Agriculture Bill

Baroness Henig Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 7th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 28th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Henig (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bruce of Bennachie. At the outset, I join others in thanking the Minister for his patience, tolerance and good humour throughout the seven days of this Committee. It is much appreciated across the House.

I shall speak to Amendment 270, to which I was happy to put my name, and I am very pleased to support the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, who moved it so ably. We have already heard this afternoon that the Government have set up their own Trade and Agriculture Commission. Unlike the ones envisaged in these amendments, it is a bit of a makeshift. It will sit for only six months in the first instance, draw up an advisory report for the Government and then disperse. However, many of the issues it has been charged with advising on are extremely relevant to the Bill. For example, one of the tasks is to look at what sort of

“Trade policies the Government should adopt to secure opportunities for UK farmers, while ensuring the sector remains competitive and that animal welfare and environmental standards in food production are not undermined.”

Another of its tasks is:

“How the UK engages the WTO to build a coalition that helps advance higher animal welfare standards across the world.”

These are important issues and show that the Government agree with many of the sentiments expressed in this amendment, but, unfortunately, at the moment the Government’s commission is to help them to navigate the next six months only. The Government’s commission has no parliamentary oversight, as we have heard, and the RSPCA commented that it will not protect in any effective way United Kingdom animal welfare standards, so I think we must try to push the Government further along this road.

At the moment, under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, there will be little chance to scrutinise the trade agreements which will have such a major impact on United Kingdom farming and agriculture and there is no parliamentary oversight of such agreements. Taking control of agricultural policy from the EU should not mean the Government taking more control with no oversight and no role for Parliament or any of the other agencies. There has to be the opportunity for more scrutiny and debate than is at present being proposed.

On Thursday, I spoke about strong public support for existing standards of food production and animal hygiene and welfare, and that has been supported this afternoon by other speakers. We heard, very importantly, from the noble Lord, Lord Empey, that Northern Ireland will retain its existing high standards in these areas, and I have no doubt that Scotland and Wales will wish to do so as well. That seems to be a very strong argument for a body such as is being proposed in Amendment 270 to uphold and oversee the standards regime. We have heard that other countries have such bodies. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, told us about Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States of America. It is found to be extremely useful in those countries. We in the UK at the moment have no such machinery. I think we need to find a way of establishing a standards regime with regard to food, animal welfare and hygiene—a regime that then becomes part of our governmental and parliamentary machinery.

I recognise that these are relevant to the Trade Bill as well as to this Bill, but because they will have such a profound effect on all the issues discussed in this Bill, I think we have to discuss them in the context of the Agriculture Bell as well as the Trade Bill. We may well hear the argument that the Government have a set of powers in negotiating trade treaties and that they must not be undermined. We have heard that argument before and I am readying myself to hear it again at the end of this group of amendments, but we have to find a way of promoting consensus on standards across not just England but Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We have to do it in a non-partisan way. That is why a commission along the lines set out in Amendments 270 and 279 could play such an important role and why I put my name to Amendment 270 and hope that the Minister and the Government give it their most urgent support.

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[Lord Trees [V]]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of Amendment 275, proposed by my noble friend Lord Cameron of Dillington. Under strict regulatory processes, and after consultation—I emphasise that that is in the amendment, as referred to by other noble Lords—it is about applying exciting new technologies, supporting our superb UK biotechnology industry to continue as a global leader and an economic success. Above all, it is about strengthening global food resilience and security while potentially reducing chemical or drug use.

The amendment has particular relevance to plants but I want to support it with respect to animals and their diseases. I draw a contrast with the opinions of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who I respect immensely. The priority of disease control in animals increasingly lies in prevention, and key tools in prevention are management and husbandry, vaccines, and genetic resistance. Genetic resistance has of course occurred spontaneously by natural evolutionary processes in wild animals.

Apart from knowing what the R number is, many noble Lords will now be aware from the Covid-19 pandemic of the remarkable innate resistance of, for example, bats to viral disease. They carry infections that are lethal to humans, such as rabies and the Covid-19 virus, without apparent clinical disease. By definition, the process of natural selection occurs over many years, so conventional breeding methods to create disease resistance in domesticated animal species are extremely slow and raise real ethical problems.

Now we have the amazing potential ability to very precisely identify the parts of an animal’s DNA that permit specific pathogen invasion and then, in a very targeted way, adapt them by gene editing so as to be non-permissive to infection. This mimics changes to an animal’s DNA that might occur spontaneously but very rarely in nature, and does it in a fraction of the time. It is distinct from the wider techniques involving genetic modification yet is currently included within them and prohibited in current EU legislation, as many other noble Lords have said.

In relation to animal disease, there is already promising research to breed pigs with resistance to African swine fever, a highly infectious pathogen in pigs, distributed worldwide, that in recent years has killed millions of pigs in China, is now killing pigs and infecting wild boar, which are symptomless carriers, in continental Europe, and presents a real and present danger to our own domestic pig population in the UK.

The Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh has recently created, using gene editing, pigs with resistance to the porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, a disease endemic in the UK pig herd and a welfare concern as a cause of severe disease and high mortality, as well as having a substantial economic impact.

Finally, I stress that unlike processes involved in gene cloning, for example, using gene editing to establish a founder stock which breeds normally involves relatively few animals and no more intrusive processes for the animals initially than are used in normal veterinary practice. I very much support this progressive, forward-looking amendment.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Henig) (Lab)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Taverne. We are having problems, so I call the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra.

[Lord Blencathra (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interests as set out in the register. I thank my noble friend the Minister for his sterling work over the last seven days in Committee, for his incredible stamina, and for his courtesy and politeness when replying to debates. I will be very brief, since the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, has set out very clearly and convincingly the essential case for permitting gene editing as soon as we are free of the EU, very ably supported by my noble friend Lord Ridley, who also made a thoroughly learned speech.

Did we not hear passionate speeches last week on controlling the use of pesticides? Gene editing will give us crops which will not need pesticides because they will be pest-resistant. I passionately believe in growing more of our horticultural crops and a lot more under glass. That is expensive, but what if we could double the yield of tomatoes grown under glass? That has been achieved by Professor Lippman in the United States with just one type of tomato. We can do that with all crops, vegetables and fruits, increasing yields, making them more pest- and drought-resistant. We might be able to make them more water-resistant so that we do not lose so many thousands of tonnes of potatoes, as we did in the wet autumn of last year.

Imagine the health potential of crops which are more nutritious, sweeter but with less sugar or gluten, crops which ripen with less heat or sunshine or mature in a shorter period. The potential, as described by my noble friend Lord Ridley, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, and other noble Lords, is enormous. This will be the next agricultural revolution and the UK can be in the lead in Europe and the world once again. Our crop geneticists will also overtake America once we are freed from the dead hand of the EU. Those who argue that we still need the EU court controlling our affairs should remember that it was the EU court which ruled that gene editing should be governed by the same controls as genetic modification, a decision that made no sense in science, morality or logic.

I hope that the Government will look favourably on this amendment, and, if the wording is not perfect, that they will bring forward a government amendment on Report.