Food Security Policy

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I should begin by declaring my interest as a rather faded and ancient peasant farmer producing wine and a few other things in Provence, although with nothing like the elegance of my noble friend Lady Miller, who has introduced this great debate.

One thing about being tinged with ancienty is that you learn that in order to determine the future it is not a bad idea to look back to the past. Perhaps we need not go as far back as my noble friend Lord Caithness, to the ice age, but in my case it is fairly simple. It is an accident of birth than entitles me to be a peasant farmer and I am proud of it. Our first wine was shipped to what is now the United Kingdom in the second century BC, to Hengistbury Head, near Christchurch, and presumably it went up maybe to Stonehenge. Your Lordships will perhaps remember that Bordeaux was also developed from Provence. We ran the whole of Bordeaux for many years and managed to take control of Eleanor of Provence, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Eleanor of Castile.

When I joined your Lordships’ House, I listened to debates, sitting on my own. I have made the point before that I did not know that when the Government changed you changed from one side of the House to the other, as nobody told me at the young age of 25. My Chief Whip then suggested that it might be a good idea to make a maiden speech. I have to say that I did not know what the word maiden meant. When I asked what I should speak on, he said I should speak from my own experience. My own experience was relatively limited, due in particular to a shortage of food during the war, where, at my prep school, we had only Pom, Spam and powdered egg. I had been brought up in Canada during the war and when I came back I was practically starving.

I learnt, too, that there is a strange thing about the United Kingdom, with a family who were the first people to ship meat from Australia and exploited sugar in the Caribbean. We are not self-sufficient. For the record, I will give the House the Government’s food situation in the year of my birth, 1937. We had to import 93% of our maize, 86% of our barley, 64% of our wheat, 73% of our meat and 95% of our cheese—after the recession, there was a need to produce less milk and more wheat—96% of our tea, naturally, 90% of our cocoa, 79% of our coffee, 79% of our rice and 68% of our sugar, as well as 67% of our butter, 90% of our spices and of course more than 80% of our fertiliser. Much of the latter was guano from Latin America, where William Gibbs “made his dibs on the turds of birds”, as I think it was explained originally.

At my prep school, I got into trouble when I said I had eaten a banana, because no one had seen a banana. I think, and will put on the record in Hansard, that there was a shortage of food. As my noble friend was explaining just now, there is enough food capability and production in the world. If we look back at our own history and the Council of Trade, the reason why we went out into the outside world was because we needed food. We went out to grow and produce all over Africa. The whole of the Commonwealth began initially not so much with the mineral resources but with the potential to create added value on the land.

Why did we get rid of the crown agents of the Commonwealth Development Finance Corporation and why do we not look back to what these countries actually produced? In the days when I did some economic research into agriculture, it was usually to predict what was going to happen to food and I always got it wrong. I came to travel through India and Africa and then gang up with the French in Francophone territories, compete with them, and ask where, what and how we produced. Naturally, sugar was one of those things. Sugar came from the Caribbean. I remember being down in Cameroon with my noble friend Lord Jellicoe when he became Leader of the House and a director of Tate & Lyle, sitting with the president there, who said, “Please, please help us to grow sugar with the Garoua sugar project”. However, Tate & Lyle got a bit nervous about Africa because it was a dangerous place to go to. They had forgotten that it was where we had done extremely well. They had forgotten, too, that Cameroon had named its capital after Victoria because the first slaves had sailed back from Jamaica and were so proud of what we had done to get rid of the slave trade that there was that relationship.

I turn to what I suggest we should do. We should go to these countries where we were before, place orders for what they used to produce and could produce, and give them an off-take agreement. With that agreement, they could fund almost anything. One of my favourite areas, which I have raised before, is the Sudan, which was to have been the bread basket of the Arab world. The Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development under Saeb Jaroudi provided, for people like me, a major grant to look at the possibility of growing grain and exporting it, as we had done before in other parts of Sudan with cotton. If we look at our shortage and what we need to import, and can somehow find a way with the private sector to direct that demand into placing orders where we, using the latest techniques and avoiding the problems of pollution, can help to grow, to deliver to the ports and to have the off-take, we are in good business.

Not so long ago, I suddenly found that I met some gang from Chicago who were very interested in all of this. Some wanted to speculate on the grain market and others on production. A lot of help on this, surprisingly enough, came from Israel. They then suggested to me that it might be possible to produce pork bellies. Thinking of some of the prejudice of the Arab world to the pig—but the pig is a forager and the Romans walked around with it—I was quite intrigued. They wanted to know when grain could be produced because there was a forward market. What I am saying is that if we can use our knowledge, our technology and our historic relationships to revisit these countries and to sit down and help them to grow what we would willingly buy, we could make a major contribution.