Agriculture: Sustainable Intensification and Metrics

Debate between Jamie Stone and Julian Sturdy

Tuesday 22nd February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Julian Sturdy]

I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Soils play a hugely important part in the wider metrics of agriculture. Knowing the Minister very well, I know that she shares a passion for soils, so she might touch on that in her response.

Early action by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to make gene editing regulations more science-based and proportionate, which realigns our approach with that of other countries such as Australia, Japan, Brazil, Argentina and the United States, is a positive and welcome first step. I am pleased to see that coming forward in a statutory instrument at the beginning of March, I believe—perhaps the Minister can clarify that.

Members of the APPG for science and technology in agriculture led calls for the Government to take action on that issue during the passage of the Agriculture Act 2020, and we are grateful to the Minister for listening and responding to those calls. Access to precision breeding tools will bring new opportunities to keep pace with demands for increased agricultural productivity, improved and more efficient resource use, more durable pest and disease resistance, better nutrition, and improved resilience against climate change.

[Jamie Stone (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (LD)]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech and I am in complete agreement with his points. I was brought up on a dairy farm, and in those days the Milk Marketing Board secured a price floor for milk. Today, I would suggest to the hon. Member that we have a problem in that the price farmers can secure could undercut everything to which the Member refers. Does he agree that one of the opportunities of Brexit is that it gives Government the power to examine the issue and consider support mechanisms, so that people do not leave farming altogether?

[Julian Sturdy]

I completely agree with the hon. Member that we have to ensure that we protect our farming communities and that people do not leave farming. It is so important that we have expertise both on the land and within the sector to make sure that opportunities are there for future generations. The Government must make that clear in their future agricultural policy, and I will touch on that shortly, because I have concerns about its direction, which is, I think, what the hon. Member was referring to.

When we talk about gene editing, we must ensure that future farm policies embrace and support the use of all the new, innovative technologies. Like many others in the sector, I am concerned about the direction of travel of the Government’s future vision for agriculture. As I just said, I am concerned about where future policy is going. We cannot afford to be complacent with something as fundamental as food security. The global food supply and demand balance remains as precarious today as 11 years ago, when Sir John Beddington’s Foresight report urged Governments to pursue a policy of sustainable intensification in agriculture to meet future food needs in the context of population growth, climate change and the finite national resources of land, water and fossil fuels.

Last year’s “Agricultural Outlook 2021-2030” report by the OECD and the Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that, with 8.5 billion mouths to feed by 2030, a business-as-usual approach will fall short of achieving sustainable development goal 2 on zero hunger by 2030. The report also highlighted the critical role of public and private sector research and development investment in enhancing productivity on existing farmland to alleviate pressures and bring more land into production. We have a responsibility to optimise our capacity for sustainable, efficient food production and to not offshore our food system’s impacts to regions of the world that are more vulnerable to the production-limiting effects of climate change.

Concerns are mounting that, without clear vision and a definition of what is meant by “sustainable agriculture”, the UK is at risk of sleepwalking into its own food crisis. Writing in Food Policy, Robert Paarlberg of the Harvard Kennedy School recently highlighted the transatlantic policy tensions between the EU’s farm to fork strategy, referring to the plans to expand organic farming, reduce synthetic chemical use and reject modern biotechnology and the United States’ approach, which is to emphasise agricultural innovations based on the latest science, articulated through its global coalition on sustainable productivity growth.

Last September, I wrote to the Prime Minister, urging the UK Government to sign up to that coalition, which was established by US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, to demonstrate that farmers can adapt to and adopt environmentally friendly and climate-smart farming practices without sacrificing productivity. I did not receive a reply from No. 10, so I ask the Minister: will the UK Government join other countries, such as Australia, Canada and Brazil, in signing up to the global coalition for sustainable productivity growth? Will the Minister explain where the UK sits in terms of the agricultural policy tension described by Robert Paarlberg?

Last year, the all-party parliamentary group on science and technology in agriculture held a meeting on the subject “Whatever happened to sustainable intensification?” It included contributions from leading UK experts in the fields of crop science, agricultural economics, rural policy and conservation science. The meeting highlighted serious concerns that current farm policy development lacks scientific rigour, and that policy focus on sustainable intensification has diminished.

We were reminded that DEFRA responded to Professor Beddington’s foresight report by initiating the sustainable intensification research platform, or SIP. That is a £4.5 million, four-year, multi-partner research programme to investigate the challenges of securing the optimum balance between food production, resource use and environmental protection. However, while the concept of sustainable intensification and the scientific rationale that underpins it remains as relevant and urgent as ever, the outputs, recommendations and advice generated through the DEFRA SIP appear to have been quietly shelved and forgotten.

The weight of scientific evidence points to a need to optimise production on existing farmland. Professor Andrew Balmford, a conservation scientist at Cambridge University, told the all-party group that the most effective way to keep pace with increasing human demands for food while protecting habitats and preventing further biodiversity loss is through high-tech, high-yielding production on land that is already farmed, mirrored by explicit policy investments and regulations to make sure that other land is set aside for nature.

[Julian Sturdy]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. I thought he was about to call for DEFRA to come to his constituency; I would argue that York would make a fantastic location too. The principle of DEFRA moving out of London and into the wider farming community, where our food production is based, makes perfect sense. I completely agree with him.

It turns out that sustainable intensification is also the most efficient way to meet climate change objectives, through the increased opportunities for carbon sequestration and storage. The Government must, as a matter of urgency, revisit the policy focus on sustainable intensification as the most effective way—perhaps the only way—to feed an increasingly hungry warming planet. If the term “sustainable intensification” has fallen out of fashion, as DEFRA’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Gideon Henderson, suggested to us recently, then by all means call it something else. However, above all else we must be guided by the science—the science that DEFRA itself has funded.

I am genuinely concerned about a shift away from science and evidence-based policy making in the Department, towards an over-reliance on voluntary and campaigning non-governmental organisations to support the Government’s vision for sustainable agriculture. Nowhere is that more apparent than in DEFRA’s approach to the issue of sustainable metrics in agriculture. While Gideon Henderson suggested to us in January that the Government are a long way from having a mature policy on metrics, correspondence that I have received on this issue from DEFRA Ministers suggests that one particular model, the Sustainable Food Trust global farm metric, is firmly embedded in the Government’s thinking. Not only is the Sustainable Food Trust an activist pro-organic NGO that openly campaigns against technologies that the Government are seeking to enable, such as gene editing, but the model itself is designed to reward less productivity and more extensive farming systems by favouring a whole farm or area-based approach to measuring resource use and the ultimate environmental impact.

Again, Professor Balmford told the all-party group that making meaningful sustainability comparisons between different farming systems would require an assessment of resource use and external impacts per unit of food produced, rather than a per-area-farmed basis. Professor Paul Wilson, an agricultural economist at the University of Nottingham, who leads the Government’s farm business survey programme, agreed that an area-based approach for sustainability indicators such as carbon footprint or greenhouse gas emissions is flawed in principle, and that there needs to be a clear reference point in terms of the amount of food produced to have any relevance.

Professor Wilson also led the metrics component of DEFRA’s SIP, which again does not appear to be feeding into the Government’s thinking. This included a huge amount of work on sustainability metrics and indicators, including the prototype development of a farmer-friendly data and benchmarking dashboard allowing producers to access and compare their performance against those indicators and against a weighted averaging of their peers.

The all-party group has long advocated for the need to embed data science and sustainability metrics at the heart of a policy agenda focused on securing the optimum balance between food production, resource use and environmental impact. We believe that access to metrics capable of objectively and consistently monitoring that balance will be essential to set targets and measure progress for sustainable, efficient production, to develop coherent research and development programmes, to understand and advise on best practice throughout the industry, and to provide meaningful information to consumers about the sustainability impact of each unit of food produced, whether that is a litre of milk or a bag of potatoes.

In addition to my earlier questions about whether the UK will sign up to the global coalition for sustainable productivity growth and where the UK sits in terms of the agricultural policy tension described by Robert Paarlberg, I will conclude with two final questions to the Minister. To be fair to her, this is not quite her brief, but I know that she has great knowledge in this field, so I look forward to her response.

First, in view of the concerns I have raised, will the Minister agree to submit the global farm metric model to a process of independent scientific scrutiny and validation with leading academic experts in the field? Secondly, will she commit to facilitating a joint roundtable with our all-party group to take forward discussions on the development of robust and meaningful metrics for sustainable agriculture?

[Jamie Stone]

I am aware that the hon. Member is reaching his concluding remarks. I would be less than honest if I did not say that farmers in my constituency have raised an eyebrow at the concept of wilding, which is very fashionable at the moment. I wonder whether he has anything to say about that. Should that perhaps also be included in any roundtable discussion?

[Julian Sturdy]

I thank the hon. Member for bringing that up. I could say a lot about wilding, if I am brutally honest; that could fill another debate on its own. I return to the point that I made early in the debate: current farmland needs to be used to produce food in the most effective and productive way possible, but also in the most environmentally friendly way, and unfarmed land needs to be used to protect and preserve the environment. I am fundamentally against the principle of wilding productive farmland because I think it would lead to a food security crisis. We have to very aware of that. There has to be a balance struck between producing food in an environmentally friendly way to feed a growing global population and enhancing our environment. We can achieve that, but a balance has to be struck between the two. From what we are hearing from DEFRA, I worry that that balance is out of kilter at the moment.