Agriculture and Food Industry

Viscount Ridley Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Ridley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Plumb and join others in paying tribute to all that he has done and said, not least today. I declare my interest as a farm owner in Northumberland, not very far from the noble Lord, Lord Curry. I am sorry to tell the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, who is not in his place, that the latest text from my combine harvester says that the barley bushel weight is disappointing.

As the noble Lord, Lord Plumb, has detailed, farming is an astonishingly successful industry but it is also countercyclical. It grew throughout the previous recession and has often done so. It was an important factor in keeping the economy going that at least one part of it was not badly affected by the great recession. However, we must redouble our efforts in the years to come to keep farming competitive.

This urgency comes not because the world will necessarily struggle to feed itself, with 2 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, and not necessarily because climate change will make it harder to feed the world. If anything, more rainfall and longer growing seasons mean that we may well see improved yields for some decades. These are not the main, imminent threats. Indeed, if British farmers sit back and think that population growth and climate change will ensure plenty of consumers for their produce, they may be in for a rude shock.

The world is on the cusp of a great farming transition. From now on, and at an accelerating rate, it is quite possible that we will need less, not more, land globally to feed the world, even as the population grows. My noble friend Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer spoke of “peak soil”. I commend the Minister’s attention to a paper by the Rockefeller University’s Professor Jesse Ausubel, Peak Farmland and the Prospect for Land Sparing. Professor Ausubel says that,

“humanity now stands at Peak Farmland, and the 21st century will see release of vast areas of land, hundreds of millions of hectares, more than twice the area of France for nature”.

His argument is as follows. At the moment, we are using 65% less land to grow the same quantity of food, averaged over all crops, as we did in 1960. Had we stayed at 1960s yields, we would need 3 billion extra hectares to feed today’s population—that is several continents. Yet yields are still going up globally at about 2% a year. If you assume, pessimistically, that that drops to 1.7%, you assume that meat consumption rates grow faster than they are growing at the moment and you assume that population growth falls more slowly than it is falling at the moment—if you make those three conservative assumptions—you still find that we will need 146 million fewer hectares of land in 2060 than we farm today. If you make more realistic assumptions, we will need 256 million fewer hectares to feed the population in 2060 than we need today to feed today’s population. In other words, the world will potentially find it easier and easier to feed itself, which means real competition for British farmers from elsewhere in the world. As for African competition in commodity grains, we still live behind an artificial European tariff wall—an unjustifiable wall, in my view. I commend what the noble Lord, Lord Curry, said about not letting the pursuit of self-sufficiency lead to perverse incentives.

We should note that whereas yields have quadrupled here since 1950—most wheat yields have gone up about fourfold—and even more than that in Asia and America, they have barely budged in Africa in that period. If Africa gets hold of fertiliser, as it will—it is doing so—world food production will soar. In short, we will need to plan for a very competitive future, with potentially low commodity prices and high yields. This could be an underestimate of how much land could be released from farming. If climate change enhances rainfall and lengthens growing seasons; if hydroponic irrigation gets going with cheap desalination, so that many desert countries can grow plenty more food; if the productivity of chickens, pigs and other livestock, as mentioned by my noble friend the Duke of Montrose, continues to increase; and if landless agriculture—that is to say, tissue engineering and 3D printing to make meat, although I am sorry to say that that is competition for wonderful Scottish sheep—all bets could be off in terms of how much less land could be needed.

Even without any of these new technologies, we will need less land. That reality has been concealed in recent years by what is little more than a scandal of biofuels. We have been turning 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel. We have displaced just 6% of the world’s oil use, so the impact on oil use has been trivial, but it has had an impact on food prices none the less. When that madness stops, as it will, the extent to which the world needs less land to feed itself may well be revealed.

What does that mean for British agriculture? It means three things. First, we must press on with innovation. Yields have stagnated over the past 10 years in this country, as a number of noble Lords have said. We must rebuild the research base, as the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, said, and grasp the nettle of genetic modification, as the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said. I hope that the Minister will confirm the Government’s continuing support for genetic modification, particularly things such as nitrogen-use efficiency, which would decrease the amount of fertiliser needed to support a particular level of yield. We must redouble work on diseases, as the noble Lord, Lord Trees, said, and, as the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, said, we need to tackle the crisis in crop protection. It is a genuine crisis, with black grass, yellow rust and these other problems, which are harder and harder to deal with. The precautionary approach that dominates the development of crop protection chemicals in the European Union has been disastrous in terms of allowing us to develop new and environmentally more friendly products.

Secondly, we need to switch our efforts to quality not quantity of food, with nutrient-enhanced varieties with Omega-3 amino acids and lysine-enhanced varieties of specialist crops. As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said, we need to link the health agenda to the food agenda.

Thirdly, and finally, we need to add value and move up the processing chain. Those are the things that will keep British agriculture competitive. Yet the opportunities for Britain are surely great, because Mother Nature has given us day length that the Spanish would die for; soil moisture that a farmer in Kansas would kill for; access to markets that most Africans cannot dream of; and mild winters that Canadians would greatly envy. The Canadian crop is possibly down by as much as 26% this year, I am told, which is partly because of the harsh winter they experienced.

One Lincolnshire farmer by the name of Tim Lamyman comes very close every year to beating the world record wheat yield, set in New Zealand some years ago, of 15.6 tonnes per hectare. He claims that if he was given unlimited use of nitrogen, he would get there. That is the potential of this wonderful country.