Agriculture: Global Food Security

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am extremely honoured to be able to speak in the debate introduced by my noble friend Lady Byford. However, I feel a sense of nervousness, surrounded as I am by landed Barons and belted Earls—although I am not sure what a belted Earl is. I doff my cap to them because I have the humility to be a peasant farmer. I am a French peasant farmer, with a numéro SIREN and SIRET, in a vineyard in Provence from where wine shipped to the United Kingdom in the second century BC arrived at Hengistbury Head. It was in this area that vin clair was first introduced, which later became claret and Bordeaux. As noble Lords will know, Bordeaux of reasonable troisième cru is selling at £124 a bottle, and China is buying more wine from Bordeaux than the United Kingdom and America put together.

As a peasant farmer, I suffer and feel for others around the world. We suffer inevitably from the dangers of flood, pestilence and frost. This year has not been good—and when a year is bad, there is often intervention by the state. The river has risen by 12 metres three times this year. The house has had to be redecorated and the roof taken off. At the moment we are struggling to find sufficient vines to replant to replace 8,000 that were lost. Wild boar ate nearly six tonnes of grapes last year while we only managed to get one. Here there is a problem with bureaucracy. You cannot eat a wild boar unless it has been slaughtered in an official EU slaughterhouse. Six people with guns do not qualify as an EU slaughterhouse, so I have not been able to eat any part of a wild boar.

Against this background I raise certain issues. When there are problems, the state helps. However, it surveys you from above. It counts the number of vines to make sure that you have no more than a certain number of empty ones, otherwise you may lose your appellation contrôlée. It is confusing because they are not used to having an idiot like me down there. I am meant to be Lord Selsdon, but the name does not matter because I have to be called “Monsieur Lord”. I have the great privilege to announce further benefits in kind. I have received a grant from the state—and an international one at that. It was addressed to “Lord Catastrophe Naturelle”. For a long time I have been a walking disaster at most things in life, but I am proud of this.

In my job around the world, I have always looked at peasant farmers and the community that comes with agriculture. My interest in the subject of global food security goes back to when I found myself, aged four and with my two year-old sister, in a strange British nursery school that had emigrated from Rottingdean to Canada because the Germans were coming. I did not know my parents at all in Canada, but I liked the war because I liked ships. Sometimes I listened to Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt. I wanted to know why all the ships were being sunk by U-boats. Someone said that it was because England—I was Scottish but they did not mention Scotland—would starve without food. It never entered my mind that war and lack of food were related. Starvation was coming because of a lack of food.

As one looks around the world today, one concludes that there are plenty of places to produce food. When I came back to England, I went to my grandfather's farm. I did not know much, but I was put in charge of chickens, ducks and rabbits. There was rationing, which I was not used to because I had been well fed. We had to send the eggs to people in London, unless they were laid in hedgerows, when you could not tell their age. You could float them, but you were not allowed to send eggs that had been laid in hedgerows because they might be bad by the time they arrived. These eggs were put into that lovely substance called isinglass, where you would keep them for ever and a day. Occasionally, one of the ducks would kill a chicken. We did not have to send off the chicken, but could eat it. We had an American airborne division nearby. They wanted eggs and, as a small boy, I would do a trade. They would give me petrol from the Jeep and that would enable my grandfather to let me, at the age of six, drive the green van.

All my life I have been interested in agricultural production. After I left industry, I went to work in a team doing agricultural and economic research. We looked at the world. Like the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, I asked: “Where does food come from?”. When I was trying to save the shipbuilding industry in England, which failed, the Department for Transport kindly gave me a chart which I still value desperately. The chart shows the position of Her Majesty’s ships at sea and in harbour 14 days after I was born, in 1937. I should add that the figures for British commodity imports at that time—the amount we had to import as a percentage of the total—from 20 world regions were: wheat, 64 per cent; maize, 93 per cent; barley, 86 per cent; rice, 72 per cent; meat, 80 per cent; coffee, 79 per cent; cocoa, 90 per cent; tea, 96 per cent, and so on—including rubber and other agricultural products. I realised that we would never be self-sufficient in this country, but also that we had a duty to our Commonwealth countries.

The first job that I took on involved agricultural work for the States of Jersey. We found that Jersey royal potatoes were being priced out of the market but that we could get a higher price if they were shipped on a Sunday from Southampton and were all the same size and put in round, rather smart buckets. This idea of agricultural production led us also to sell daffodils in bud to families—you could not sell them to boyfriends and girlfriends. Daffodils in bud could be shipped cheaper. From there I moved to economic work for the Government of India and what they could produce—namely wool and, mainly, minerals, but not much food. My job always was to work out the most economic way of getting something from its place of growing to the market, and that taught me a lot. When I chaired the Government’s Middle East trade committee we looked at food shortages and where things came from. We went on missions together, often pushed by Lord Shackleton and Lord Jellicoe, to such places as French West Africa. I never realised that the Ivory Coast produced so many pineapples or what happened in other countries. Products from French territories would arrive the next day fresh in the markets at Les Halles and later in Rungis.

I now turn to one of the forgotten opportunities. One of the main reasons for our being in all the British territories—the Commonwealth, as we call it today—was to produce food, at which we were very good. It was highly organised and highly efficient, with very good security of transport. We have forgotten that. Of the other territories, the greatest in my view is the Sudan, where I spent a long time looking at the production of grain. Sudan was meant to be the breadbasket of the Middle East. We had the Gezira scheme for cotton, which produced some of the best in the world. All those areas and territories could return.

I thought that I would make some suggestions to some of your Lordships, in particular to the rich, belted Earls and Barons who might join in. We have a certain technology in the United Kingdom. I have already declared that I am intending to order six agricultural satellites. With the new technology we can plot from satellites the growth pattern of deserts and everywhere else over the year, and predict where there will be famine. We have forgotten this technology. Although we may be able to produce things here, the British in one form or another may often be better at managing other people’s affairs than they are their own. At 44,000 kilometres, the Commonwealth has the longest coastline in the world. We look at global food security, which must inevitably include the sea, and we say that there are great opportunities for our resources, particularly our human and technological skills, to be used worldwide. I would hate for us to concentrate just on little Britain.