National Food Strategy and Food Security

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Kerry McCarthy

Thursday 27th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kerry McCarthy]

Yes; Henry Dimbleby suggests that that 5% should come out of production. However he does not dictate that that should be anywhere that, perhaps, does not have certain productivity levels or does not do this or that. That brings me neatly to my concluding point.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Kerry McCarthy]

I think that the hon. Gentleman will make a speech, so I will let him make his comments then.

This is where the environmental land management scheme comes in, which is a sophisticated approach and not a blunt tool. It is about looking at everything taking place on the land, including what is being done to support nature and biodiversity. I would think that the farmland mentioned by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) would very much come under those criteria; I hope so. My final question to the Minister is: where are we now with ELMS? Farmers are desperately seeking certainty on it. Will he confirm that the public money for public goods approach will still underpin support for our food and farming system?

Environmental Land Management Scheme: Food Production

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Kerry McCarthy

Tuesday 1st February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend, the excellent Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. He is 100% right: there are a lot of opportunities all over the world for us to export our produce.

As an island nation, it is vital that we are able to feed our population. Considering that we have such a temperate climate, which is well suited to agriculture, we have all the means to increase our self-sufficiency. There is also an argument that we have a moral duty to maintain our food security. With a growing global population leading to increased food demand, alongside climate change, which will have a disproportionate impact on certain countries, it is imperative that we ensure that our own needs are met, rather than being more reliant on other countries around the world.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I entirely agree with what the hon. Member is saying about the need to improve our food security, grow far more in this country and consume it here as well. However, does he agree that the Government’s current policy of pursuing trade deals around the world completely undermines that? It seems as though the whole policy is based on trying to reduce support for farmers in this country and chase cheap food imports from elsewhere.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am delighted to have the support of the hon. Lady. Given the number of times that we have debated in Bristol and been at odds, to have her support is somewhat amazing. I was on a programme the other day agreeing with the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) as well, and I have never agreed with her before, either. The Whips must be getting worried that I might defect soon.

Even for a global trading nation—this goes to the heart of the point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy)—shocks can expose real fragilities in any reliance on imports. The current severe spike in energy price is a result of an increasing reliance on imports; we became vulnerable to the global squeeze on energy and gas supplies last year, and going into this year. With technical and geopolitical issues impacting on supply across Europe, we have been hit hard for a number of reasons, including our storage capacity, which is one of the lowest in Europe, and our demand, which is among the highest.

Imports will always play a critical role in our food system, but I say to the Minister that the Government must take our own self-sufficiency more seriously. It is stagnating, and the public will not thank us if there is ever a world food shortage, prices rocket and supermarket shelves are emptied of certain commodities. Although the nation is encouraged to be healthier and eat more fruit and veg, our domestic production of those products falls below our potential. We are only 18% self-sufficient in fruit, 55% in vegetables and 71% in potatoes. The figures for veg and potatoes have fallen by 16% in the past 20 years, despite the sector demonstrating sustained investment. The entire economy is aiming to build back better and greener from the covid-19 pandemic. British farming can be central to that green recovery. We have a golden opportunity to place food security fairly at the centre of our food system and become a global leader in sustainable, high-quality food production.

The Government have a crucial role to play. Food security should be at the heart of Government policy, and there needs to be an annual system of reporting to Parliament to ensure that we do not allow our domestic food production to diminish. UK farmers are best placed to implement many of these environmental schemes, while at the same time maintaining the countryside to the high standard that the public have come to accept. I do not think the public are going to welcome the look of countryside that is going to waste growing brambles and shrubs. It feels highly counterintuitive to have such high environmental standards here that food production becomes unprofitable enough that we need to import more.

Not only does physically importing food produce greenhouse gases, but by relying on farmers from the rest of the world to produce food for us in the UK, we are simply exporting our environmental problems and responsibility to other countries with lower plant and animal standards. The public place real value on high standards of animal welfare, environmental protection and the climate ambition of British farmers. We cannot guarantee or enforce those high standards on farmers from other countries around the world. It would be morally unjustifiable for a UK farmer to be put at a competitive disadvantage by imported food with lower standards—a point made by the hon. Member for Bristol East.

The innovation I have seen from UK farmers throughout my lifetime, working towards ambitious environmental goals, has been incredible. The NFU has been working with its stakeholders to outline the policy mechanism for agriculture to reach net zero by 2040, which is a critical goal. I believe that the best way to reach our environmental targets is by supporting British farmers, not by making food production an unsustainable economic model.

The second of the key issues in the report from the National Audit Office—a highly respected institution—on which the Public Accounts Committee inquiry majored is that, without subsidies, most farms in England make an average profit of just £22,800 a year, after labour costs and investment, and a third of all farms would not make any profit at all. That makes the sector pretty financially vulnerable. For small and tenanted farms operating on wafer-thin margins, there is a real fear that many will go out of business. The consequence would simply be that the average size of farms would increase and the environmental benefits they provide would be lost. ELMS should provide advice and funding to help those small farmers diversify.

The future farming programme for England, which will replace the direct payments with a new scheme based on public money for public goods, will see small farms have their direct payments reduced from December 2021, and 50% will be lost by 2025. There is a real concern that some of the ELMS options will be completely unprofitable, given the amounts available, and too complicated; and that many farmers will simply not take them up, especially if they do not have the administrative capacity to negotiate the complicated bureaucracy. That could mean that only large institutional landowners, such as the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, benefit from these Government schemes. It would be quite wrong if such landowners received a bigger and bigger share of the agricultural subsidy cake when they provide less and less food each year. ELMS should have a part to play in protecting small, tenanted farms and upland farmers—I class small farms as less than 100 acres—alongside their significant environmental aims.

The final problem I would like to take up with the Minister is the average age of farmers, which is currently 59. My own farming situation has been discussed here; my farm is in north Norfolk, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker). I am delighted to see him here today and I have issued an invitation to him to come and visit my farm. I know from my own farming situation that my son, who is in his thirties, is much more adaptable than I am to new technology, which would have two key effects of increasing productivity and innovation. ELMS should have a structural element to help young people who wish to enter agriculture, particularly those who are leaving education, because agriculture tends to be a highly risky, capital-intensive business, combined with very low returns.

DEFRA is providing money to councils, landowners and county farm estates via the new entrant support scheme, to support young people joining the sector with access to land, infrastructure and support for successful and innovative businesses. My own farming business, to which I have referred, provides an opportunity for three different businesses to get on to the farming ladder. Chris is my long-term farming contractor; Ben runs a successful outdoor pig-breeding business; and we are currently discussing an arrangement with a lady who has a rotating ewe flock of sheep, to graze our increasingly over-wintered green cover crops. Existing farmers could do more to help young people into agricultural employment and business.

All in all, if farmers are to survive, they must produce better returns, either from increased productivity, Government subsidies or increased prices from the market. Otherwise, many will simply not survive. The consequence will be that the average farm size increases, employment in agriculture falls and social cohesion in rural areas is lost. The Government are formulating a new policy on ELMS, and we need to see much more detail before it is launched in 2024. I appreciate that a lot more was published at the beginning of the year, but I still do not get the full sense of where the Government’s aims for ELMS really are.

As I have said, we cannot become over-reliant on other countries to fulfil our food needs. We have the means to produce food here in more sustainable and smarter ways, but to do that we must support farmers across the country, and not make the industry so unprofitable that only the largest farms survive. The Government should be much more ambitious with their aim of producing food in the UK. Well over 60% of the food we eat should be produced by UK farmers. That would well and truly put the “F” back in DEFRA.

Badger Culling/Bovine TB

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Kerry McCarthy

Wednesday 7th September 2016 Westminster Hall

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am intrigued that an hon. Member from Scotland has secured this debate, because I did not realise that it was a problem in Scotland. The hon. Gentleman must have few problems with his own constituents to have time to bring forward this debate.

As well as the emotional stress for the farmers involved, the cost to them is tens of millions of pounds. Add that to the costs to the taxpayer and this is a really serious problem. As my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) said, the only legal vaccine for badgers is the injectable BCG vaccine. It is in such short supply that it is needed for human use and therefore the vaccination trial in a quarter of the area of Wales has had to be curtailed. I hasten to add that I believe DEFRA is right to budget tens of millions of pounds to try and achieve an oral vaccine for badgers. That is the nirvana and when we get that, we will really make progress.

My constituents in the new badger cull area in Gloucestershire, with whom I have worked very closely and to whom I pay tribute, have had to go through an incredibly rigorous process to get the licence from Natural England. They are responsible for all the training and recruiting of firearms experts—forgetting all the equipment. I say to Opposition Members that they would not go to that huge amount of trouble and expense unless they really believed that a badger cull was the answer, so I think the Government are exactly correct in their 25-year vaccination strategy. We have to use all the tools in our box.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I met people from Natural England a few months ago and they very much gave me the impression that the process was little more than a rubber-stamping exercise and they took their steer from DEFRA as to whether they would go ahead. It came across to me as a political decision rather than, in any way, an academic exercise.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I invited the hon. Lady, when she was the shadow Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister, to come to my constituency and meet some of these farmers, and I invite her to come and meet some of the people who have been involved in this licensing programme. She will find out the hours, days and weeks they have had to spend on this to get a licence. She will be amazed.

Human Rights (North Korea)

Debate between Geoffrey Clifton-Brown and Kerry McCarthy

Tuesday 13th May 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy]

I entirely agree. China provides some humanitarian assistance to North Korea; one would therefore hope that it had some leverage over the Government there and could persuade them to change their ways.

The hon. Member for Congleton mentioned the fact that one action that could be considered is referral to the International Criminal Court and the adoption of targeted sanctions. Resolution 25/25, passed by the UN Human Rights Council in March, was a welcome first step in taking the report forward, in particular by extending the mandate of the special rapporteur and requesting increased support, including establishing a field-based structure to strengthen monitoring and improve engagement with all states.

However, it was disappointing that 11 countries at the Human Rights Council abstained on the resolution vote, while six—Russia, Cuba, Pakistan, Venezuela, Vietnam and China—voted against it. There is more general concern about the composition of the Human Rights Council. The UK is on the council, but many member states have, shall we say, rather poor human rights records. There is concern about such countries’ failure to respect the special procedure or country-specific mandate holders. It would help if the Minister set out more about what he thinks the Human Rights Council can actually achieve—beyond mere condemnation of the DPRK regime—and how that can be done.

Following the recent universal periodic review, it has been reported that North Korea has actually agreed to consider 185 of the 268 recommendations. However, it has rejected some of them outright, including that it should co-operate with the ICC, end guilt by association, implement the commission’s recommendations, close the prison camps and abolish the songbun system. Critically, the Human Rights Council resolution recommended that the General Assembly submit the report to the Security Council for further action. The Human Rights Council called for the consideration of a referral

“to the appropriate international criminal justice mechanism”,

which would presumably be the ICC. On top of that, it called for consideration of the

“scope for effective targeted sanctions against those who appear to be most responsible for crimes against humanity”.

Will the Minister update us on the Government’s discussions with Security Council members about formally putting the DPRK on the agenda? What sanctions does he think could possibly be effective in targeting the DPRK leadership? Bearing in mind Russia’s and China’s position on the Security Council, what are the prospects and time scales for action and any referral to the ICC?

Now that the commission has reported and the Human Rights Council has passed its resolution, it is crucial that we maintain the momentum and keep the spotlight and pressure on North Korea, to try to secure the co-operation of partners in key positions of influence. It would be so much easier to say that solutions are more easily at hand in other countries, where the UK operates more leverage and where we know that we can, perhaps, achieve more good in a shorter time, but to turn our back on what is happening in DPRK, just because it is a difficult case and the solutions do not immediately present themselves, would be morally wrong. We simply should not contemplate that.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady; she has been generous in giving way.

The approximately 600 people from the North Korean diaspora in this country have not been mentioned so far. Could we not harness them and perhaps ask the BBC to ask them to help with some editorial work on programmes broadcast into Korea? They would surely want to help their families still left in the country.

[Kerry McCarthy]

The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. What always has to be weighed up is whether such a move would make life easier or worse for the people in the country. People in the country know how dreadful the situation is there. People from the diaspora community here would, obviously, need to highlight that to win over international opinion, ensuring that this matter is firmly on the political agenda. I am not so sure, although I have only just heard the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion, what the impact would be of such footage being displayed in North Korea. There is a particular danger of measures being taken against people’s relatives who are still in the country. We have to be slightly worried about that.