Agriculture: Animal Feed

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer]

I, too, would like to thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin of Kennington for this debate tonight and also for her brilliant analysis of why we must change our attitude to food waste. I further thank her for introducing me to Tristram Stuart and his book, which she has generously lent me, Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, which I felt could have been subtitled “a philosophy for life”. I feel passionately that it is immoral to waste the planet’s resources; he gives the facts and figures behind that immorality and shows that there is a different way forward.

My noble friend Lady Jenkin mentioned the examples from Japan showing how it is technologically possible to separate out food waste streams and create an entirely safe way of feeding food pellets—perhaps the term “swill” is not helpful anymore—to non-ruminants with no risk at all, to create a better, more premium product. That is an entirely desirable vision which is actually realisable. It is all about having the confidence to regulate the food streams in that way and giving industry the confidence that the regulators can do it. I think that consumer confidence will then follow. People go off quite happily to Japan and other places that are doing this and eat pork, so it is not as though this is an impossible vision to realise.

In my contribution tonight, I mostly want to talk about the environmental damage that will occur if we do not change our attitude. First, I want to pick up something that my noble friend Lady Byford mentioned—the question of GM soya. I will be very sorry if this debate about food waste was in any way hijacked—I am certainly not suggesting that my noble friend was doing this—by those who want to promote the increased use of soya feed, whether or not it is GM. We cannot import GM soya into the EU at the moment, but this should not be seen as a marketing opportunity for GM feed producers to push their product, just because the non-GM soya has got so expensive. This is all about replacing the soya, and that is what I want to concentrate on: why we should be replacing it.

The ban on feeding food waste to livestock necessarily meant that Europe has had to increase imports of commercial livestock feeds, including soy meal, of which roughly 40 million tonnes are imported to Europe annually. The amount of land needed to produce soy for the European market since the ban on meat and bone meal in 1996 is roughly equal to the area of deforestation in the Brazilian rainforests since that date. That might be coincidence, but it is a very good example of this destruction. It is for this reason that the United Nations called on the EU to reconsider the overcautious legislation, concluding that encouraging the recycling of food waste into livestock feed could,

“contribute substantially to the feed supply, and by the same token release pressure on land”—

thereby reducing,

“biodiversity erosion, pollution and greenhouse gas emissions”.

Poultry feed accounts for more than half of all soya used in the UK livestock sector and much of this could be replaced by using food wastes, including processed animal proteins.

As well as land use causing deforestation, another knock-on effect is that of local farmers in Latin America who are evicted from their landholdings to make way for the large ranches and soya plantations. Last month, at the All-Party Group on Agro-Ecology, of which I must declare an interest as a co-chairman, we heard from the national co-ordinator of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil about the effect on families who not only lose their land but can no longer grow food for their communities.

In Paraguay, 2.5 million hectares of soil were planted in 2006-07. Friends of the Earth found that every year in Paraguay alone 9,000 rural families were evicted because of soya production. Therefore, those families are not producing food for themselves and their communities. I have seen for myself the importance of corn, rice and beans in the Latin American diet. That food production is being displaced by soya production and the effect is that families are no longer able to afford a basic nutrition basket.

It is certainly not just me who has made that link. Defra has made the link between what happens when we import so much soya feed and what happens on the ground in Latin America. Recently, the Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, announced that Britain would contribute £10 million to help to protect the Cerrado in Brazil. She said:

“The Cerrado is rich in biodiversity and yet, alarmingly, it has almost halved in size, because of wild fires and the demand for agricultural products”.

Because of time I will not go on with what she said, but she made a very good analysis of the problem. She spoke about the loss and in conclusion she said:

“We won’t succeed in tackling climate change unless we deal with deforestation”.

We really must wean ourselves off this extreme need for soya.

I should like to look at the points of resistance that allow us to throw away so much; that is, the FSA, the NFU, the supermarkets and the food processing industry. The FSA is tasked to be rigorous in its risk assessment but, in its recent analysis, it said that the risks to human health of feeding PAP to pigs and chickens was negligible. That does not suggest a high risk or even a medium risk; it is a negligible risk. It is probably the sort of equivalent risk to something that is very common and highly regulated—the spreading of sewage on farmland. The FSA’s conclusion was that the risks were negligible. But its board also did not look at the benefits in environmental terms of stopping some of the issues that I have mentioned, such as deforestation. That might be because it is not in its remit but in our globalised world where everything is linked, it is hard to think that it should not have had a view on that.

I am sorry to say that I found the NFU brief for this debate rather shocking. Most of its reasons for why this was not a good idea were not mentioned tonight. They included staff in supermarkets being less well informed and not understanding the importance of properly segregating the products. Furthermore, the NFU believes that pet pig owners might pose a problem. Finally, in this regard, it states:

“Should the focus become more about using pigs to dispose of waste, the level of ammonia and nitrogen excreted from pigs could increase”.

I think that the NFU has been missing the point. I would ask it to go back and look at some of the examples that the noble Baroness quoted of things that are happening abroad and think about whether it could not help the pig industry here by taking a bit more of a positive attitude.

Finally, WRAP, the supermarkets and the processors have made some very good steps with the Courtauld commitment. Phase 2, which is happening now, is all about achieving the more sustainable use of resources. Pretty much all our major supermarkets and processors are signed up that. Part of that commitment must be to address this issue and to make progress on it. So my question for the Minister is this: does he think the Government could help with the very unhelpful regulation on the one-roof policy, which means that if something is produced under the same geographical roof of an establishment that also deals with meat products, that is always going to be a huge hindrance? Is this not more about working towards a total separation plan and making sure that it is regulated and enforced? That is the way forward.

In conclusion, this is all about education in schools and getting our children to realise the effect of wasting anything. Some great examples can be found in the Food for Life Partnership in schools and by the Royal Horticultural Society. Earlier today a parliamentary delegation went down to Wisley to see some of its work with school children, who completely got the thing about, “If you have put all that effort into growing food, do not waste it”.