Agriculture Bill (Fourth sitting)

Sarah Dines Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee Debate: 4th sitting: House of Commons
Thursday 13th February 2020 Public Bill Committees

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

Q Could we talk about peatlands? You have been very involved in trying to make the case for the restoration of peatlands and their role as a natural climate solution. Do you think more can be done in the Bill to encourage their being left alone?

George Monbiot: I do not know whether this would fit in the remit of the Bill, but I would certainly favour banning driven grouse shooting, which is a major cause of peatland erosion. I would look at the strongest possible measures we could introduce for the restoration of blanket bogs. I would, at the very least, commission new research into the impact of agriculture on peatlands, and whether we are better off without agriculture on peatlands in terms of the carbon budget.

There is a paper in Food Policy by Durk Nijdam that points out the extraordinary levels of carbon opportunity cost on Welsh farms with high organic soils. He talks in some cases of 640 kg of carbon per kilogram of lamb protein, as a result of the lost opportunity to protect those organic soils, which is a result of farming continuing there. It would be far better in carbon terms not to farm soils, if his research is replicable.

[Miss Sarah Dines (Derbyshire Dales) (Con)]

Q I am interested in your view that we should be looking at reducing farming land usage. As we leave our present farming relationships due to Brexit, is this not a time of national need when we must preserve our acreage to feed our growing population? I am asking whether you have a political slant that is not directed at feeding the nation and securing the interests of our home farmers and workers. Is it not fanciful to think that we should give up a large amount of our acreage? Do we not need it to save us against the trials and tribulations of the post-Brexit world?

George Monbiot: There are a lot of things we need to save ourselves from at the moment, and the most urgent is climate breakdown and ecological breakdown. Huge tracts of this land are scarcely feeding us at all. There are very large areas of land where you have one sheep per hectare, per 2 hectares or, in some places, per 5 hectares. That is not producing food in any appreciable amount, yet that land could be used to draw down large amounts of carbon, to stop the sixth great extinction in its tracks, for the restoration of wildlife and ecosystems, or to prevent flooding. There is a whole load of ecological goods—public goods—that that land could be delivering, but it is not currently delivering them, because it is producing tiny amounts of food instead. We are probably all against urban sprawl and believe it is a bad thing because it takes up huge amounts of land while delivering not many services for the people who live in a sprawling city. We should be equally concerned about agricultural sprawl, which takes up far more land.

[Miss Dines]

Q With respect, what do I say to my farmers in the Derbyshire dales, where, by necessity, the land is good only for sheep in some areas? Do I tell them they should not be able to earn a living and feed the country? It is a bit fanciful to think we can give up huge tracts of land. Is it not the case that we will get the best outcome if farmers work in conjunction with places such as the Peak park authority?

George Monbiot: I would characterise the Peak park as an ecological disaster area. It is remarkable how little wildlife there is. You can walk all day and see just a handful of birds; I will see more in a suburban garden. We need a completely different approach to managing land like that.

What you can tell the farmers is, “Let’s pay you to do something completely different, such as restoration, rewilding, bringing back the missing species or bringing back the trees.” Where are the trees above around 200 metres in the Peak district and, indeed, most of the uplands of Britain? They simply are not there. This is a disaster. Anyone who visits from another country—someone from Brazil or Indonesia, my friends, tropical forest ecologists—says, “What’s happened here?” They see these places we call our national parks and say, “How can you call that a national park? It’s a sheep ranch.”

By all means let us keep people on the land, but let us use public money to pay them to do something completely different. Let us face it: there would not be any hill farming in this country without public money. It is a loss-making exercise. If we, the public, are going to pay for it, I think we, the public, have a right to determine what we are paying for. We should be paying for public goods, not public harms.

[Abena Oppong-Asare (Erith and Thamesmead) (Lab)]

Q Hi George. There has been a lot of publicity about the carbon footprints of different types of food. For example, 1 kg of vegetables produces approximately 2 kg of carbon dioxide, whereas 1 kg of beef produces about 27 kg of carbon dioxide. Do you think the Bill should go a step further and focus on those who produce foodstuffs with low carbon footprints rather than those who produce foodstuffs with higher carbon footprints?

George Monbiot: I think this should be the perspective through which we start to see everything. This is the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced: the breakdown of our life-support systems. The Governments that will be judged favourably by future generations are those that put that issue front and centre. Other things are subsidiary to our survival. It is imperative that we should start favouring a low-carbon diet and use public policy to disfavour a high-carbon diet. Whether through farm subsidies—I think that does play a role—or meat taxes, which I think could also play a role, we should find all the instruments possible to steer and encourage people to reduce the environmental impacts of their diets.

The most important metric here is what scientists call carbon opportunity costs, which is basically, “What could you be doing on that land if you weren’t doing this?” If, for instance, you are producing beef or lamb on this piece of land, what is the carbon opportunity cost of that? What would be the carbon storage if, instead, trees and wild habitats were allowed to return? There has been some new research just published, or a new compilation of research, on Our World in Data showing that when you look at the carbon opportunity costs, those of beef and lamb are massively greater than those of anything else we eat. It is really, really huge. Even when you take food miles into account, they are tiny by comparison to those carbon costs, and that is what we should focus on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ruth Jones]

That is what I would like to have your opinion on, because obviously five years is a long time. Do you have any thoughts on the timescale? Would you make a recommendation?

Professor Keevil: I would like to see it reported much more frequently, every year or every two years.

[Miss Dines]

Q Professor Keevil, you make quite a bold statement in your briefing note about the 14.7% of the USA population getting food-borne illnesses every year, compared with only 1.5% in the UK. I want to ask you about your reference for that, because there is not a reference for the source of that information. That brings me on to a general question. It is quite clear that there could be a variety of other reasons for that: it could be bad storage, bad travel or bad food preparation or cooking. How reliable is this sort of statistic in a climate where we are facing going into new agreements with other countries? How reliable is that sort of information?

Professor Keevil: That is a good question, because you will get different metrics if you go to different sources. What we tried to do with those numbers was look at the annual reporting by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. You will find the information on their website. A lot of the agencies say, “Well, these are the numbers of actual reports that we have received,” for example, through people going to hospital, to their GP and so forth, and then they apply a multiplication factor for the numbers who could have been affected but for whom the signs of disease are much less—people who do not report that they have had any disease. A lot of the information is based on those types of numbers—for example, 14% of Americans do not report to a doctor to say they have had food poisoning—but they are extrapolated. As I say, you will get different metrics depending on your source. It could be that the figure in the UK is more than 1.5%, but I do not think it is anywhere near what the Americans have extrapolated.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Q We mentioned clause 17 on food security, which is new to this edition of the Bill. Do you think there is scope for an extra provision? It talks about looking at global food availability, supply sources and resilience of the supply chain. In terms of your speciality, there is a lot of concern about endocrine disrupters in food, nitrates in meat, and the overuse of antibiotics, which affects human health, through the food chain. Do you think there should be reports to Parliament on food security? It is not really about food poisoning, but about the wider health concerns about what is getting into our food supply.

Professor Keevil: As I said at the start, the issue is very complex because food security is not just about supply; it is about whether it is nutritious, wholesome and safe. You cannot separate one from the other, so we have to be aware of the microbiological safety of the food that is being produced and consumed. The work that we and others have done shows us that our current methods of assessing safety are not adequate. That has to be recognised. As a scientist, I would always say we need more research done; I sincerely believe we do in this particular case. Knowledge improves standards, and we have to adopt and enforce the highest standards. We need better research and continual reassessment of what we are being challenged with, and perhaps the Bill can reflect that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Abena Oppong-Asare]

Q The Food Standards Agency looks into the standards in food production. Are there elements of that that you think should be incorporated into the Bill to embellish it?

Sue Davies: Including provisions that enable financial assistance for food safety and public health measures, such as the reduced use of antibiotics, feeds through into the things the Food Standards Agency is trying to achieve. That then allows sufficient flexibility.

I mentioned the example of campylobacter because that has been a big priority. It is the main type of food poisoning in the UK. Most of it comes from chickens. We have been struggling to reduce its level for years. We have made progress in recent years by taking the farm-to-fork approach. We need to recognise that a lot of things that manifest at the end of the food chain originate in production. Giving the flexibility to be able to provide financial assistance and incentivise those kinds of measures is really important. The Food Standards Agency will then need to work with DEFRA and others in defining what those might be and what sort of indicators you might want to include, in terms of the monitoring that is set out in the Bill.

[Miss Dines]

Q Ms Davies, your organisation, Which?, has historically been a champion for consumer choice. I want to ask you what your position is. From your written statement, it seems like you are proposing a form of protectionism against certain imports based on standards, but with a lack of clarity, I would suggest. Does that not deny the consumer a choice and potentially make food a lot more expensive for the consumer?

Sue Davies: We are certainly not protectionist and we are certainly in favour of consumer choice. However, it is about enabling people to make meaningful choices and the types of choices that we want. We also base what we say and what we call for on consumer research—talking to people and understanding their perspectives. Over the last couple of decades, we have been talking to people about food a lot, but in the last three years we have had a regular tracker and have been asking a lot about food standards.

We are just in the process of doing some more research, for which we are going to do a series of public dialogues around the country, particularly focused on trade deals and what some of the opportunities of those could be, as well as some of the issues over which people might have concerns. It will look at food standards, but also at things like digital services and opportunities for a wide range of cheaper products. We know from the research we have done to date that people feel very strongly about food production methods and would have concerns if food was allowed to come in with reduced, cheaper standards that undermined the standards and choices we have at the moment.

I do not think it is about reducing people’s choice. It is about enabling people to have an informed choice, and about enabling everybody to have a choice. At the moment, we have regulation and standards that underpin everything that everybody buys, whatever their income level. If it suddenly becomes the case that only those who can afford it can have the type of standards we have at the moment, and other people have to have lower standards, that would certainly be a completely retrograde step.

We are starting from a point where we have good standards, and we are about to start negotiating trade deals, so we need to be really clear in those objectives about where food fits. We need to look at the opportunities for food and other things that we might gain in those trade deals, but also to be really clear about where we will not compromise. Things such as food safety and quality and animal welfare come out from our research as things that people do not think we should compromise on.

[Ruth Jones]

Q I am sure you are aware that the national food strategy will be published shortly. How do you think that will complement the Bill? The strategy is coming out after the Bill has been published. Will the two marry up? We obviously do not know yet what it will contain.

Sue Davies: We are really pleased that the national food strategy is being developed. In a way, it is incredible that we have not really got a clear vision for food and how it should be produced, so we think that is really valuable. The way it is being conducted, with public dialogues and citizens’ assemblies, is a really inclusive process, and will hopefully look at the breadth of issues and the many different interests involved in food policy.

As you say, ideally you would have your food policy, and you would then have your agriculture policy, your trade policy and your environment policy; they should all be complementary. Obviously things are working to different timescales, so we need to make sure that the Bill allows for the breadth of issues that agriculture can be impacted by. That is why, as part of that national food strategy, we think it is important that food delivers for consumers and that we tackle some of the challenges in the food system, whether that is climate change, dealing with obesity or food security issues.

We realise that there is limited scope within the Bill, compared with the strategy, but we should take every opportunity to make sure that we put the right incentives in the Bill to deliver on those wider things that matter to people.