Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for securing this debate and the amazing tour de force of her speech. Food security is a huge area, but she covered most of it and I shall not attempt to try to do the same. I am also glad to see my noble friend on the Front Bench; I hope he has a good deal of Araldite to keep him there a bit longer, because we need his experience and knowledge.

It is also a pleasure to welcome the recently published government food strategy. I should like to mention three aspects in particular: the commitments to maintain the current levels of domestic food production, which is very important; to a separate horticultural strategy; and—such good news to me—to develop a land-use strategy. At long last: we have been banging on about this for many years and have always had the thumbs down from Defra. At long last, the Government will produce a land-use strategy next year, and I look forward to it. However, I feel it is a bit of a cart before the horse, because the Government are half way through the ELMS programme, and we needed a land-use strategy before a policy for the land.

It is good to see the change in Defra’s approach, because the past decade has not been its finest. In the first part of the past decade, it flirted with sustainable intensification in agriculture. That followed Professor John Beddington’s Foresight report—many of your Lordships will remember it. No sooner had that gone cold and started to collect dust than the pendulum swung and Defra moved off in totally the opposite direction, on a rather nebulous path to sustainable agriculture. At long last, the pendulum is a little more central.

I fear that in the past few years, Defra has been too influenced by some NGOs and well-meaning environmentalists who have rather a picture postcard view of the country and what farming was about. Ideals were based on emotion rather than science and fact. I now want to concentrate on the importance of Defra making all its decisions on hard, provable science. Without that, we will not get the resilience and sustainability in our farming system that we so badly need, as just highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.

Let me start with production levels. I go back to the 1960s, when I was working on farms before I went to agricultural college. If we had kept the same yields as we achieved then, we would have to farm 85% of global land surface, rather than the 35% we do at the moment. That is a huge credit to our farmers, not just in this country but throughout the world, who have increased their production to keep us fed as they have. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude, and we rely on them to keep us fed in future. Can my noble friend confirm that the strategy set out by Henry Dimbleby in his National Food Strategy will be followed by the Government: that is, to have high-yield farming, low-intensity farming and natural habitat? It is important that there are these three different parts.

Conservation scientist Andrew Balmford said:

“Most species fare much better if habitats are left intact, which means reducing the space needed for farming. So areas that are farmed need to be as productive as we can possibly make them.”


That will be anathema to some people, but it is absolutely vital because we must improve the biodiversity. Is it possible to farm in the way that Henry Dimbleby suggested? It is; we have been doing so for 30 years at least. The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, in its Allerton project, have been doing exactly this. It has increased the number of farmland birds, productivity and the areas of land subject to wildlife and to low-intensity farming. It can be done, and I hope the Government will use that as a template for the future of farming in this country. That was a question I posed to my noble friend Lord Gardiner of Kimble when he was a Minister; I am glad to see him in the House. He did not give me an answer then, but I hope that my noble friend the Minister will give me an answer today.

It was the late Harold Macmillan who allegedly said, “Events, dear boy, events”. The question of Ukraine and what it has done to farming was mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, but it shows how resilient and adaptable we must be in the future, to adapt to all the new circumstances thrown at us.

My penultimate point is to ask my noble friend about the soil health action plan for England. Many of us were delighted when we got a commitment from my noble friend Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park that there would be a soil health action plan. Alas, Defra seems to have gone to sleep on it. It was promised to me in a Written Answer in the spring. Well, spring is a long time away. I have followed that up with Written Questions but there has been obfuscation. I wonder whether we were accidentally misled by my noble friend, or whether there is a new policy in Defra. Can my noble friend tell me what the up-to-date situation is?

In conclusion—this is all related to science—I pay a particular welcome to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown. Being a scientist, she is exactly the sort of person we need in this House, to help us and guide us through our deliberations. Some of our hard—perhaps crusty is the wrong word—farming and environmentalist noble Lords are in the Chamber at the moment, and the noble Baroness will get to know us all pretty well in a short time.