fuel-powered cars by 2030 or 2040; it is very difficult. But however messy and difficult it is, we can no longer duck this. We cannot ignore it and we have to take it on board. It is the most important thing that we all consume, and it is the one thing we cannot do without. We can all rage about cotton T-shirts causing environmental damage and we can do without so many of them, but we cannot do without food.

What worries me in this gracious Speech is that food really does not get much of a look in. We have the Agriculture Act coming through at the moment, and I welcome the ELMS as much as anyone, but I just want to see how it will work. The gracious Speech makes reference to the food strategy written by Henry Dimbleby, which I have been an adviser on. I am a huge supporter of this because it will help our diets and our comeback from Covid, and it will stop us being such an unhealthy nation and, to some extent, start to work against climate change if we implement it. But noble Lords cannot assume that 34% of global emissions can be dealt with by one White Paper produced by one individual. That is crazy. This must be rethought. I am also really worried that it says that the Government’s response is to consult. I know that they are meant to do this within six months, but it is my understanding from people I know that Defra is commissioning a whole other ball game to try to look at these facts. They are there, and we know them. We have to go much further.

We cannot leave the question of climate change merely to a food strategy, however good it is. Bloomberg News said—it is a ridiculous quote, but I will read it out anyway— last week:

“There is no escaping that beef is a climate villain.”


Some 14% of human-driven emissions come from livestock production.

We are not alone as a country in doing this. It is not something that should be political, but I would welcome a chance to work on it. It can be done. It needs to be seen as a whole, and in the light of the spectacular benefits it will bring us. We went into Covid as an unhealthy nation eating rubbish food. Every single bit of rubbish food is a result of bad farming practices. When you eat a cheap chocolate mousse, you are actually probably destroying the habitat of an orangutang in Indonesia. The same things are true right across the board: if we fix the food system, we fix an incredible number of other things. I really hope that the Government will step up to this and not see it as a party-political issue, but something from which we will all hugely benefit.