Agriculture: Global Food Security

Lord Dixon-Smith Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dixon-Smith]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a farmer, still practising, and landowner in Essex. Essex is a peculiar place and not particularly well understood. When I discuss my rainfall average with foreigners—I have kept records since 1961—or even with Londoners, who never have to think about this sort of thing, they say, “But that is arid”. My rainfall would suggest that it is arid. My average rainfall over that period has now pushed up to about 19 inches per annum. Anywhere else in the world, that would be semi-desert. We need to remember how enormously privileged we are in this country to live in a temperate climate. I farm land that is highly productive.

My life has to some extent been coloured by the experience of accompanying my father, who was an active member of something that most people have forgotten: the War Agricultural Executive Committee. I used to accompany him on farm visits during the war. Those people began the revolution that has brought in modern agriculture as we see it, with its highly productive state. However, I fear that if we ever face another crisis such as that which we faced in 1940, we no longer have the capacity to expand our output to meet such a crisis. When we consider the way in which our population is developing, when we are already highly dependent on imports, and look at the global economy, with a world population of 6.5 billion going up to 8.5 billion, becoming more prosperous and therefore competing more for the food imports upon which we depend, we need to worry.

It is perhaps worthwhile putting ourselves into perspective as a nation. I pulled some figures off Wikipedia, which put us right in our place. The global landmass, including Antarctica, is roughly 148.5 million square kilometres; of which 49 million square kilometres are classified only as agricultural; of which 14 million square kilometres are classified as arable land. In this country, our total area is 41,000 square kilometres. We have 1 per cent of global population. In 2050, by neat coincidence, we will still have 1 per cent of global population. We are bit players, but we are of course highly vulnerable to international competition for food supply as the global food circumstances become more difficult. It is estimated that agriculture must double its global output to meet demand in 2050. We have no capacity to double our output so we shall become increasingly dependent, which means that we will have to develop our economy in other ways to sustain the people who will live in our islands in the future.

As my noble friends Lord Selborne and Lady Byford stressed, if we are to increase our farming output we will have to rely hugely on technical developments, technical change and intensification. Indeed, we do rely on them hugely. We face particular problems. We have extremely good plant breeders in this country but they will not undertake research if they know that their remit is limited. On my wish list is something that would revolutionise global agriculture. I desperately want to see a nitrogen-fixing wheat with the same characteristics as plants in the legume family. That would enormously reduce the need to apply artificial fertilisers and would increase soil fertility and enable us to produce good nutritious food. Such a wheat does not exist and cannot be achieved through conventional breeding. That implies that genetic modification must be used, yet, on a psychological level, genetic modification is not accepted in Europe. One hears people speak of dreadful Frankenstein foods. However, our future survival will depend on developments such as I have mentioned. Therefore, I ask my noble friend, when he winds up, to say how he proposes to persuade the European institutions that rule our agricultural lives to change their ways. We need these developments if only because, as the rest of the world increases its output of genetically modified agricultural products, we will cease to be able to purchase the non-genetically modified imports on which we depend. There will be no alternative.

The same attitude applies to herbicides and insecticides. In the old days I used to burn every field of straw on the farm, which I found exciting. I took extreme care over it as a main road runs through my farm but I never had a problem. However, that practice was stopped, and rightly so because one of its bad effects was that it increased what I call the mining aspect of farming—that is, the amount that we extract from our soils. One of the benefits of stopping that practice is that all our waste organic material now remains in the soil and our soils have reverted to the condition they were in when they were originally ploughed up and converted from permanent pasture. That has happened in the past few years and constitutes a highly beneficial change. If we are to maintain our farming going forward, we have to look at that. I have always envied the Fenland farmers who farm highly organic soil. However, they are “miners”, and that practice cannot be sustained.

The use of agricultural by-products for energy production has not been raised but is worth mentioning as a lot of people talk about it. Given the factor that I have mentioned, certainly those of us who farm in the solidly arable parts of the country have no biological waste products as we need to put them back in the soil. The other day I heard it said that even if we used all the agricultural land in the United Kingdom to produce energy, apart from the fact that we would produce no food, we would be able to produce only half the energy that we require. That represents an even lower proportion of our national requirement than is the case with food so we would be better off by far sticking with agriculture and finding our energy from other sources, of which there are plenty.

Speaking from a narrow perspective, we need to keep a very close eye on our long-term vulnerability. Although I have some sympathy with those who want to keep the countryside pure, unsullied and environmentally friendly, I have to warn them that in the longer term that simply may not be practical. The attitude that prevailed in my youth, with which my noble friend Lord Plumb will certainly be familiar, when food output had to take priority over planting trees and other such measures, may well have to be reasserted. If we do not, we may not be able to survive in the way that we would wish.