Climate Change: Support for Farmers

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, there is a lamentable tendency in the debates of the nation—and even in the discourses of your Lordships’ House—to elide from food security to self-sufficiency. We heard it a little just now. It was hinted at by the right reverend Prelate in introducing the Motion. He did not exactly make the link, but he spoke about the decline in self-sufficiency since the 1980s, and it was made explicit by some of my noble friends on this side, but it is fallacious, it is specious and a moment’s thought reveals why. Food security depends on being able to source your supplies from the widest possible diversity of suppliers, so that you are not vulnerable to a localised shock or disruption, which might as easily happen on your own territory as anywhere else.

When we come specifically to the broccoli and cauliflowers being debated this afternoon, I think we have a pretty robust and diverse system in place. Yes, we grow a lot of these brassica in Lincolnshire—I think that is the most concentrated place—some of it from my noble friend Lord Taylor, but all of it, I am sure, excellent. We then buy from the EU—mainly Spain, a little bit from France—and then we buy from beyond, from Morocco, from Kenya and, I, think a little bit from Mexico.

The difference is that, when we move beyond the EU, at a time when we are complaining about these shortages, we are still, incredibly, applying tariffs. We are saying that we do not have enough of the stuff and we do not have food security, and yet we have, if I understood the figures from the department this morning correctly, an 8% tariff for most of the year on brassica—or at least on chilled and non-chilled fresh cauliflower and headed broccoli from countries that either are not in the EU or with which we do not have a special trade deal. How on earth can that be sensible?

I at least understand that we produce some of our own brassica in this country. When we look at some of the other food tariffs, it becomes utterly unsustainable. I have gone on and on endlessly in your Lordships’ Chamber about the tariffs we continue to impose on Moroccan tomatoes, even though we produce barely any tomatoes. I know we produce some tomatoes—I used to be a Member of the European Parliament and I had the Isle of Wight in my constituency—but even at the height of our very short tomato-growing season, we are still importing about 80% of our tomatoes. Whom do we think we are protecting?

If we think it is silly when we get to tomatoes, let us consider the real spike in prices which is happening this year in our supermarkets, which is of olive oil, as a result of some of the same climatic changes that were being discussed earlier. We do not grow any olives in this country, to my knowledge. There is always some story in the Telegraph about someone in Cornwall having managed to grow tea or something, so maybe we do—no offence if any Cornish olive growers or would-be olive growers are watching on television, but let me say that we are not a major producer of olives, yet we are still imposing tariffs on olives and olive oil imported from Turkey, Tunisia or wherever it is.

In other words, we inherited tariff schedules from the EU that were designed to protect growers, particularly in Spain but also in Italy, Portugal and France, and five years almost to the day since Brexit, we have still not repealed them. This country led the way as a free trader, especially in foodstuffs. For the century that led up to the 1930s, it made us the richest place in the world. The parties that were in the forefront of arguing for what was, in a phrase of the Labour Chancellor, Philip Snowden, the “free breakfast table”, were the Lib Dems of the day and, after its foundation, the Labour Party. They understood that agricultural protectionism is a racket whereby the poor are forced to pay the rich. Now that we have these freedoms and are once again in charge of our own trade policy, please can the party opposite look to its own heritage and recover that global vision which once made us the wealthiest and most prosperous country on earth?