Agriculture: Global Food Security

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords of my own and my husband’s interests with our farm and of my role as chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agro-Ecology. I congratulate very warmly the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, not only on securing the debate but on framing the question as she has. She framed it in a very accurate way, and it is particularly well framed because it raises the right issues. It does not suggest that we as a nation or even Europe can have food security without it being global security. We are not suggesting pulling up the drawbridge and just being quite satisfactory on our own. This is an incredibly timely debate, too, with food prices soaring; even though we have seen a slight drop this week, the overall trend in staple foods has been upwards at a rate that quite outstrips earnings here in the UK, in Europe and certainly throughout the world.

When the Minister was kind enough recently to reply to my Written Question about the increase over the past five years in staple prices and the factors that he saw as the reasons for that, his reply reflected the complexities—but the underlying trend was due to the unpredictable climate happenings. So the urgency with which we must address the effect of climate change on food production is there for all to see in the prices. The link between oil and food prices shows graphically why we must break the massive dependence of food production on fossil fuels. So there are immense challenges.

The reason why I struggled slightly with the question before us today is that our British agriculture has a long and proud tradition of improvement and innovation and many examples of excellence—and I am sure that we will hear about many more of them in the debate today. There is the quality of stock-breeding programmes, welfare and the excellence of all sorts of individual practice as well as research and knowledge. But no Government since the Second World War have really had a comprehensive food policy, so all that excellence in agriculture is not reflected in our diet. We recognise that we can produce the food in quantity and certainly in high quality and we can store it well. The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, mentioned the amount that is lost globally. The inadequate storage issue means that globally we are losing upwards of 40 per cent of food produced, and probably much more than that, which means that adequate storage could answer a lot of the need for increased production to feed an increasing world population.

The overall effect of our agriculture is not reflected in the effect on consumers in the country today. There are more and more obese people—about 13 million now—eating the wrong sort of food in the wrong sort of quantities, and at the same time there are malnourished people. Also more and more food is wasted. A significant proportion of food waste, about 6.5 million tonnes, is produced by domestic households, and retailers are generating a further 1.5 million tonnes. Supermarkets have been criticised in particular for wasting damaged or unsold items, which the industry calls “surplus food” although it often remains edible. Most of the 7 million tonnes have been not only produced but transported, then probably wrapped, sold and transported again only to be thrown away. That is an expensive way to make compost or biofuel. While turning waste food into compost or biofuel is certainly better than throwing it into landfill, the aim must be to drastically reduce that waste mountain. In mentioning that, I commend the work of WRAP—especially its online toolkit, which shows those wishing to reuse food waste how to go about it.

As for producers, smaller and family farms have to rely on working outside the farm for much of the time to produce even a living wage for the family. At the same time, the profits of those nearer the market continue to show that there is money in food. I know that this statistic is often quoted, but Tesco is currently on record as making profits of about £10 million a day. I therefore join those who call for the speedy introduction of the groceries code adjudicator. Farmers also have to cope with the unpredictable weather that climate change is producing. As I speak, I am particularly aware of those whose crops have seen no decent rain for over a month, with temperatures last month being nearer to the post-harvest levels of August than to April’s.

There have been new entrants. However, if anyone is brave enough to go into farming today, they will discover that unless they have a family farm, finding new land is like finding hens’ teeth. The number of local authority tenanted farms has halved since the 1940s, covering about 100,000 acres today. The current financial squeeze on local authorities is likely to diminish the number further still; and, disgracefully, the previous Government decided not to take up the support offered under the new entrants’ part of the rural development regulation. Life for farmers in the UK is also made difficult because of a tremendous lack of support for co-operatives—for machinery rings, marketing co-operatives and all the other things that make life easier for the smaller producer. Those are problems for all of us because this is about assets for the future of food production.

Finally, we still have to work on soil and water quality in this country, let alone in the rest of the world. We also have our own problems with biodiversity. Defra, for example, has been measuring the number of farmland birds as an indicator of farmland health. It says that these bird populations are a good indicator of the broad state of wildlife on farmland because they are near the top of the food chain. Still, the number of farmland wild birds has decreased at a rate of about 10 per cent over 10 years. That may not sound much but it is an awful lot of birds to be lost in 10 years. Those who listened to “Farming Today” this morning will have heard about the plight of the bumblebee. The general health of that population is very worrying indeed.

Although our agriculture model is fit for export and could make a contribution, it is not a model that the rest of the world would want to take up more generally in relation to diet.

Perhaps the jewel in our crown is our knowledge and research base. On this point, however, I differ from some of the other speakers. I would worry tremendously if we concentrated only on GM research. I would not rule it out, as it might have a part to play in the future, but in view of what is happening with some of the other incredibly valuable research going on, there are other things to worry about. For example, in a letter to the Times last September, the leading academics in the world of entomology underlined how drastic the situation is:

“There are now less than ten pest management specialists teaching in all UK universities”.

If you think of where pests are likely to be, the increases that will happen under climate change and the threat that insects pose to our global food production, that is really serious.

I make a plea that research does not concentrate on GM and that it starts to address the wider issues as well. Another example is the Rothamsted Institute, home to much excellent research, which saw a win-win situation when it looked at the issue of stem borers in east Africa and striga weed. The ecologically based system of intercropping that it came up with increased animal forage, increased soil quality and fertility and managed the borer problem, so it was a win-win-win. If it had simply had a crop that was resistant to borers, those other things would not have been realised.

It is important that our contribution to global food security is to underpin with resources the research base that this country has given the world throughout the past decades—indeed, the past century. That is in danger. What is the project in real terms over the next three years for research funding for UK agriculture, food storage and, in particular, entomology?