Food Security Policy

Baroness Sharp of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sharp of Guildford]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lady Miller for introducing this timely debate. I declare myself the fourth member of Sub-Committee D to be speaking in this debate.

I spent the first half of April in Egypt. While wondering about the degree to which methods of cultivation seemed to have changed very little over the past few millennia—donkeys still seem to be the main means of transport—I nevertheless found fascinating the narrow bands on each side of the floodplain of the Nile that had been the centre of civilisation three or four millennia ago. When we returned to the UK, there was an interesting programme on BBC Four, which I happened to see, about the sudden collapse of the first kingdom in about 2000 BC. What had been a relatively high level of civilisation suddenly disintegrated. Archaeologists are increasingly of the view that the reason was a major famine caused by the failure of the rains in the upper Nile valleys in what are now Uganda and Southern Sudan, which feed the Nile. Luxor, where we were, had not received any rain for 46 years, but the Nile had traditionally provided the fertility of the Nile valley.

When the Nile failed, the fertility of the valley failed. Hieroglyphs of that period, around 2000 BC, indicated that it was a very serious famine. They were stories about people having to resort to eating their own babies and years of famine—the sort of famines there are now in west Africa and the Horn of Africa, which the noble Lord, Lord Judd, spoke about. This lasted for something like 20 or 30 years—the sort of thing that the Murray-Darling valley in Australia has seen. In those days, of course, there were no global programmes to help. Today, we exist in a global world, but the issue of food security hit home, as did the degree to which crises of this sort destabilise political systems. There are lessons that we can learn today.

The Foresight programme and report, The Future of Food and Farming, put together the four issues that John Beddington, the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, talks about as his perfect storm: population growth, climate change, the exhaustion of easily accessible fossil fuel energy, and increasing competition for water resources. Above all is the issue of population growth—from 7 billion today to an expected 9 billion, or even more, in 2050.

The key question for food security is: will we be able to feed all these people? In the 20th century, when arguably we faced an equally fast growth in population, we were able to do so by pulling more land into cultivation by the very profligate use of fossil fuel fertilisers—fossil fuels in the form of fertiliser—which underpinned the green revolution, and by building huge dams such as the Aswan and Three Gorges dams to provide for irrigation.

However, none of this is possible any longer. We need our forests and wilderness areas to absorb our carbon dioxide emissions. We are running out of easily accessible fossil fuel energy. Water resources are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive to manage and climate change is causing total unpredictability in rainfall, periods of drought, and so forth.

Nevertheless, I suppose I am slightly surprised at how optimistic in some senses the Foresight exercise was. There were three main messages in the priority themes that it picked out. First, it is vital to spread best practice. Knowledge transfer and exchange are the key to this. One of the problems that we face—this has come out in what many noble Lords have said—is that we have the knowledge today but people are not using it. It is therefore vital that we develop forms of farm advice and advice systems that spread the knowledge that we have. It is not necessarily a question of developing GM, although that may play a part. We must disseminate best practice.

Secondly, we need to invest much more in research and development. The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, mentioned the study on innovation that we in Sub-Committee D made. Out of that came the fact that the EU spends €400 billion on the CAP and only €2 billion on research. This will rise to about €4 billion, but it will still be a miserable 1% of the total. The European Union target is to spend 3% of GDP on research, which would equate to something like €12 billion. The UK’s research effort is, in relative terms, lower than that of Germany or France. We have superb, leading-edge research institutions, but again we fall down very badly on dissemination.

The final issue, to which my noble friend Lady Parminter referred, is reducing waste. It is appalling that more than 30% of the food produced in the world is wasted. The noble Lord, Lord Stern, spoke about the methods by which that waste could be easily prevented. So much could be used to feed those who are undernourished.

There are questions that we need to put to the Minister. Are we doing enough to promote research and development? Are we doing enough to disseminate knowledge and develop farm advisory systems? Are we doing enough both at home and in international circles to make sure that things are done? There is a great danger of feeling satisfied by coming to agreements in talking shops; the noble Lords, Lord Judd and Lord Stern, instanced the promises made in the G8 summit that were not met. What we are desperately looking for, both in this area and that of climate change, is leadership—not only from our Government but in the wider world—to try to get things done, as distinct from just talking about them.