Biodiversity: Aichi Targets

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park [V]]

There is no doubt that monoculture is the greatest friend of pandemics and disease and that biological diversity is the greatest buffer and hedge against instability and the kind of dangers that we have seen materialise in recent months. Although the details remain to be worked out at the finest level, we are shifting from the common agricultural policy, where payment is based pretty much on the amount of land turned into farmable land, to a new system of environmental land management that rewards farmers on the basis of their delivery of a public good. That includes environmental stewardship, management of land to slow the flow of water and diversity of species. I very much hope that this move to ELM, which is a world first, will deliver the kind of results for which the noble Baroness asks.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

I am delighted that my noble friend has put nature at the heart of the Government’s biodiversity targets. Will he go one step further? Can we learn the lessons from Covid and accept that food security should be recognised as a public good in the Agriculture Bill?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park [V]]

The Agriculture Bill is winding its way through Parliament as we speak, being expertly delivered by my noble friend Lord Gardiner. The concern about putting food security as a public good is that we are trying to move away from a subsidy system based on rewarding landowners for converting land into land that can produce food. While on the surface, and when it was developed, the old system may have made perfect sense, it has proven to be disastrous. It is clear that the new system has to be designed to ensure that no public money is handed to landowners without a return of some form of public good. We have to be slightly careful about how we define public good and that work is under way. We certainly recognise the value of food production but, on the whole, that is recognised by the market, unlike the environmental benefits that we know landowners, more than anyone else, provide.