Sustainable Livestock Bill
Debate between Christopher Chope and James Paice(14 years ago)
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The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)
May I start by reminding the House of my interests, as declared in the register?
I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Robert Flello) on drawing second place, I believe, in the ballot. Many of us have been in the House far longer and have never got on the list at all, and there is always an element of envy when people manage to get a high place on it in their very first Parliament.
As the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain) said, the Bill provides the opportunity for a hugely important debate. I hope the House will forgive me if I spend some time going through a number of related matters and explaining what the Government are already undertaking. Before doing so, may I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on what I believe is his first speech at the Dispatch Box? He will forgive me if I am mistaken, but it is certainly the first one opposite me. He made a very good speech, and I agreed with virtually everything he said, which will probably finish his political career completely. The exception was his brave effort to say that the Bill would help. I could see an element of fence-sitting there—I hope it was not too painful.
The hon. Gentleman rightly referred to the importance of agriculture as an industry and to the increasing world demand for food. He clearly agreed with a number of my hon. Friends, who have said that simply pushing for less meat-eating is not the way forward, given the increased demand elsewhere. He rightly said that agricultural growth was the best form of economic growth in poorer countries, and mentioned the 20% fall in agricultural emissions, which is considerably better than in many other sectors. Those were all good points on which I support him entirely. I hope he will forgive me if I chide him slightly by asking why, if the Opposition are so supportive of the Bill, the Labour Government opposed it when it was presented by my then hon. Friend Peter Ainsworth. No doubt they are learning by their mistakes, for which we must all be grateful.
This has been a good debate, and none of us could argue that the sustainability of the UK livestock system is of anything but prime importance to everybody. It has, however, given rise to a number of what I can only call myths and misunderstandings about today’s livestock industry. For a start, there has been a lot of talk about large-scale dairy enterprises. The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) referred to my remarks at a previous Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Question Time. I am grateful that she remembers them five weeks after I made them—that does not happen very often, so I will bask in the reflected glory. When we discuss the matter, we need to know certain facts. It is not for the Government to be for or against large-scale dairies, and the particular case in question is subject to a planning application, but I hope that the debate can be held on the basis of facts.
The reality is that the animals at the proposed 8,000-unit diary will still be fed largely on roughage, as are all ruminants. The fact is that ruminants—cattle and sheep—cannot survive on all-cereal diets, because their digestive systems cannot cope. They must have silage, grass, hay or something similar as a substantial part of their diet. The difference with the proposition at Nocton is that the grass or silage will be brought to the animals; they will not go out to it, although they will still be on it.
Someone referred to the NFU briefing, and the reality is that ruminant diets contain on average only about 3% soya bean. The fact that a dairy unit is large does not mean that it will use any more soya per cow than a small dairy unit. As I said in my intervention, the vast bulk of soya feeding, and indeed grain feeding, goes on in the pig and poultry sectors, where the livestock cannot live on anything else. Pigs will eat a bit of grass, but they cannot extract the nutrients from it, and poultry, of course, feed on seeds—hence their diet of grain, nuts and things like that, certainly in the wild. If we try to curtail the use of soya or grain, it is the intensive white-meat sector—the pig and poultry sectors—that will be most affected.
As a number of colleagues have said, the livestock sector accounts for more than half the £20 billion gross output of UK agriculture as a whole. That primary production is part of the biggest manufacturing industry in this country. The hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) is no longer in the Chamber, but he made a pertinent point about the importance of domestic food production. He referred to high-quality, traceable and nutritious food. The word “traceable” is one we must spend a moment on, because the more food that comes from abroad, the harder the challenge of ensuring traceability becomes. As we all know, traceability is critical to food safety and production standards.
The food manufacturing industry employs almost 400,000 people and contributes £20 billon in gross value added. Unless our farming industry produces the raw materials for that industry, we will lose that manufacturing sector as well as our farming sector.
As several hon. Members on both sides of the debate have said, the contribution made by farming is about much more than simply food; it is about creating and maintaining our landscapes and our biodiversity, as well as about our food security. Indeed, it is also about the viability of many of our rural communities, because more remote communities tend to be in areas where livestock is the only form of production possible.
I want to re-emphasise a point that I made earlier, because there is a belief on both sides of the House that if we stopped importing soya, all the stock would somehow go out on to grass and we could return to the chocolate-box days when there were cows in every field. That is not the reality. Cattle is not the sector where the majority of grain and soya is used.
Like everybody in the Chamber, the Government wholly accept and share the objectives and aspiration in the Bill, which is about ensuring the sustainability of our livestock industry, but it is not right to try to do that through a regulatory framework, as the Bill does.
Mr Chope
As my hon. Friend said, there is a public misconception about the link between soya imports and large-scale dairy units. What is his Department doing to put the public right on that and to remove that public misconception? Obviously, his speech today is helping, but what else can his Department do?
Mr Paice
It is not for the Government, directly, to say that one form of production is right and that another is wrong. What matters most—I will come to this in a minute—is that consumers are properly informed about how and where their food is produced. They can then make the right judgment according to their own views and beliefs.
Mr Paice
I will indeed, but perhaps my hon. Friend will bear with me until I get to that point in my remarks.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South slightly chided the Government when he said that our structural reform business plan contained no reference to the use of soya, yet there is no reference to it in the Bill. However, the Government’s business plan has a priority of supporting a competitive and sustainable British food and farming industry. That is our No. 1 objective. Alongside it go issues such as enhancing the environment and biodiversity to improve quality of life and support a strong and sustainable green economy that is resilient to climate change. It cannot be made any more obvious that a sustainable livestock industry sits clearly in that framework of ambition.
We support a sustainable future for livestock farming and food production in which the whole chain—the farmers and their representative organisations, food chain businesses, consumers and the Government—plays its part by operating efficiently, sharing information and learning, and, as the hon. Member for Glasgow North East said, eliminating waste. However, I emphasise that we do not believe that the best way of going about that is through the regulatory approach in the Bill, or even, as some have suggested, through a soundbite approach of giving the Secretary of State a duty to ensure the sustainability of the industry. Clearly, that is impossible for any Secretary of State; it flies in the face of common sense.
There has been some debate about the scope of the Bill. Hon. Members have referred to the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland are excluded, yet clause 5 implies that Wales is included. That is simply another fundamentally flawed aspect of the Bill, because agriculture and sustainability are devolved to the Welsh Assembly.
Taking the matter forward requires clear resolve and determination from the Government. It requires a resolution that we will work with industry in partnership as it delivers its commitments and, when necessary, take steps to ensure that those commitments are fulfilled.
We also need the ambition to realise that Government do not have all the answers. The Government have never pretended—and will never pretend—to know all the answers to everything. It is for those with the best knowledge of their businesses and activities to devise solutions. That is why I am happy today to offer a different approach from the detailed prescription in the Bill, which sets out how and when the Secretary of State should consult and so on. I want to make the Bill’s promoter and sponsors a genuine offer from the Government. I invite them to participate in a broad conference of all those concerned with the sustainability of the livestock industry, to be held early next year, and convened and run by stakeholders in the industry. It will reflect on and debate the activities that are already under way in the livestock sectors, and consider what has been achieved and what remains to be done. I will expand on that shortly.
I shall outline some of the activity that is already taking place and the Government’s approach. Like the previous Government, we believe that a partnership approach is right. First and foremost, I want to show that we can trust farmers to do the right thing. If we trust people, they must accept responsibility. The UK livestock industry is showing its leadership and commitment to operating sustainably. The dairy supply chain forum’s milk road map is a good example of what can be achieved through bringing producers, processors and retailers together to commit themselves publicly to milestones for more sustainable operation on, for example, dairy farm land, and in environmental stewardship, nutrient planning, recycled plastic milk bottles and so on. I look forward to seeing the new targets for sustainability in the updated road map when it is published next spring.
The hon. Member for Glasgow North East referred to the pig sector and the work it has done in producing its own product road maps. The beef and sheep sectors are also working to produce road maps to provide frameworks for measuring the sustainability of their operations. I am genuinely encouraged by their commitment to developing supply-chain approaches to sustainability. The Government will work closely with each of those sectors to encourage the agricultural industry in partnership in England to implement the reductions in on-farm greenhouse gas emissions, which were set out in the frameworks for action earlier this year.
There are other areas where the Government can and do help in respect of the subject matter of the Bill. On public procurement, which was mentioned in the debate, we are developing Government buying standards for food. They will be mandatory for central Government and our agencies, and we will promote them to the wider public sector. The standards will set a clear definition of healthy and sustainable food procurement and will allow us to lead by example in influencing procurement practice.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) said, labelling is also a key priority for the Government. Ensuring the integrity of the information that labels provide to consumers is crucial to a sustainable livestock industry. That is why the Secretary of State and I want to ensure that unprocessed meat is clearly labelled with the country of origin and information on where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered. We also want to ensure that processed foods that are labelled as made in the UK show the origin of their main ingredients if they come from outside the UK. Again, that is to avoid any confusion for the consumer. I am very encouraged by the response that I have had from the food supply chain businesses in developing the principles in that voluntary code, but more work remains to be done to ensure clarity for consumers, and the Government have always made it clear that we reserve the right to legislate if we cannot achieve what we want voluntarily.
Tackling food waste is a Government priority. The Secretary of State has already announced a thorough review of all aspects of waste policy and delivery in England, including household and business waste and arrangements for recycling collection. The hon. Member for Glasgow North East referred to anaerobic digestion. We want to see a big increase in renewable energy from anaerobic digestion of both agricultural and human waste. We are working on the steps to achieve that through the rural development programme, which will knit in with the feed-in tariff system. DEFRA’s support for a sustainable livestock industry is, I believe, shown through its commitment of significant resources to research to improve our knowledge base of what works.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South, among others, mentioned soya, but we need to be clear what we are talking about. We import something like 2.2 million tonnes of soya bean meal, and 0.8 million tonnes of soya beans—a total of 3 million tonnes. Of course, not all of that is for animal feed. Virtually all our processed food—soya is a major ingredient of vegetarian food—contains soya. Not all soya is fed to stock. In fact, about two thirds of all our manufactured food products contain derivatives of, or ingredients made from, soya. Nevertheless, the debate has focused on the livestock use of soya.
The 3 million tonnes should be seen in the context of current UK cropping and we must look at the implications of the ultimate objective of the Bill, which is to produce all our protein within the UK. A yield of 5 tonnes per hectare of the equivalent of soya—the nearest we have are dried peas and beans, which we already grow—is quite high, but with that assumption, the 3 million tonnes of soya imports equate to 600,000 hectares of British farmland. We currently grow about 1.8 million hectares of wheat, just over 1.1 million hectares of barley, 581,000 thousand hectares of rape and only 233,000 hectares of peas and beans. It does not take much working out to see that if we were to replace that soya import, our cropping practices would need to undergo a massive change, with the consequential increase in imports of whatever crop is displaced to grow some form of protein to replace soya.
What we are doing as a Government is to co-fund research with the livestock industry on the environmental consequences of replacing soya with home-grown legumes in diets—for pigs particularly—and on the life-cycle analysis of poultry production systems, on an analysis of nutrition regimes for ruminants to reduce greenhouse gases, and on work to improve the welfare and health of dairy cows, including in the large-scale units that we have debated at other times.
Mr Chope
Has my hon. Friend seen the report “Pastures New—A Sustainable Future for Meat and Dairy Farming”, produced by Friends of the Earth? In it, quoting research by the Royal Agricultural College, Friends of the Earth says that we could use 2.25 million hectares of land to provide crops as an alternative to soya imports, rather than the lower figure to which my hon. Friend referred.
Mr Paice
I do not think I have actually seen that figure, but if it is to be taken as the correct figure, that is half our arable land. So the increase in imports of all the crops that would be displaced by that crop would obviously be dramatic and would have other implications; we would probably have another Bill trying to stop that.
On top of the research that I referred to, we are committed to tackling the deforestation that the Bill rightly aims to reduce, and which has accompanied some soya production. But we must recognise that soya consumption is not all about livestock. DEFRA is leading a programme of work, with businesses and non-governmental organisations, on another major food ingredient that has not been debated this morning—palm oil. We want to support production without the forest footprint of replacing rain forest with palm oil production.
We are also working closely with our European and other international partners. Much has been made of Brazil; in particular we are working with that country to tackle the drivers of deforestation. We are also working with EU partners to tackle illegal logging, which destroys forests and biodiversity and contributes, as we know, to CO2 emissions.
Mr Chope
The hon. Gentleman is usurping the position that should be occupied by his hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent South. I hope that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South will have a chance to respond to the debate and to explain to Members who are interested in the subject whether the Minister’s offer is a good one, and whether, on the basis of it, he wishes to seek leave to withdraw the Bill.
I shall give way to the hon. Gentleman if he wishes to tell me that he wants to withdraw the Bill, because we can then move on to the next business, but I cannot force him to intervene. I am giving him the opportunity to do so, but he is declining. The hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) knows very well the procedures of the House and exactly what the Bill’s promoter and sponsors can and, perhaps, will do between now and half-past 2 if they do not want to accept the Minister’s offer.
Considering that my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North spoke for an hour and a quarter, I am just getting into the beginnings of my contribution. I thought that it would be helpful not to make a speech de novo, but to make a speech that built on what my hon. Friend the Minister said. We are meant to be having a debate rather than a dialogue of the deaf, and it is a pity that at the moment there is no indication that any more Opposition Members want to engage in it.
My hon. Friend the Minister went on to say that he was keen to ensure that the Government introduce mandatory standards for the public procurement of food, but I am not sure that I am. I can understand the desire in relation to Departments, but not in relation to going further and trying to impose such a demand on the whole public sector.
Mr Paice
If I did not make it clear at the time to my hon. Friend, I should like to clarify the Government’s proposal. The guidelines would be mandatory on central Government and their agencies; local government and other aspects of the public sector would be encouraged to adopt them, but they would not be mandated.
Mr Chope
I am most encouraged by my hon. Friend’s response. I am glad that he recognises that it would be a mistake to impose on local government and other parts of the public sector.
My hon. Friend went on to talk about labelling. I agree wholeheartedly that we should try to get better labelling, but I fear that unless we can renegotiate our position in relation to the European Union, we will not be able to do that as easily or quickly as my hon. Friend would like.
I still do not understand why we are not able to feed food waste to pigs, as we always used to. There was an unnecessary health scare about all that, and it would surely be much better if we fed our food waste to pigs, rather than putting it into landfill or disposing of it in some other way. I hope that in due course the Government will readdress that issue.
Pigs will eat almost anything. As you may recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, it was not that long ago that a citizen was murdered in Wimbledon and it was discovered that his body had been fed to pigs. I am sure that you will be advised that that point is far outside the remit of the Bill, and, funnily enough, dealing with such issues will not be one of the burdens put on the Minister if the Bill passes into law. That is fair enough. I am illustrating the point that pigs are omnivores. It is a pity that we do not allow pigs to devour food waste and thereby the reduce the amount of soya that they consume.