Animal Welfare

James Paice Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) on securing this debate, and I am sorry that it is only a short Adjournment debate. The issues that he raises go to the heart of things that the Government and I hold dear. He started by reminding me of what I wrote in the Conservative document on agricultural policy about a year ago, and I do not resile from those objectives. I want to explain to the House what we are doing and how we are trying to take forward the objectives that we share. As part of the business plan for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, we want to support and develop British farming, encourage sustainable food production and improve standards of animal welfare.

The previous Government’s Animal Welfare Act 2006, which had cross-party support, makes it an offence to cause unnecessary suffering to any animal and contains a duty of care and the five freedoms and so on. The 1999 treaty of Amsterdam requires the Commission and member states to consider animals as sentient beings. I was a Member at that time and know that that was seen as a significant step forward, and it was later reinforced by the Lisbon treaty. Therefore, a large body of EU legislation improves animal welfare. As my hon. Friend said, we have experience in this country of taking unilateral action for the most noble of motives, such as improving the welfare of pigs. I am thinking of pig stalls and tethers, but that action had a catastrophic effect on the pig industry in this country, and there was probably no substantial gain in pig welfare.

My hon. Friend referred to a chicken being a chicken. I was going to relate that not to production in the way that he described, but to concern for animal welfare. It may salve our consciences to raise standards of animal welfare in this country and not care about the rest of the world, but if that means that we simply export those lower standards of animal welfare, it is not a case of a chicken being a chicken—the chicken in England has moved to being a chicken in another country kept at a much lower standard. There is a tremendous amount to be said for doing our best to raise standards across the piece, not just unilaterally, and that is important.

My hon. Friend referred to the directive on caged hens, and I do not want to be led at this stage to say what we might do in this country if the situation does not improve. We have strongly emphasised our views to the Commission, and we believe that the matter must be dealt with at European level. It is abundantly clear that a number of European countries will not have complied by the end of the year with the requirement to replace all their conventional battery cages. Sadly, the Commission seems to suffer from the illusion that that is still possible, but I assure my hon. Friend that the Secretary of State publicly stated in an Agriculture Council meeting a fortnight ago that we are not prepared to contemplate any extension of the time scale, that the measure must work and that the deadline should not be delayed.

My hon. Friend also referred to competitiveness, which is what we saw in the pig industry. Extra costs can be involved in higher welfare standards, and the European Commission—thankfully—now considers international competitiveness as part of the impact assessment of new policies.

My hon. Friend made a significant point about the World Trade Organisation. What I said in the written answer to which he referred is factually correct. As we see it, the WTO does not allow measures to be taken to ban imports on the grounds of animal welfare. It is, of course, wide open to any member of the WTO—or in our case, the EU—to impose a ban on whatever it likes. However, that would be done in the knowledge that the ban might be challenged and various trade measures taken to deal with that.

My hon. Friend referred to the fact that the Doha round is in a complete state of stagnation. My colleagues in the Foreign Office and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills are anxious to get those negotiations back on track, but that will take time. That is the reason for the perhaps somewhat terse written answer that I gave my hon. Friend. While all eyes are on Doha, we cannot start changing the very framework of the WTO.

I shall now deal with the specifics about the WTO, the general agreement on tariffs and trade and various other global agreements to which my hon. Friend rightly referred. He referred to article XX of GATT and read out the relevant justifications: protecting public morals and protecting human, animal or plant life or health. Another justification is conserving exhaustible natural resources. Whether animal welfare could come under any of those headings is, frankly, untested, and I fully understand his desire that we should seek to test that.

It is worth making the point that certain measures have been taken internationally. In some cases, they have been contested. They do not relate directly to farmed animals, at least not in the UK. My hon. Friend will be aware of the seal trade ban—the ban on products from sealing. The European Commission banned them and used the justification of a distortion of trade, but I stress that that is being challenged under the GATT treaty. There is a serious risk that the WTO court will find against it.

The Commission also imposed a ban on importing cat and dog fur, which came mainly from China. That was also done on the basis of distortion of trade. It has not been challenged, although it may be in the future, so one could argue at the moment that we have got away with it. A longer-standing ban, which the previous Conservative Government pressed hard for back in 1991, is the EU prohibition on furs and pelts—primarily from Canada—harvested by using leg traps. That has never been challenged.

I am giving my hon. Friend some encouragement that some ways through this issue have been found, but those are not mainstream agricultural issues, as I am the first to recognise. I fully agree that, in an ideal world, we would get this issue considered at WTO level.

I want to pick up some other comments and then, if there is time, I might return to one or two other aspects of the WTO. My hon. Friend referred to the sanitary and phytosanitary rules, known as the SPS rules. To refer to an issue that is closer to home, Europe has banned the use of hormones in beef production on the basis that we believe that there are public health risks in not doing so. However, the United States has challenged us, and the matter is progressing through the judicial process at the moment.

Again, we have a problem there and we have to think through carefully what we do, but we can do other things in the immediate term. I do not think that even my hon. Friend would expect us to get the WTO rules changed very quickly, and I want to spend a few moments on that. The first point to impress on people is that improving animal welfare standards can benefit producers, because quite often they get higher productivity from animals if they are kept in better conditions, although some costs can be involved.

The second issue, to which my hon. Friend rightly referred, is the role of what are sometimes called private standards—the role of the retailers in demanding higher standards. That has been very successful across the world in raising production standards. There is some evidence, as we might expect, that when the cash figures go the wrong way, retailers turn round. This example is directly pertinent to a point that my hon. Friend made. I was very concerned to hear only last week that one of our major retailers that until now has been sourcing all its organic pig meat from the UK—that meat is certified to Soil Association standards—has now decided to stop doing that and to source organic pig meat from abroad. That meat is up to European organic standards, but they are not as high as the Soil Association ones. If what I have said proves to be correct, it is a pretty shameful approach and does not show much support for our own industry.

My hon. Friend made the point, which I have to repeat, that many people and organisations see welfare restrictions as some sort of ban on trade. The same can apply to the private standards to which I referred. The EU made a commitment to support international initiatives to raise awareness and to create a consensus on animal welfare through its action plan for the period from 2006 to 2010, and we want that to be continued through the strategy for the period from 2011 to 2015.

It is fair to say that animal welfare has not been a major priority for many Governments in recent years, either because they have believed that it is a trade issue and market forces will work, as my hon. Friend described, or perhaps because the alleviation of human poverty has been the predominant concern. However, we are making progress. The EU has recognised that the first step in getting third countries fully engaged in the development of animal welfare standards is to create a wider understanding and awareness of animal welfare, including among Government officials and the exporters. A conference on global trade and animal welfare was organised by the Commission in 2009.

We also have to recognise the OIE—the World Organisation for Animal Health—with which the Commission is working closely. The OIE was created a long time ago, in 1924, and has 178 member countries. However, it began getting involved in animal welfare only in 2001. By the end of 2004, it had developed guiding principles for animal welfare, and it held a conference in 2008 with more than 400 participants. The most important outcome of the conference was the identification of key needs and the tools necessary to help OIE member states to strengthen their capacities, including in relation to good governance and relevant infrastructure. The world assembly of OIE delegates has adopted seven animal welfare standards. Therefore, there is clear evidence that most of the world is moving in the right direction. I hope that my hon. Friend will take a lot of comfort from that. On-farm animal welfare issues are now beginning to be addressed by the OIE, but that will take a bit longer. I cannot get away from that.

None of that prevents higher standards through bilateral agreements. The EU is now emphasising that. Since 2004, we have addressed animal welfare specifically in a number of trade agreements with Canada, South Korea, Colombia, Peru and central American countries. I understand that it is also part of the negotiations with the Mercosur countries that are taking place at present. That work is clearly a step in the right direction.

My Department is working hard to provide training in welfare science and legislation to the veterinary services and non-governmental organisations in a number of countries. We have made a significant contribution to the EU Better Training for Safer Food programme and on welfare-during-transport training for veterinarians. Of course, we also continue to invest in research, because that is hugely important.

My hon. Friend and I are in exactly the same place on this issue. There may be a slight variation in nuance on precisely how we go forward. However, the Government remain determined to do whatever we can to increase animal welfare standards, not just at home but across the world, and to ensure that our producers are not unfairly discriminated against by imports produced to lower standards. I conclude by reminding my hon. Friend that we are also committed, in the document to which he referred, to ensuring that Government money is not spent on buying food produced to lower standards than pertain in this country, and that policy commitment will come to fruition in the next few weeks.