Agriculture Bill (First sitting)

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[The Chair]

Before I bring in Simon Hoare, we have eight Members who still want to ask questions, so again, can we keep the questions short? I also respectfully ask the witnesses to keep their replies short and concise. That would be great.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

Q What is the principal purpose of agriculture?

Patrick Begg: It is to grow food long term and look after the natural assets that it stewards.

[Simon Hoare]

Q Principal purpose.

Patrick Begg: I do not think they are divisible. You cannot have long-term food production without a healthy, thriving well-stewarded natural environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report from last week is a wake-up call about the kind of challenges that we have around land-management resilience. Certainly people in Martin’s network and many other farmers I meet absolutely recognise that it is a long-term game, and for a long-term game you need long-term assets in good health.

Martin Lines: Food is important for all of us. We eat it every day and we farmers produce it. It is one of our key assets. The issue is how we produce it for the long term. If we talk only about more short-term production, that will not give us long-term food security. Also, we are wasting up to 40% already. Do we need to produce more or should we educate people to use more of what they produce? We need a change of system and a change in society to recognise the food that we produce and how to consume it well.

Thomas Lancaster: The principal purpose of agriculture is to produce food in a way that does not undermine the capacity of future generations to produce food, but I would differentiate between the principal purpose of agriculture and the principal purpose of agriculture policy, particularly payments. From our perspective, clause 1 is really important in terms of securing the things that the market does not provide, such as environmental land management, better water quality, and carbon storage and sequestration: the sort of natural capital that food production in future will depend on. The clauses around data collection, producer organisations, and regulation of the relationship between farmers and the first purchaser of agricultural products are all absolutely integral to the success of the Bill in enabling farmers to get a better return from the market. To me, that has been lost in some of the debates about there not being enough agriculture in the Bill, because that is a reading just of the first two or three clauses, which are about public money. Agriculture policy is about a lot more than public money. We need to have a much broader debate about what the purpose and structure of future policy is.

Gilles Deprez: I am not a food producer.

[Simon Hoare]

No—daffodil bulbs are poisonous if you eat them.

Gilles Deprez: I have never tried to eat them.

[Simon Hoare]

Don’t!

Gilles Deprez: With horticulture, I need to make money. I need to run a profitable organisation. Without being profitable, I cannot survive. I agree with the long-term views, building fertility and working in harmony with nature. I have never met a farmer who said, “Gilles, today I will spray and kill all the birds on my farm.” We do not need those farmers. I have never met that farmer. Farmers are custodians of the land and are working to the best of their ability to try to do that, but at the end of the day we need to make sure that we are profitable.

With flower production, perhaps I am not impacting on someone’s physical health, but I influence their mental health. Our ambition is to make sure that people live healthier lives and enjoy access every day. We need accessibility. It is a bit of a paradox sometimes because accessibility means in a certain way affordability, but within our slow margins, if I had to show my balance sheet or my profit and loss to a technical or IT company, they would laugh at us. They would say, “Why are you working seven days, 24 hours a day, for that small margin?”