Food Security Policy

Lord Bishop of Derby Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, I offer some thoughts about food security from the perspective of international development. We have had some amazing, impressive and helpful perspectives about scientific and technological approaches, and I want to offer some thoughts from the perspective of people who suffer from the need of food and that element of the food security issue.

Noble Lords will know that the Christian faith operates through people gathering around a table to share food—people of any culture or race. That is a great picture of an international family and sharing around a common table, which most human hearts can assent to and desire. As we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Stern and others, the fact is that many people do not participate or do not even feel that they are at a common table. That is the risk of the food security issue, which is why I welcome the Government’s concern—and the statement from the Prime Minister yesterday about a summit to consider those issues during the Olympics, when a lot of people will be in this country.

Christians also talk about word and sacrament—that is, you do not just talk about things, you have to do things and act them out as a sign of how things could be better. That is what people who feel excluded from the table are looking for and longing for. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, about growing population, and about climate change and industrialisation. All those things are threatening the sustainability of human life across the globe for millions of people. Therefore, we have to look at our own consumption patterns and the needs and demands of our brothers and sisters.

I am not going to push this common table analogy too far, but I shall make one last reference. St Paul, writing at a very early stage of Christians trying to gather round a common table, noticed in Corinth that some people took a whole lot of food and drink and got drunk and had a good time and quite a lot of other people did not have anything at all and were not noticed. That is a pretty sharp picture of what human behaviour is often like.

There are two ways of looking at that in our own context. One is the issue of what is called tax justice, for which I have a particular concern. In many countries where crops are grown the result and profit of that enterprise is not reinvested in the country for the well-being of the people who could be round the table in that part of the world; it is shifted out and piled up in front of other people in another part of the table so that they can live well and other people are excluded. That is happening more and more, and is a very major issue about food security. By contrast, Christian Aid, Oxfam and other agencies are trying to work in partnership with people on the ground. One billion people are either landless or small farmers; they need folks alongside them to see their needs and then to use the technology and wisdom that is around to grow things from the bottom up, in partnership with people who are excluded from the table and suffering enormously.

I ask four things of the Government. First, can they target their investment in the area of food need and security to have a special emphasis on the partnership with local people through agencies that can work through genuinely local people, discern their needs and target the technology and food changes appropriately? Secondly, what is the Government’s view on tax justice, which is excluding many and piling up the resources from agriculture in a very few places for the benefit of a very few people. Thirdly, how are the Government going to continue to monitor global institutions such as the UN and the World Bank so that their policies take account of the partnership needs of people at a micro level and not simply just act at a macro level? Fourthly, as we have heard, there is an issue about obesity in our own society, which is costing a fortune. How can the Government take a lead on our own consumption patterns, and on how we literally pile up trolleys in the supermarket and act out what St Paul warned us against—of looking after ourselves and ignoring others? That might say something about advertising and other ways in which messages are conveyed in our society.

I congratulate the Government on their concern with this area. I hope that they consider some of these questions and pay particular concern to human beings—brothers and sisters—on the ground, who need partnership and targeted and tangible signs of hope.