Agriculture and Horticulture

Countess of Mar Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Countess of Mar (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, for bringing this very important subject to our attention today. I declare my interests as recorded in the register. My husband owns a small farm in Worcestershire, for which we receive about one-thirteenth of the £13,000 average CAP payment. I am also co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology for Sustainable Food and Farming.

While I was thinking about writing this speech, my mind went back to my first jobs on farms in the mid to late 1950s—I cannot believe it was 60 years ago. I recall long hours of back-breaking work hand-weeding acres of kale in the pouring rain, spreading lime, slag and farmyard manure on the fields for fertiliser and milking cows in their stalls, initially by hand, but later by machine, at 6 am each morning and again 12 hours later. After I married, I would go strawberry picking in the summer and apple picking in the autumn. Those jobs are now taken almost entirely by our eastern European friends, and I wonder what has happened to the British workforce in this field.

Scientific and technological developments and, at times, sheer necessity have changed the world of British agriculture and horticulture from small, mainly family units, which were labour-intensive and marginally productive, to, with some exceptions, large, low-labour, high-capital industrialised units with some of the highest productivity levels in the world. We have looked west to Canada and the USA, where farmers have vast tracts of uniform land, and have tried to emulate their monocropping practices, albeit on a smaller scale, particularly in eastern England. However, Britain is a small country with hugely varying geographical features, climate and soil conditions, not necessarily suited to US methods.

A section of the scientific and farming community is asking us to emulate the States further by allowing genetically modified crops to be grown in the UK. Our farmers and horticulturalists have, with EU encouragement and education, made steady advances in reducing pesticide and fertiliser inputs to those deemed essential, and they have steadily improved yields. Here, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Byford—whom I call my friend; we have worked together for so many years—for her work with LEAF, which has certainly made huge advances.

There is a risk that if we introduce GM pest and herbicide-resistant crops, those advances will be reversed. This reversal is a feature of so-called Roundup-ready GM soya. Since an initial increase in productivity when GM crops were first introduced, crop yields have become highly variable and have in some cases declined, sometimes below pre-GM levels. More than 20 weed species have become resistant to Roundup, despite application rates that have risen nearly 15-fold since GM soya was introduced in 1996 to 122.5 million pounds in 2014, the latest date for which EPA figures are available.

To accommodate this, maximum residue levels for glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, in animal and human foods have been steadily increased, despite safety concerns. Major seed companies have now developed stacked varieties of soya that are tolerant to at least two herbicides, but I have very little doubt that Mother Nature will find her way around these, too.

Those scientists who develop GM seeds and plants seem to have totally ignored their effect on the environment, or on the health of humans and animals who consume the crops produced. They emphasise the accuracy and simplicity of their procedures while ignoring the complexity and interdependence that exists within the genome. We still do not understand fully the relationship between genes and the environment. To quote Jonathan Latham,

“a defined, discrete or simple pathway from gene to trait probably never exists. Most gene function is mediated murkily through highly complex biochemical and other networks that depend on many conditional factors, such as the presence of other genes and their variants, on the environment, on the age of the organism, on chance, and so forth”.

US regulators have taken the word of the corporations that their GM products are substantially equivalent to their non-GM counterparts without testing the veracity of their assertions. There have been very few truly independent studies of the safety of GM foods. We frequently hear, as my noble friend the Duke of Somerset said, that millions of Americans have been eating these foods for 20 years with no ill effects, but there have been no post-marketing surveillance or epidemiological surveys to prove this assertion one way or the other. American consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they are eating is GM unless they deliberately buy organic food.

We know that many studies have shown that glyphosate is strongly associated—I repeat, strongly associated—with increased birth defects, neurological developmental problems in children, kidney failure and cancer. It is genotoxic. It is believed to attack the beneficial organisms in the human digestive system, causing serious health problems, although much more research is necessary to prove this and other hypotheses. It is also a powerful biocide which encourages microbial plant pathogens and mycotoxins to develop.

There is a major concern about the threat of major widespread contamination of the countryside. It is clear that some GM crops pose a threat, but not all. The lesson of the Government’s own farm-scale evaluation trials should be heeded. The key one was that contamination was inevitable with some crops. Currently there is no effective system in place for post-marketing surveillance to measure the effects of GM releases, though both the UK Government and the EU have acknowledged the need for such monitoring. It could be said that there is no need for monitoring because there has been no commercial cropping, but if GM varieties of, say, oilseed rape, cereals or grasses are to be introduced, a robust monitoring system is essential.

There is a tendency to the simplistic view that agricultural science is the equivalent of genetic modification and intensive chemical farming. Far from men and women in white coats working in laboratories on trial plots, there are many agriecological, agriforestry and organic farmers who have an intimate scientific knowledge of the farming, ecological and environmental systems in which they operate. Far from the objectors to the currently available GM seeds being anti-science, I believe they have very valid scientific reasons for voicing their concern.

These advances are proving economically important to many family and small farms, as well as to many large-scale producers that serve local markets, UK markets such as supermarkets and, especially in the case of dairy products, the export market. The UK organic market, according to the Soil Association’s 2016 report, showed growth of 4.9% and a value of £1.95 billion. We are now on the threshold of major change in the way we are being encouraged to farm as members of the EU, changes that I hope we will embrace with enthusiasm and courage as well as a modicum of caution. I suggest to the Minister that he reads The Precautionary Principle (With Application to Genetic Modification of Organisms) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It provides a very balanced method for the application of the principle, though I must confess that the mathematics got the better of me. We are constantly reminded that we will need to feed 9.5 billion people by 2050. That reminder is coupled with the statement that the only way we will succeed is by embracing genetic modification. I am neither anti-GM nor anti-science. If it could be shown that, instead of being beneficial solely to the great corporations that promote it, GM was both beneficial and safe for humans, animals and the environment, I would happily embrace it.

Currently, agritech strategy totally, and government funding largely, ignores the research and development needs of the sector. In what is undoubtedly our most important industry, the many years of neglect have resulted in the closure of land-based university departments and colleges with a loss of soil and plant scientists—those young people who, as we have heard today, the research establishments need to replace others as they retire.

British expertise in this field was once regarded as the best in the world. Just after the Second World War, we were 80% self-sufficient in food. That is now down to 62%. Unless we recognise the importance of agriculture, not just to the rural community but to the whole of our nation, we will be in danger of becoming the equivalent of a third world country. Commercialisation or development pathways for direct rural development are not particularly considered in funding allocations, or, if they are, they are not transparent. Alternative approaches that rural communities might consider more beneficial to the development of the rural economy are not set against any proposal and considered. It is not just a matter of deficit in transparency; it is a deficiency in thinking about how science can engage communities and, through that engagement, be more effective.

Our farmers have the skills, energy, ingenuity and motivation to be the best. Far from wallowing in doom and gloom, let us harness those assets and show the world what we can do. However, we need a supportive Government.