Food Security

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2022 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I say to the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Deidre Brock) that it is a great thing that she has secured today’s debate on food security. Like her and many others in the House, I have talked a lot about food security, which is now more necessary than ever. I, like her, want to talk a little about what is happening in Ukraine and about global food security.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put Ukrainian agriculture under threat and issues with food security are being inflicted on the Ukrainian people, who are also dealing with a murderous invading force. Ukrainian farm workers have been deployed to fight on the frontline; infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, has been damaged, making it hard for goods to be transported across the country; and there are fuel shortages, as usually Ukraine gets 70% of its petrol and diesel from Russia and Belarus.

There is also a risk that the conflict may disrupt or stop the spring planting season, which is due to start now. There is shrapnel in the field, which will cause problems for farm machinery, and President Zelensky himself recently said that Russian troops are mining fields in Ukraine, blowing up agricultural machinery and destroying fuel reserves needed for sowing, which is absolutely dreadful. The President has said that Ukraine has access to around one year’s supply of food. That creates problems for food security beyond that time period and has a knock-on effect on global food security, because Ukraine needs to stockpile what it would normally export.

Ukraine produces a sixth of the world’s corn exports, 20% of global maize, 50% of global sunflower oil and 12% of the world’s wheat exports. The Black sea port in the south of Ukraine has now been completely shut down, taking about 12% of global wheat out of the market. Around 400 million people across north Africa and the middle east rely on wheat from Ukraine.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman is making an incredibly important point and what he is setting out is deeply concerning. Hunger already kills more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined, even before we got into the current situation. Does he agree that that points towards a need for urgent action?

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I will go on to make the case that in order to ensure global food security and food security in this country, it is essential for us to produce more food, so that the gap left by Ukraine being unable to export to Africa and other countries can be filled by others and ourselves, if possible. That really is an issue.

Around 400 million people across north Africa and the middle east rely on wheat from Ukraine. Countries such as Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya import over 50% of the wheat their people eat every year, and 75% of Lebanon’s wheat comes from Ukraine. These countries are having to take steps to try to produce more wheat at home in difficult conditions, or to find new sources from other countries. In the past 10 days, several countries have introduced restrictions on the export of grain and vegetable oils, including Lebanon, Egypt, Hungary, Serbia, Moldova, Algeria, Turkey and Indonesia.

With millions of people already living in poverty around the world, we could soon face a great humanitarian crisis. The African Development Bank says it is planning to raise $1 billion to boost wheat production in Africa alone and avert potential food shortages. It is going to fund new technologies to try to help African countries to grow cereals, which is normally difficult in those conditions. I hope the Government do what they can to support those efforts.

Fertiliser costs are rising. We all know that the situation in Ukraine is also having an impact on food security in this country. Agriculture relies on specific imports to produce food, including fuel, fertiliser and feed. The cost of those imports varies each year, and farmers are very much at the mercy of the market when it comes to the prices of those imports. We have seen a perfect storm, with all of these spiking at the same time due to global events; when profit margins are already low, big price rises can practically put farmers out of business. The prices of feed and fertiliser are particularly volatile, and represent farmers’ most significant expenses.

The situation in Ukraine has disrupted supplies of potash—a key ingredient in fertiliser and mass produced in Russia and Belarus. That, combined with rising gas prices, is pushing up the cost of fertiliser, with wholesale gas prices up 500% from a year ago and 40% since the invasion of Ukraine. Farmers may face some very difficult decisions about how much fertiliser they use, because £1,000 a tonne—a jump of £245 from a year ago—is not affordable. Those prices cannot be absorbed by farmers, and if we are going to produce more food in this country, the basic fact is that we need to use enough fertiliser.

I welcome DEFRA’s announcement this week that the Government will clarify how the Environment Agency will apply the farming rules for water to allow spreading of slurry in the autumn, and I congratulate the Minister for her work in that area—it is very good news, and long awaited. I also welcome that any changes to the use of urea will be delayed by a year, given the crisis we are in. Over the long term, there is scope for moving towards more organic fertilisers. We can look at other forms of fertiliser, such as using dry leachate from biodigestion plants, but all of this is coming, and we need to deal with ammonium nitrate now. I welcome the decision to put an extra £20 million into the farming innovation programme to come up with new solutions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alyn Smith]

It is great to see a fan of my early work.

“I believe the UK government authorities have been far too complacent about the security and stability of our food supplies…assuming that international transit networks and foreign sources of supply will never fail.

Last week was the mother of all wake-up calls.”

I said that in The Scottish Farmer on 29 April 2010, talking about the Icelandic volcano. However, I am afraid that the sentiment still applies and the lessons remain largely unlearned by the UK Government. I do not necessarily criticise our Minister in the Chamber but we all—all of us, collectively—must get food security far higher on our agenda. The lessons need to be learned.

I hope that I have proven over the years, that I am cross-party; I believe in consensus, and in working with other parties. I do not fabricate disagreement where there is none, but, damn sure, we disagree on food. We have a different sense of where we want to get to. We also have a food emergency on this Government’s watch, and we urgently need to change course. I implore the Minister to take my suggestions seriously, because they are made in good faith.

Things have got worse in the last 20 years. The latest figures show that the UK’s food self-sufficiency has gone from 80% to below 60%. Of course, we cannot and should not produce everything, but our food supply is under unprecedented strain. I believe that food security should be viewed as our national security is, and given the same urgency and priority within Government. Anything that undermines food production, however well intentioned, should be viewed with extreme scepticism.

Food production must be the basis of the rural economy. Only profitable food businesses can form the bedrock of our rural economy. No amount of tourism, birdwatching or tree planting can replace it. Those are all important, but they are add-ons, not the basis or bedrock of our rural economy.

[Kirsten Oswald]

The points that my hon. Friend is making are extremely important, and really underlie all the reasons why the debate is so important. Is he aware that evidence suggests that in just over six decades, globally, over 30% of arable land has been degraded due to human-induced activities? The point that he is making is one that the Minister and all of us need to focus on.

[Alyn Smith]

I am grateful for the intervention. That is a very important point. There will always be conflict over land use; there will always be competing purposes, and we must be aware of the perverse incentives to take prime agricultural land out of food production. That would leave us more vulnerable to international shocks and not more resilient. We must put food production far higher on our agenda.

We have seen action after action that has made farming more difficult because of political decisions. The sector was already reeling from Brexit and covid, and now the dreadful events in Ukraine have every single light on farming’s dashboard flashing red. The input costs for feed have gone up, and supply is becoming more difficult. Fuel costs—red diesel and gas—are all going up. Fertiliser costs are rocketing. Labour shortages are real, and are increasing costs—in fact, I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on the increase in the hourly wage to £10.10 an hour for seasonal workers, because that also increases costs, already, with labour shortages. Finally, UK trade policy—which always puts the interests of farmers first, but it is a shame that those are farmers in other countries—is weakening our food production domestically.

The SNP’s position is clear. It is a discussion for another day, but we have a clear agenda that we want to achieve: we want to get back into the European Union, the single market and the common agricultural policy. We think that would be far and away the best solution to support agriculture. In the last couple of weeks the EU has just announced a €1.5 billion support fund for farmers. The UK needs to match that urgency and priority, but other things need to be done, too.

In Scotland we have maintained pillar 1 payments and the drift of policy in England is regrettable and needs to be reversed. I would like to see pillar 1 payments retained and reintroduced as policy, or, if not as policy, as an emergency measure to get farmers through the crisis. We need to reduce red diesel duty to zero and address energy costs via a price cap on input, and we urgently need to review immigration policy to ensure labour supply. I urge the Government to consider loan guarantees along the lines of the covid support for agricultural businesses that face a short-term—hopefully—crisis in their cash flow. We need to prioritise agriculture in future trade deals, and anything that undermines indigenous food production must be viewed with scepticism. We need to see proper scrutiny of supermarkets and the role of multiples in the supply chain.

My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine. Our interdependence and international solidarity have come into sharp relief lately, but so has our lack of resilience. That lack of resilience and the social consequences of rising food costs are affecting every community that we all represent. If the Icelandic volcano in 2010 was a wake-up call, the events in Ukraine show that our resilience must be prioritised more, and food production must be at the heart of that resilience. There is lots that we can do, and I will work with anybody to help promote that agenda.