Agriculture and Food Industry

Baroness Parminter Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Parminter (LD)]

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Plumb, and I thank him for securing this debate this afternoon. It is testament both to the importance of the issue and the respect in which he is held around this House as a doughty champion of the countryside that he has secured so many speakers on a Thursday afternoon. I congratulate him.

He has done a very good job of outlining the economic contribution that the farming community in particular makes to our country, to which I would add the significant contribution of the food and drink industry. When we think of our great manufacturing sector, such as it is still in this country, we do not always think first of the food and drink industry, yet it accounts for more than 15% of our total manufacturing turnover in the United Kingdom and more than 400,000 jobs. That is a significant achievement, and one on which we would do well to reflect further.

If we are going to continue the successes of agriculture and of the food and drink industries, we will have to work hard to face the challenges around food security, as my noble friend Lord Plumb said. We have to feed 9 billion people by 2050 in a world constrained by climate change and the resource implications—the loss of nutrients in soil and loss of water—that our food and drink industries and our farming communities will have to contend with, if they are to produce the food that we are going to need in future. We need to find a new way in which to produce that food.

We hear a lot about “sustainable intensification”, which means different things to different people. For me, it means working with nature and the environment to conserve the resources that we will need in future—the soil and water—to grow the food that we will need. We will have to address not only the challenges of producing food more sustainably but the challenges of the effects of some poor diets on people in our country and around the world. It is a salutary fact that 40% of men and 30% of women in this country are overweight, and that one-third of all 10 to 11 year-olds are equally overweight. The fact that we are not feeding our nation healthy food and that at the same time we are struggling to provide the resources that our industries will need in future is something that the Government will have to take more of a lead on in future—linking the health agenda with the agenda for producing food sustainably. I do not say that our Government have not done anything; they obviously have done an awful lot. We have the agri-tech strategy and responsibility deals, but they are not brought together. We do not have a co-ordinated strategy for linking the work that we need to do on health and on producing food in a sustainable way. Therefore, we are not setting our industries and the farming community the clear agenda that they are crying out for.

We are also lagging behind in comparison to other parts of the world. While I know that many noble Lords would not wish us to be compared with what is being done in Nordic countries or within Brazil, there are many similarities between the UK and the Netherlands—not least a very similar agenda for reform of the European Union. There they have a very clear set of nutritional guidelines, which they use as a means to communicate with their public about what foods need to be eaten. They give their industry guidance as to what they think it should produce, and they equally have a very clear public procurement policy, which they use to drive forward the production and purchase of sustainable food.

The Government have a record of doing a number of different initiatives, such as the agri-tech strategy and the responsibility deal. In 2012, they launched the Green Food Project, which was a very welcome initiative, bringing together a large number of stakeholders in this field to look at the challenges that the food and agriculture industries face and to see whether we could find some common solutions. Those stakeholders included the NFU, the CLA, the Food and Drink Federation, EBLEX, WRAP, the Food Ethics Council and the WWF—a whole breadth of organisations involved in the very large food business field. That first report received a ministerial foreword and there were some very clear conclusions. When the report from the second year of the Green Food Project was released last summer, there was no ministerial foreword and no launch; I found it buried on the Defra website. There was no commitment to take forward any further action, and I found that a great pity—particularly since all those diverse groups together had come up with a set of principles to produce healthy and sustainable food to which they all jointly agreed.

There were eight simple principles to be used as a guide for outlining nutritional standards for our country and for driving important public procurement. Those eight principles included an agreement on moderating meat consumption and encouraging the production of plant-based foods. I remind noble Lords that that group included EBLEX, the lobbying and representative organisation for the beef and lamb sector, the WWF and the Food and Drink Federation. These groups, which would not normally come together, are in fact coming together under a government initiative and producing a clear and coherent set of principles to guide the industry in giving it a mandate to do something different about the food that it offers and equally to drive public procurement.

My worry is that the list that was produced by the group will sink without a trace. My understanding is that it went out for peer review. What do the Government intend to do with the set of principles that the Green Food Project steering group has drawn up? My understanding is that it could be buried in some website that Defra co-funds, but that it will not be used to drive forward a clear vision for the industry or drive forward procurement. That is a great pity, particularly since this week we saw the launch of the Government’s public procurement plan, which is a very welcome step forward. However, when it talks about some of the steps that we would like to see in procurement—and let us not forget that the public sector in the UK spends £1.2 billion on public procurement—it says nothing about meat moderation. Several of my colleagues might say that it is not the Government’s job to intervene in such a sensitive area, but this public procurement plan, which we launched this week, makes it clear that if you are in receipt of a government contract for food to serve meals, you have to provide fish twice a week, and one of those has to include oily fish. So it is prepared to say something about fish, but it should really say something about meat.

The Government have some initiatives in this field, but if we are to develop our food and drink industry properly we must make sure that we carry on with the work that we started with the Green Food Project and take it forward so that our industry can carry on in the way that we know it can and should.