Agriculture: Animal Feed

Baroness Byford Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Byford]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington for introducing this short debate. It is actually very timely. She asked us to consider the environmental and economic impacts of the proposed changes, at a time when we have so much waste, which she has clearly identified. I should perhaps remind the House of our family’s farming interests. My original profession was in fact breeding poultry and we also had pigs on our farm, neither of which I am involved in any more.

As my noble friend has indicated, the pig industry already uses over 1 million tonnes per annum of co- and by-products from food manufacturing, mainly in the form of wheat feed, biscuit meal, cake, bread and cereals products, starch extract products, and whey products. However, it is a highly regulated industry. I cannot stress this enough. All the products have to be FEMAS-assured and do not come from manufacturing plants that have any meat products, in order to minimise the risk of cross-contamination.

I was shadow Minister at the time of the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, and I cannot stress enough the huge impact it had across the country, not just closing farms but movements of markets, countryside access, and rural concerns put out of business in the long term as a result of it. The ban on pigswill also, sadly, put 60 of those swill feeders out of business. What has come through from the NPA and NFU briefings is a note of real caution, and I hope my noble friend will reflect that caution when he responds—that it is not totally dismissed—as there have to be very strong rigours to ensure there is no question of cross-contamination.

From the briefings that we have had, the other big issue that has been raised is—as at the time of the foot and mouth outbreak—public concern and public confidence. Certainly the one thing the farming industry does not wish to see is another shake of that confidence, which has been restored over the years so that people trust the food they eat. Whatever the European Commission or our Government decide to do, very strong systems should be built in to make sure that there is no contamination.

The National Pig Association also goes on to say quite clearly:

“Whilst the focus should be on reducing the amount of waste produced in the first place, we would support alternative methods of dealing with waste food such as anaerobic digestion and gasification”.

Obviously these are also useful forms of energy. Taken with the briefing from the National Farmers’ Union that has been quoted by others already, it is important to recognise that here are two organisations that you think would be very much in favour of it, which say, “Yes, we will consider it but there are indeed questions attached to it”.

As I mentioned earlier, we are in an era where we have waste on one hand and increasing costs on the other. This debate gives me an opportunity to raise a couple of questions with the Minister. As the briefing from the NFU says:

“This waste utilisation issue coincides with a severe shortage of availability of GM free animal feed protein, particularly soya, which is grown predominantly in South America, and used by the pig and poultry sectors. Whilst EU GM feed restrictions continue, the price of GM-free soya is rocketing”—

which my noble friend referred to earlier—

“putting inflationary pricing pressures on UK produced pig and poultry products, whilst perversely, imported products are allowed to have been fed GM diets”.

So my question to the Minister is: should this aspect not be looked at again? Should the EU not be reconsidering its stance on GM? If it wants to maintain that stance, surely it should be looking at ways to protect UK pig and poultry producers from having to compete unfairly with products that are allowed to be brought into this country. It is an important part of the debate we are having tonight.

I have also looked up the letter that the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, sent on behalf of the Food Standards Agency. While I do not always agree with the Food Standards Agency, it too recognises the need for caution. The letter to my honourable friend Jim Paice on 15 September, discussing the current feed ban, also says that,

“provided effective controls to prevent infective material from entering feed are maintained, the proposed changes would give rise to a negligible risk of exposing farmed animals to BSE. Hence the risk to consumers would also be negligible. The Board was concerned, however, that this assessment relies on controls and enforcement, and that the risk would be negligible only if the controls were effective”.

Therefore, the recommendation from its recent meeting was that,

“the Board agreed to advise Ministers that the UK should not support the proposed\ changes”.

This is a very important discussion and I am really grateful to my noble friend for raising it. For me, it raises some very basic issues. We have waste; we need to deal with it. It would be better not to have it in the first place, to be perfectly honest, but there are ways in which we can use that waste without necessarily feeding it to pigs and poultry. We can use it in biofuels, anaerobic digesters and pet foods. We have the cost of purchasing and getting non-GM food for our producers here. The EU has to look at both sides of the equation.

I am very grateful for this short debate tonight to give us a chance to think about the ways in which we produce food in this country and where we would aim to go in the future. At the end of it all, the main goal should be to reduce food waste. Something like a third of the food that we produce here in this country is wasted. My noble friend Lord Greaves mentioned countries overseas. Their problem is different. Their waste is not what is actually put on the plate, but is a result of a lack of infrastructure to get it from the field where it is grown into the shops or markets—wherever people buy their food. Internationally, it is a slightly different challenge that they face.

I say to my noble friend Lady Jenkin that, while I support her thoughts behind her debate tonight, I cannot emphasise enough the degree to which we must be very careful, whichever way we go in the future. We could look back at the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001; if one accepts that it came from pigswill, it would mean that there was a system in place which should have made that not happen, but sadly it did happen. Therefore, whatever system goes on in the future, those controls and inspections need to be in place and reviewed regularly. I thank the noble Baroness for giving us this opportunity to speak tonight.