Agriculture Bill (Seventh sitting)

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Thursday 1st November 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Mr Goodwill]

The shadow Minister rather let the cat out of the bag when he said that this issue was somewhat tangential to the Bill. We all subscribe to the idea of reducing food waste and ensuring that the scarce resource and the high-quality food that we have in this country is consumed, rather than being thrown in the bin and contributing to methane production on landfill sites or to the expense of incineration.

I suggest that farmers are probably the people most angry that the food they produce ends up in the bin and not in somebody’s stomach, but the decision whether food is wasted is out of their hands; it is in the hands of the consumers, the supermarkets and the catering industry. How much food in fridges is thrown away because it goes past its sell-by date? How many pensioners in the supermarket will be tempted by a “buy one, get one free” offer, only to find that it gives them more than they can manage to eat?

We probably need to look at the catering and food service industry more closely, but it is not within the scope of the Bill. For example, I was in a hotel in Belfast last week where a marvellous breakfast buffet was laid out; I was there at the beginning of service, but the full range of food would have needed to be available until the end, so a lot of it would have had to be thrown away. Indeed, on Friday I was at a meeting of farmers in my constituency. Some of them had had a pub meal before I arrived, and even they could not eat the large amounts of chips that were put on their plates, so no doubt the leftovers went into the waste stream. Historically, a lot of waste used to go into the animal food chain, but because of mad cow disease, that is now much more controlled. Pig swill is not something that can be used in that way because of disease problems.

While I understand the feelings and the motivation behind the amendment, it should not be in this part of the Bill. Perhaps supermarkets could do more than they have so far with respect to what they call “ugly vegetables”. How often has a strangely shaped carrot been thrown away rather than put on the shelves because it is not of the right specifications? Indeed, we could go to the EU and talk about straight bananas and cucumbers, which was something that was often covered in the media during the referendum campaigns.

We also need to consider what waste actually is. A lot of the so-called agricultural waste—stock feed potatoes or stock feed carrots—can actually be used as a viable feed, so reducing waste per se is not always the way to go. I hope that the Opposition will understand that, while everybody agrees with what they want to achieve, this amendment is not the way to do it.

A part of the Bill that does not need amending relates to grants that could be made available to farmers for improving their storage. Farmers get very annoyed about the deterioration of crops in storage—particularly potatoes—over winter. The very best storage conditions mean that more of a crop can be marketed the following year. The Bill already includes provisions for capital grants for farmers to improve that situation. I hope that the hon. Member for Stroud understands that, although we can get behind what he says, this is not the right place to do it.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I am chair of the all-party group on food waste. I will speak to the amendment briefly because I hope to table amendments to the provisions on data and transparency in the supply chain. That is probably the most important angle for tackling food waste because, as other hon. Members have said, in most cases farmers are not really responsible for the amount of wasted food. There is far too much focus on household food waste, and many people in the food supply chain have a vested interest in making it all about whether people throw out their salads or know what to do with their leftovers. In some ways, that lets people in the food supply chain off the hook.

A reason why farmers are forced to waste so much food to the extent that occurs on farms is that it is rejected by supermarkets. Although the Groceries Code Adjudicator has gone some way to addressing that, supermarkets now use spurious cosmetic reasons to reject fruit and veg. Vegetables might be accepted on one day and rejected on another. That is simply to do with the logistics of supermarket sales and the quantities that they need. We need to tighten up the Groceries Code Adjudicator, but we will come to that later in the Bill.

I put two questions about the amendment to the Minister. If food waste were a country, it would have the third-largest carbon emissions in the world, after China and the US. Clearly, from that point of view, food waste is a significant issue. There are measures in the Bill to support farmers who reduce their carbon footprint, and I wonder how the Minister sees food waste fitting in to that?

Measuring food waste on farms can be quite difficult, particularly when a lot of it is ploughed back into the land—would that be classed as wasted? Is using food waste for anaerobic digestion considered a waste or a good use? Farmers using food waste is a good thing—I have been to farms in Somerset where they use waste from local cider mills and bread factories for anaerobic digestion; that is absolutely fine—but how do we address the increasing amount of land being used to grow crops for anaerobic digestion? Fields should be used to grow crops for people to eat, but there is a prevalence of maize being grown for AD. I am not sure where that fits into the Bill, but I want to see farmers rewarded for doing the right thing with food waste, given what I said about it not being their fault. How can we do that while we also incentivise them to grow crops for AD?