Adapting to Climate Change: EU Agriculture and Forestry (EUC Report)

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I must remind the House of my interests; my husband and I own and run a 40-acre vineyard, and I am chair of the All-Party Group on Agro-Ecology. I warmly thank my noble friend Lady Sharp of Guildford for her knowledgeable and passionate introduction to the report, as it came to some important conclusions that were rather hidden behind a slightly anodyne summary and a less-than-passionate introduction. I am glad that she has redressed that today.

Agriculture and forestry are tremendously important; after all, they occupy the vast proportion of the entire land surface of the EU. For that reason alone, they offer tremendous opportunities for climate change mitigation to be incorporated into our land use. There are also some dreadful penalties to be paid by future generations if we do not manage to get adaptation right. Those penalties will be paid in food production, flooding and the very ability of future generations to able to produce food at all.

Is the Commission capable of altering the CAP in order to address some of this? That is where my worries lie. The difficulty was spelled out in some of the evidence that the committee received from Ms Andugar, which is on page 158 of the report. She said:

“The CAP is not a climate change policy, so it is impossible for this policy to provide all the tools, incentives or instruments”.

That is the crux of the issue.

I agree with my noble friend Lord Teverson that the debate hovers unhelpfully at the moment around pillars—pillars are depressing—and whether we should green Pillar 1 rather more or move further towards Pillar 2, where environmental goods are recognised as a desirable outcome. I am worried that the Commission might simply settle for the compromises that are needed to achieve any CAP reform by 2013. Those compromises will fall far short of what it must deliver in order to start addressing some of the critical issues that climate change puts before us and which your Lordships have touched on today. Here, I disagree with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. Even without climate change, the issues of profligacy and waste would be no less critical. We cannot go on using water as we have. we cannot go on using artificial fertilisers as we have, and we would need three planets in order to farm as we have. I think that the noble Earl is nodding assent. Even if we set climate change aside, the CAP would still need radical reform.

It was cheering to hear in our evidence sessions of the multiple wins to be had from incentivising land users and farmers to take the right measures that address not only climate change but the crucial issues of soil quality, water stress and waste. For example, green cover crops slow down water run-off, stop soil erosion and allow better water absorption, with leguminous plants reducing the need for artificial fertilisers. All these provide more opportunities for beneficial insects and encourage biodiversity.

The report gets very excited about biochar—I agree that the evidence from Mr Prodi MEP was among the most exciting and compelling that the committee received. However, the committee could have extrapolated more fully the biochar lesson, which was that there should be no such thing as waste in the agricultural process. Waste at the start of the food chain is compost, mulch and manure; at the end of the food chain, and under some of the new technology coming forward, it is biofertiliser from the anaerobic digestion of food waste. We all agree that there is far too much food waste, but while it exists, let us use it. Biofertiliser is a liquid containing nitrogen, phosphate and potash, along with other trace elements, and it can be applied to farmland, reducing drastically the need for purchased fertilisers. That is another example of a win, win, win situation.

As other noble Lords have mentioned, this report needs to be read in conjunction with the recent government report from Foresight entitled The Future of Food and Farming. That report contains a critical, almost throwaway, sentence. It states that there is nearly as much carbon in the organic compounds contained in the top 30 centimetres of soil as there is in the entire atmosphere. That deceptively small statement contains an enormity of importance on which the UK Government and the Commission need especially to focus.

There are dangers in badly managed soils and potential in properly managed soils. In order to manage soil, farmers and land managers need the skills and knowledge, and indeed the right incentives, to restore its health and its properties. We have had more than 50 years of throwing on to it as much imported and artificial fertiliser as a farmer could afford. That has resulted in degraded, eroded soils and an industry addicted to artificial fertiliser.

I disagree with my noble friend Lord Taverne, who has offered biotechnology as the solution to the problem, but it will not restore the soils or supply more water. Before he is tempted to intervene, I should say that I have a very short time in which to speak and that I have kept my remarks as moderate as I can. We have to consider other ways of addressing this issue.

The UK response to the Commission communication and consultation, published in January 2011, also contained a worrying phrase. It said that,

“a minimum level of direct payment for small farms—however defined—would provide a perverse incentive to such farms to remain small and would impede consolidation”.

However, there is nothing magic about consolidation. Small farms might have seemed undesirable in the 1980s monoculture philosophy of maximising one-crop production as cheaply as possible without worrying about externalising the costs. Now we are thinking about carbon outputs, soil compaction from enormous machinery and, indeed, unemployment as the workforce is reduced. In today’s world, small farms can be seen as highly efficient units. Indeed, some studies of innovations on farms in south-east Asia have discovered highly efficient units of mixed production that re-use animal manures; they have a mixed polycultural approach and spread the risk for the farmers.

They also deliver a landscape that is attractive and rich in biodiversity. You do not find many tourists demanding to see the wheat fields of the Ukraine, but mixed farming areas such as Tuscany, Devon, Dordogne and County Waterford are attractive to tourists and wildlife alike—and they produce high quality food.

There is a huge amount of training to be done, knowledge to be imparted and research to be undertaken, and that message from the report is incredibly valuable. As noble Lords have mentioned, we need to build on the best of modern knowledge. The noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, mentioned drip irrigation, for example. How simple, but how very important. We also need to build on the tradition of what grows best where, not only geologically but climatically. Again, biotechnology cannot deliver that for us.

The EU and its member states had better address fast the appalling situation that has arisen whereby vast tracts of land—most recently, for example, 50,000 hectares in Kenya—are being sold off to European companies to produce biofuels. Smallholders in those areas are being dispossessed to become the urban unemployed. That situation is utterly immoral. It might be about meeting the EU climate change targets, but we cannot accept it and we should not encourage it.

Finally, I ask the Minister: what are our preparations for Rio 2012 on the agricultural side of the equation?