Agriculture Bill

Earl of Dundee Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 14th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook. I second his comments about the importance of food security and its absence from the Bill at present. It is also a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering. I commend Amendment 35 in her name for its focus on food security. One of the major roles of the Government must be to ensure that people can eat. I also commend Amendments 46 and 70, which are supported by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb.

I shall speak chiefly to Amendment 47, in my name, which my noble friend Lady Jones, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and the noble Lord, Lord Judd, have kindly backed. I am also grateful that in our discussions last week, the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville and Lady Jones of Whitchurch, commenting on the linked Amendment 77, expressed support for the principle of this amendment and for the Bill to cover this explicitly.

To some degree, this amendment is a rebuttal of the statements made last week by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, suggesting that outdoor livestock production is not giving us enough food and, implicitly, that factory farming is essential. That suggests that production of meat is one of our problems, which is clearly not the case. In fact, we have meat production which is largely food waste. I am talking about factory farming, of course—feeding large quantities of perfectly edible grains, oils and proteins to produce far smaller quantities of meat. This is something we can no longer afford.

Land is a scarce resource, as the Government acknowledged last week. We cannot afford to waste it growing food that is immediately fed to animals, as we currently do with about 20% of farmland. There is an argument for small quantities of winter feed for predominately pastured animals, but that is very different from the vast chicken sheds, piggeries and factory dairies that we have seen expanding in the UK in recent years. The problem with them is not simply food waste, or the failure to produce healthy food. I often come under attack from people who wave a finger at me and say, “The Green Party wants people to eat less meat, isn’t that terrible?” Usually I point to those well-known radical environmentalists of the British Medical Association, which also says that we need far less meat in the British diet and meat of a far higher quality. As the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, said last week, this is a very strong medical recommendation.

The noble Baroness also alluded to the crucial issue of antimicrobial resistance, something we hear concern about from all sides of politics, including the former Prime Minister David Cameron, who some years ago made it the subject of a major speech. In the past week, we have seen the chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline identify antimicrobial resistance as a predictable threat to global health on the same scale as Covid-19.

Sadly, Covid-19 has made all too clear the need to think about the welfare of workers, not only on factory farms but in the giant, fast-moving, mass-production abattoirs. There is also the health of our environment, including dead zones in our oceans and rivers from nitrogen pollution, and the air pollution problems on which my noble friend Lady Jones has tabled amendments.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was right that we need protein. That is where the positive side of this amendment comes in, as it seeks to promote a shift to plant-based food production, particularly—one of the things that we have seen some progress on, but it must be much faster—the production of protein crops. It is interesting that this also means the potential for farmers to diversify into different crops, reducing risk. Of course, growing nitrogen-fixing crops often reduces or ends the need to rely on artificial fertilisers, with all the other benefits that have been rehearsed in this debate.

This amendment says, “We want to see the Agriculture Bill positively promote crops that are good for the environment, good for people’s health and good for farmers’ incomes and farm security.” I need to point to the possibilities of a pretty small-scale operation. A wonderful company called Hodmedod’s, which is very much focused on promoting different crops and restoring historical ones, recently grew lentils in the UK for the first time in quite some time. I also learned that it has been promoting carlin peas, which, as I learned in an internet discussion, are apparently a traditional cultural bar snack in Lancashire. Rather than peanuts, we could have local carlin, or parched, peas. This reminds us that we can have cultural restoration as well as the restoration of our health, well-being, soils and food. I commend Amendment 47 to the House.

I was also pleased to attach my name to Amendment 71, tabled by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and supported by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. It would introduce a requirement to support healthy and nutritious food and, implicitly, avoid supporting unhealthy food. It is clear that our global food system, of which the UK is a closely enmeshed part, is entirely broken. Last year, before Covid, 690 million malnourished people were unable to get the basic calories they needed; a similar number are obese, unable to get the healthy food they need, and billions more are on that route. Yet we have just seen a truly tragic figure in the UK: the number of cases of children admitted to hospital suffering from malnutrition has doubled in the past six months to 2,500—and that was with only two-thirds of NHS trusts reporting. I hope that, in responding, the Government will say that it is their business to ensure that the UK meets the second sustainable development goal: zero hunger. Part of that is having a healthy diet, not simply an adequate number of calories. We not on track to meet that goal by 2030. In his response, I hope that the Minister will tell us how the Government hope to achieve that goal if they are not intending to use the Agriculture Bill to do so.

Amendment 75—tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and backed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Meacher and Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville—seeks to improve public health by increasing the availability, affordability, diversity, quality and marketing of fruit, vegetables and pulses. I want to focus on marketing in particular. The World Cancer Research Fund has said that countries, including the UK, are failing to protect children from the effects of “harmful” junk food marketing. Children are having unhealthy food promoted to them but are not seeing the promotion of healthy food; the World Cancer Research Fund says that this is a human rights issue.

Finally, Amendment 75 refers to reducing the use of antibiotics and related veterinary products. I have been contacted by members of the public and industry asking what “related veterinary product” refers to; I would point to anthelmintics, in particular their impact on dung fauna and on insects on land and in watercourses. I do not consider this amendment as covering vaccines. I also note the similarity between this amendment and my Amendment 49, which would put a similar provision in Clause 1. If the EU target is for a 50% reduction in pesticide use in a decade and if the UK is to be world-leading in that regard, how will we get to that standard if not through the Agriculture Bill?

[The Earl of Dundee (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my own business interest in farming as already detailed in the register. In this group, I support Amendments 35, 36, 60, 69 and 71. All of them emphasise growing healthy and nutritious food. That also means growing and offering a rather better selection of food than we now do. Therefore, I am also in favour of Amendment 47 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, which advocates a shift in direction to achieve improved diets—still containing, but much less dominated by, animal products. I also support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, which urges more food production in urban areas.

Amendment 63 in my name would encourage urban and peri-urban growing enterprises to provide fresh local produce close to the market where it is required. I hope that my noble friend the Minister agrees that the Secretary of State might provide incentives accordingly. During the coronavirus pandemic, we have witnessed the importance of food security and local supply chains delivering food to where it is needed. Farming endeavours within conurbations can have an immediate and beneficial impact on supply chains, responding accurately to local demands. This contrasts with large supermarket chains sourcing goods from overseas and adding to the carbon footprint of such produce through transport costs.

Small-scale intensive food production uses little space yet reveals a high yield per acre as well-evidenced in the Netherlands. Those examples are particularly suited to towns and cities where ground is in short supply. Green-belt areas could also be freed up for such endeavours. They would also offer quality outdoor employment for people in urban environments.

Some of these projects might fulfil a social purpose too: for instance, city farms to educate children about animals and agriculture; and allotments, to which the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, has already referred, which can teach people about food production at the same time as allowing and encouraging them to grow their own food. Not least, they also enable more green areas in cities for the benefit of those living there.

[The Earl of Devon [V]]

My Lords, I will endeavour to be brief: we have an awful lot to get through. I am grateful to see Clause 1(4) in the Bill. It was remarkable that, in its early iterations, a Bill about agriculture had no specific reference to the provision of food. My Amendment 71 would merely improve upon that provision of food by the specification that it should be both “healthy and nutritious”.

I am grateful for the support of the noble Baronesses, Lady Bakewell and Lady Bennett, on this amendment. I understand that all the amendments in this group are directed to a very similar goal. There is clearly strong support across the Committee for making sure that the food whose production we are encouraging is healthy and nutritious, and not the sort of food that causes ill-health, obesity and so many other issues that are being brought into full focus with the onslaught of coronavirus. At this time, of all times, it has become clear that the health and well-being of our nation are a result of the healthiness and nutrition of the food that we eat. This is therefore not just about agriculture; it goes to a much wider issue.

Some may say that the health and nutrition of the food could be secured by the fact that the clause provides that it must be environmentally sustainable. Of course, the two things are vastly different. It is perfectly possible to produce food in an environmentally sustainable way and it not be healthy and nutritious. There has been much talk over recent days of insect farming and novel agritech. You could certainly see insect farming as a very environmentally sustainable means of farming. It is the feeding of waste product, typically to insect larvae, which are then mashed up for their protein. That is the production of food in a very environmentally sustainable way, but I am not sure that it is either healthy or nutritious food, albeit it has an important role to play in the feeding of fish, for example, and other larger animals.