Agriculture Bill (Ninth sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Philip Dunne

Tuesday 13th November 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Kerry McCarthy]

Yes, that is entirely the case. This is about the food supply chain. If we are only to look at our food system in relation to farming and treat that as something segregated, we cannot help farmers in the way they need to be helped.

[Mr Dunne]

I am listening carefully to what the hon. Lady is saying; perhaps I could illustrate to her, with a current example from my farm, the difficulty with what I think she is suggesting. We have a potato crop, and the very dry conditions through the summer, followed by some rain in August, have led to a large proportion of the potatoes in unirrigated fields developing what are called “dolly heads”, where there is an extra spurt of growth, and the potato, instead of being a single shape, has a misshapen bit alongside.

To get buyers to accept loads that contain those shapes, we have to send samples off to them. They decide whether to accept or reject them; sometimes, we send the entire load off and it is rejected on sight and sent back to the farm—we cannot anticipate precisely how the supermarket or intermediary will react until they see the load. What is being suggested can lead to extreme complication for the farmer in deciding what should happen to the particular product. What happened to the product is not their fault, but is to do with the climatic conditions.

[Kerry McCarthy]

There is certainly evidence that, whereas under the Groceries Code Adjudicator regime produce should not be rejected because supermarket buyers have just decided they do not actually need what they are contracted to buy, they are increasingly using cosmetic reasons as an excuse, because they are still allowed to reject on cosmetic grounds. A crop of potatoes in one period might be entirely acceptable to the supermarkets because they need those potatoes, but then, on cosmetic grounds, they will reject produce that looks almost identical, because they have got their predictions wrong and do not actually need the potatoes they thought they would. Sometimes this produce is not going to be sold as nicely smooth and rounded baking potatoes packaged up in the supermarket; it will be going into products where the shape does not matter, but the supermarkets have got their predictions and buying calculations wrong and do not actually want it, so they use cosmetic reasons as an excuse.

The memorandum on the delegated powers in the Bill says that clause 20 provides powers for new marketing standards that could be used to

“reduce food waste (for example, by having the flexibility to change any standards that are purely visual)”.

That picks up the contention about EU marketing specifications being responsible for some produce being rejected. As I understand it, the supermarket standards are actually much higher than the EU marketing standards, so the fault does not lie with EU standards; the issue might be supermarkets trying to employ them as an excuse. I think that having more flexibility in relation to marketing standards is unlikely to make a difference, and I hope that the Minister addresses that point.

My key point is this. When we discussed amendment 85, I think, the Minister said we should not make farmers responsible for meeting the food waste target, as most of the time they are not responsible for food waste, and I absolutely agree. That is why the mandatory target should sit in this part of the Bill, where we are talking about the supply chain.

I have said that the Courtauld 2025 commitment is a helpful tool, but it is not ambitious enough. The fact that participation is voluntary means that it will never achieve as much as we would like and will certainly not get us towards the sustainable development goal. However, when Courtauld 2025 was announced, the Waste and Resources Action Programme was meant to be generating a baseline for primary production by the end of 2018. Can the Minister update us on that? My understanding is that it might now be only an estimate rather than a set figure. The fact that there have been funding cuts to WRAP and the industry is still being secretive with its data means that we cannot come up with the baseline that we would like to see.

Finally on amendment 113, I just reiterate the point that we want to see a level playing field. At the moment, 89 businesses have signed up to the food waste reduction roadmap, but that is fewer than half of the top 250 food businesses. Again, the good guys will sign up and get a lot of credit, and then the Government can say, “This is really working. We’ve got companies that are doing their best to reduce food waste.” But what about those companies that have not signed up? I will leave the food waste side of things there.

Amendment 114 is a probing amendment to follow up on a debate that I had a few weeks ago, on international Anti-Slavery Day, about modern slavery and labour exploitation in supermarket supply chains. We know that the sector has a really serious problem with that. The International Labour Organisation estimates that agriculture, if grouped with forestry and fishing, is the sector with the fourth highest proportion of victims of forced labour worldwide. Other sectors, such as apparel—the fashion or clothing industry—seem to be getting to grips with the problem, but the food sector does not appear to be. I mentioned many examples during that debate, so I will not go into detail now, but they ranged from organised crime in the Italian tomato-growing sector to workers in the Thai seafood industry—cases of torture, enslavement and workers being kept at sea and passed from ship to ship for years at a time, with 59% of workers, I think, saying that they had seen the murder of a fellow worker. In this country, we still very much have an issue with gangmasters and poor conditions in the sector.

Oxfam has sent up the Behind the Barcodes scorecard, which rates supermarkets on their transparency, accountability and treatment of workers and farmers. There is also a gender element, because women tend to be more likely to be victims. On that scorecard, Tesco again comes out best—at 23%. It did actually come along to a meeting of the all-party group on human trafficking and modern slavery, which I thought was good. It listened to the clothing industry talk about what it had done, and it seemed keen to do more. So Tesco was on 23%. Morrisons and Lidl are on 5%, and Aldi is on 1%, so we have a discrepancy between the supermarkets trying to do the right thing and others not taking it seriously at all.

Agriculture Bill (Sixth sitting)

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Philip Dunne

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

[Kerry McCarthy]

The hon. Gentleman has plenty of carrots, although I do not know about sticks. For those who do not know, he is in the carrot business. I have already said that I get a bit fed up with the constant refrain that we have the highest animal welfare standards in the world, because I think it suggests a slight degree of complacency and we should constantly aim higher. The Minister is probably sick to death of the number of written questions that I table about slaughterhouses and conditions on farms, but we have seen from undercover investigations some of the conditions under which the more intensive farms operate. I am by no means tarring all farmers with the same brush, and it is good that we take animal welfare so seriously in this country. However, there are a lot of examples of when we do not, and we should not be too complacent about it.

[Mr Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady. I should declare that I am a livestock farmer and am in receipt of single farm payment. I understand that she may not have had much experience of visiting livestock farms, though she might have done so as a member of the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. She would be welcome to come and see the livestock on my farm—both cattle and sheep—and how they are looked after. That might encourage her to consider whether she wants to continue to be a vegan.

[Kerry McCarthy]

I have visited quite a few farms. The hon. Gentleman is completely missing the point. Anyone could take me to a farm with happy cows or happy sheep, by his definition, but that does not mean that there are not places where abuse occurs—where animals are not kept in the best possible conditions or treated well. That is exactly the point I have just made. I accept that we have high animal welfare standards generally, but I am also saying that we should not be complacent. As for the vegan thing, I have been a vegan for 27 years, so the hon. Gentleman would have to do a lot more to change my mind than simply show me his cows.