Biotechnology and Food Security

Simon Hart Excerpts

Wednesday 12th January 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr Spencer]

I am grateful to you for your intervention, Mr Streeter.

World energy prices are very much linked to the issues that we face. The simple fact is that the price of petroleum directly affects the price of agricultural fertilisers and pesticides and has a knock-on effect on them.

Energy production itself requires land usage. Erecting a wind turbine takes out land that could be used for agricultural food production. The erection of a refinery takes land out of agricultural food production and uses it for industrial purposes. More importantly, as we move towards sustainable energy sources, such as bioethanol and biodiesel produced from rape seed, we will be using agricultural crops to produce those biofuels, taking land out of food production and putting it into energy production. That might seem like a wonderful, modern technology and a wonderful, modern thing to do, but when my grandfather started farming in the 1930s, 30% of his land was used to produce oats, which were the energy source for the horses that he used to pull the ploughs. There is, therefore, nothing new in farmers using land for energy production. What has changed, however, is the number of people we have to feed and produce for. The changes will be quite dramatic, and we need to make sure that we have technologies available to assist us.

The Government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, said:

“by 2030 we need to be producing 50% more food. At the same time, we will need 50% more energy, and 30% more fresh water.”

Those are dramatic statistics. If we are to solve such problems, we really will have to set our stall out and meet those challenges. I hope that we all recognise that there are enormous challenges out there.

[Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on the way in which he is putting the case. One area of influence that has not been touched on is the UK media’s attitude to some of the topics he has discussed. Does he have a view on whether their attitude, particularly to developing technologies, has been a hindrance and has impacted negatively on our farmers’ ability to meet the challenges he has set out?

[Mr Spencer]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. What he says is true, and the purpose of today’s debate is to have a much more mature, science-based, focused discussion, which looks at the facts rather than the hysteria. My hon. Friend will recall headlines such as “Frankenstein foods”, which do nothing to inform people, and only make them scared of new technologies. To a certain extent, that is human nature. I stand here today unsure myself as to whether these new technologies will assist us. My point, however, is that we need to have the debate, to look at the facts and to explore the opportunities to see whether they offer a solution to the problems we face.

The human race has always been scared of new technologies. If we went back in history to the first time a surgeon suggested doing a heart transplant, we would see the furore that that caused. It was very dramatic to take a heart from one human being and transplant it into another human being. That was quite scary at the time, but it is now run of the mill. As a Member of Parliament, I am lobbied by people who say that we need to improve organ donation and to make sure that we are all informed about it. The technology is accepted and warmly embraced.

To an extent, we are going through the same debate with stem cells, because people are concerned about them and about whether they can assist us. Of course the human race is sometimes scared of change, but we have always been quite adaptable. In the end, we get there, we embrace technologies and we make use of them. That is why we have been so successful as a species at looking after ourselves.

I want to draw attention to Sir Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel peace prize for his work in changing wheat varieties and improving the way in which we feed ourselves. Many Members have mentioned the fact that we have been able to feed ourselves since the second world war, and we have done a very good job of that. Sir Norman Borlaug was the lead figure in the field. After the second world war, wheat yields were very low. As part of a long and painful process, Sir Norman used a paintbrush to cross-pollinate different varieties of wheat. He was able to take the correct strains from one variety and put them into another. That made the wheat yield vastly more per acre. It also made varieties shorter so that they did not fall over. As I said, we were able to feed Europe; we were able to keep what is now the European Union well fed. That process took a long time. We are talking about tens of years to make advancements in the science.

I am led to believe that genetic modification can speed up that process of genetic change. We have been doing such things for a long time. We have been changing the genetic make-up of those varieties through the long and laborious process of cross-pollination. Genetic modification can speed up that process and lead to advances that will reduce the disease susceptibility of those varieties and make them easier to grow and more drought-resistant. That has to be a good thing. At this stage, it is worth recognising that the genie is out of the bottle. Countries such as the USA, Canada and Brazil are using these technologies. Those crops are being grown in other parts of the world, where technological advancement is starting to move faster than it is here.

It is suggested that yields could increase between 6% and 30% using the same amount of land. If we were able to harness that technology, we could increase yields by 30%. Given the figures and the global changes that we are experiencing, even that degree of advancement might not be enough to keep us all fed to our accustomed level. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) mentioned fertilisers, a subject that will prove important as we move forward. Imagine a technology able to produce a wheat variety that had the same root structure as lucerne, which is nitrogen-fixing. Lucerne—and clover, which is very similar—takes nitrogen from the atmosphere, absorbs it into its leaves and produces nitrates in its root structure.