Agriculture: Global Food Security

Earl of Sandwich Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Sandwich]

My Lords, it may be appropriate for a Sandwich to follow both chicken and egg. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, who is as conscientious now as she was in opposition in bringing these issues forward. My name may be for ever associated with fast food, and I have to declare an interest in both agriculture and the food industry, but, as the noble Baroness knows, today I shall concentrate on world food issues.

Most of us are fortunate to live in rural Britain and not in parts of the world where people are starving. Yet, the noble Baroness has already described the shrinking production and income, and the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, has said that farming is out of balance. Farmers in the West Country near to where I live face severe droughts this week, in spite of the rainfall, while being urged to maintain or increase production for the benefit of mankind.

Feeding the hungry also costs lives. Across the world in southern Sudan, three weeks ago a senior programme assistant of the World Food Programme was killed in an ambush when his vehicle was attacked. He leaves behind a wife and two children. Every year, dozens of aid workers and their drivers are killed, and hundreds of lorries are hijacked or destroyed. That is the price of bringing food to the hungry during conflict, and perhaps it should be costed as part of the waste of food in the world.

Sudan is the World Food Programme’s largest mission. It brings food to up to 6 million people, including those on the front line in Darfur, Abyei and several other areas of conflict. In the south, it is currently providing food assistance to 1.5 million people, including returnees to the south and communities recovering from decades of instability and conflict.

Another 5 million are awaiting food in the Horn of Africa this year, but here the story is a little better. Following the drought in east Africa two years ago, there were areas of surplus in Kenya, Uganda and even Ethiopia last year, and the WFP was able to buy grain from all three countries at a value of $139 million. Therefore, with Zimbabwe still out of the grain market, it is a relief to see surpluses coming from Africa, especially east Africa.

I was in northern Ethiopia in March and, although I saw ox-ploughs and drills in action on semi-arid land, there is now concern that the current long rains are below normal. In some areas, the maize price is going up from 25 to 120 per cent, and cereal prices may increase by 40 to 50 per cent, compounded by rising fuel prices.

The Foresight report is an authoritative document and benefits from the wisdom of both farming and international development experts being brought together—people such as Dr Camilla Toulmin, who has vast experience of the environment and development. The report says that our present system is unsustainable, and the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, has already described the need for sustainable intensification. On a global level, we have more than 900 million hungry people to feed out of a total population of 7 billion, and that may reach 9 billion by 2050. Incidentally, considering that it is the lunch hour, it is worth mentioning that perhaps 1 billion people overeat and that the problem of obesity should also be addressed.

I was glad to read in the CLA briefing for today that its emphasis is on maintaining, not increasing, productivity. We all remember the rush to use those embarrassing subsidised grain surpluses incurred at that time, with the farmers’ Send a Tonne to Africa campaign, and a well known Cambridgeshire farmer actually following his surpluses out to Eritrea. In the 1970s, when I first joined Christian Aid, aid agencies were still paying for Land Rovers full of grain to cross the desert to reach the starving.

Now, the crisis seems further away. The surpluses have gone and we speak in more measured tones about the need to sustain and broaden our own agriculture and support the “greening” of the CAP. However, there is no less urgency to feed the world. It is the language that has changed and the questions now, both here and in developing countries, are all about inputs, GM crops, biofuels, more applied research and the careful handling of natural resources.

On GM and fertilisers, like the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, I still have misgivings about the concept of the highly irrigated green revolution because of the amount of irrigation and inputs that it requires and the social divisions it can cause. It is all right for the Punjab but not for most of the Deccan, for example, and I doubt whether it would pass the stringent tests of the Foresight report in terms of carbon emissions. As the noble Baroness said, there are many available alternatives and dry-land farming is now a highly developed and respectable science which benefits from research right across Africa and India. I am not a biofuels enthusiast either because of the amount of land and forest they consume in countries such as Brazil where the sugar industry is based literally on the backs of forced migrant labour. I hope that Africa does not follow Brazil down that route.

I notice in looking at the DfID website that while climate and environment is one of the emerging policy areas, agriculture is not. It seems that the first millennium development goal, eradicating poverty and hunger, will not be met in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. Investment in agriculture in Africa, which also means infrastructure—especially rural roads and bringing more land into production—has been long neglected and is still at a very low level. I was encouraged by the conclusion in the Foresight report that there was a lot of potential in Africa and that investment is recovering. However, DfID estimates that with a 2 degree increase in temperature, up to 400 million could be at risk of hunger and up to 2 billion could be short of water. I suspect that these are not new numbers. Most of these people are already included in the world’s hungry. Perhaps these alarming figures will be a catalyst to getting more investment in water conservation and rain-fed agriculture.

A lot of sensible, practical agriculture, of the kind already undertaken out of necessity by the poorest communities, can be done under the heading of climate change. It is the same old story under a new environmental label. To take, for instance, Ethiopia, in much of sub-Saharan Africa and the arid central belt in India, stone walls, terracing and tree-planting are essential, and have been for many years, to prevent erosion and deforestation. DfID says that it is climate-proofing all its aid programmes, and this is also the EU Commission’s policy. The same is true of the CAP. We are relabelling farming as sustainable agriculture and attempting to move further away from outright productivity. It is difficult and the Minister will agree that we are in a dilemma here. We are entering discussion on the EU financial framework from 2014 and there is very little room for manoeuvre. Will the Government, as our EU Committee has recommended, move away from direct and environmental payments towards rural development and a more flexible farm policy in Pillar 2? That means adjustment which will not necessarily go down well with our own farmers.

Finally, the Minister will remember my interest in the Government’s decision to establish a groceries adjudicator, and many voices have been heard in support today. If the office is now established, there will be a lot of staff in proportion to the interest that has been expressed.