Food Waste

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Teverson (LD)]

My Lords, it is not often that one finds it impossible to follow certain speeches, and I am not going to go through my breakfast because it probably would not be as impressive as that of the noble Lord, Lord Young.

I must declare an interest as a member of the board of the Marine Management Organisation, and I will say a little about that later. I start by congratulating not just my noble friend Lady Scott but also the noble Baroness, Lady Byford, and my noble friend Lady Parminter for following this subject through, which is so important. I know from having been chair of the House’s Arctic Committee, which did not get quite the same level of publicity but did not do badly, that it is so important because we in this House put so much energy into these reports. It is important that the chairs of those committees, and other Members, follow them through and make the differences that we open out.

On the fisheries side, I congratulate the coalition Government and the present Government on having followed through with Europe in terms of landings requirements. That now means that, increasingly, the discarding of fish is illegal at last. That is true of the pelagic stock, for which it was introduced last year, and this year it is sensibly being introduced for demersal species. That will make a huge difference to the immoral waste that there was; something like 15% or 20% of some stocks was being thrown back into the sea to die. I do not think that the Government need any encouragement, but nevertheless I encourage them to keep strong in that area, not just in terms of our own fisheries but also those of our EU partners. That is really important.

The area that I want to talk about a little more is the developing world. Clearly, most of the subject so far has been around the UK. During the general election, I attended a meeting with the NFU in Devon and Cornwall as the Lib Dem representative. The meeting was in Exeter, and there was a lot of consensus and it was most interesting. But one question from a landowner in Devon was about the fact that we have a population of 6 billion on this planet and we are going to go to 9 billion. He asked, “How the heck are we going to feed them and deal with that?”. I put my hand up, schoolboy-style, and said, “Please, sir, I’ve got the answer to that one because I have read the report from the House of Lords which states that around 30% of all food globally is wasted”. So one key way of solving the problem of feeding not just the increased population but the existing people in poverty is by looking at this whole area of food waste. We need to make it not just a national issue but a global one.

Over the last year, I was very privileged to chair a commission for the University of Birmingham on the “cold” economy and doing “cold” smarter—it was all about refrigeration and supply chains. Again, one key thing to come out of that was that a large proportion of food waste in the developing world is because of wastage due to not being able to control temperatures; obviously the other major issues are just not being able to get to markets and pestilence. Cold chains are really, really important. There is a huge amount that we can help developing countries with in that area and I am very interested to hear from the Minister on that. It is clearly a DfID issue rather than a Defra one, but in terms of the global development goals and UK aid, are we helping in that process?

One of the other things about it is that, although waste food takes up the equivalent of about the size of Mexico and impinges on water and land usage as well, refrigeration engineering technology is extremely bad, polluting and energy inefficient. We have technological solutions for that in this country which we are implementing. It is so important that we allow that technology to go out to the developing world.

I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, on securing this debate and moving it through. The last thing I would say is that one of the great solutions to food waste in Cornwall is organisations such as the Cornish Food Box Company, which delivers food boxes and does not care what shape the food is at all. I recommend that fellow Members go to that source.