Poverty: Food Costs Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Robin Millar
Main Page: Robin Millar (Conservative - Aberconwy)Department Debates - View all Robin Millar's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
Poverty: Food Costs
Robin Millar Excerpts(1 year, 2 months ago)
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Robin Millar (Aberconwy) (Con)
It is a privilege to serve under you, Mr Dowd. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) for bringing this debate to us. I start by paying tribute to the many in my own constituency who are dedicated and devoted to helping those in need in a variety of forms, not least by preparing and delivering food through food banks. I thank them and acknowledge the good work that they do.
In the two minutes I have, I would like to draw attention to the inadequacy of our approach to poverty. This debate is about
“tackling poverty and the cost of food”
and I congratulate the hon. Member for Ashfield on not calling it food poverty. I have written an essay on this, “A Common Sense Model for Poverty”, which highlights the inadequacy of a purely financial measure of poverty. In the context of food, a simple example is that the price of a bag of pasta has risen from 50p to 95p. That is the food premium that my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield mentioned. The impact of that price rise is far bigger at the bottom of the affordability scale than at the top.
I will give three very quick observations. First, there are structural problems in our economy because it has accelerated the capacity to produce food through, for example, businesses focusing on adding value through processing to foods to make them more convenient, rather than focusing on nutrition or health. That is the maximising of profit, again at the expense of local food producers, and the supply chain suffers for it. I doubt that farmers who are worried about feed, fuel and fertiliser are seeing the benefits of many of the price rises in our shops. Finally, businesses are concentrating on the markets that can pay, not the local and global markets that need the food themselves. When it comes to health, we are all after a hot, filling and nutritious meal. That is well within our grasp.
I would like to conclude by mentioning the social benefits of food. The most powerful projects that I have seen are about bringing people together around the making and breaking of bread, so our approach needs to change. Market drivers introduce unhelpful factors—
