Food Security Policy

Earl of Caithness Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Caithness]

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, for introducing this debate. We could do with far more than two and a half hours to discuss such a major difficulty that faces us.

The Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change produced in March this year another report, Achieving Food Security in the Face of Climate Change. It is an excellent report, but my initial thought was that mankind has faced climate change since mankind appeared on the scene. There have been at least 75 major temperature swings in the past 4,500 years. Indeed, the Norse empire was brought to an end when the west coast of Greenland became uninhabitable at the start of the mini ice age in the early 1300s.

However, one finds on page 6 of the report a sentence that sums up the problems that we face:

“Agriculture is at the nexus of three of the greatest challenges of the 21st century—achieving food security, adapting to climate change, and mitigating climate change while critical resources such as water, energy and land become increasingly scarce”.

That is a very good summary of the problem that we face and we have to set it against population growth in the world. For the first time, 50% of the world’s population lives in urban surroundings. As my noble friend Lord Gardiner and the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, we will need 30% more water, 50% more energy and 40% more food by the middle of this century, and we are getting towards the halfway mark for that. There are 7 billion people in the world and one has to remember that 20% of them—about 1.5 billion—are dependent on land that is currently degrading. Therefore, even if there were no increase in the population, the problems would already be getting more acute.

Water has also been mentioned and there are undoubtedly going to be considerable problems there. The population on the banks of the Nile is expected to double to 300 million by 2025. Looking further afield into Asia, there is the potential for water wars. If one thinks that China is going to build eight dams in the foreseeable future, taking water away from Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, one can see that the existing problems are going to be exacerbated by another country’s actions. How fortunate we are that we live on a funny little island off the north-west coast of Europe and that the only rivers we share are between Northern Ireland and Ireland, and a couple of rivers between Scotland and England. We do not have a problem compared with the rest of the world.

We have talked a little bit about waste and diet but what has not been mentioned is that food for the poorest 10% of households in the UK accounts for 15% of their budget, whereas for the richest 10% it is only 7%. Therefore, any hike in food prices will increasingly hit the poor.

It is terribly easy to set out the problems. Every noble Lord has done that and they are all experts on this, whereas I am not. However, it is much harder to set out the solutions. One can find some solutions in the report of EU Sub-Committee D. I am the third member of that sub-committee to speak today and there are two quotations that I should like to read out. The first is in Chapter 1—the introduction—and is from Mr Paolo de Castro, MEP, chairman of the Agriculture Committee of the European Parliament:

“In my mind, agriculture is at the centre of an Innovation Union and the new global challenge”.

A further quotation comes from the beginning of Chapter 6:

“We in Europe are sitting here saying, ‘Agriculture is the old economy’, in what I call an innovation-hostile environment”.

That was said by the head of cabinet of DG Agriculture. That, I think, highlights the problem that we face. Any solutions that we put forward are going to be hampered by the institutional framework in which we work and also by politicians—that is, politicians with a small “p”.

A recent report that we have just published concerns water—the problem of fresh water in Europe and the difficulties that that is going to pose for us. One of our recommendations is that in certain circumstances water prices will have to rise. Again, for the poorest in the country that will come as a nasty shock. Which politician standing for election wants to go around saying that food and water prices will have to rise? There is a small political negative in all that. It is also very difficult for politicians to tell the rich that in future they will have to eat less, particularly less meat, when, as one gets increasingly affluent—and there are more and more affluent people throughout the world—the one thing one wants to do is to eat meat and more of it.

Going back to the institutional framework in which we work, I again draw your Lordships’ attention to our report on innovation. With diseases such as bluetongue and the latest Ug99, rust in wheat, we have to have new technologies and innovation. At the moment, that is all tied up with the words “genetically modified foods”, but that is a very blunt term—rather like using the drought to cover every water shortage. We have to use biotechnology, just as we use nuclear as part of the energy solution. However, at the moment, the EU is preventing that innovation. Its reaction to innovation in the GM world is rather like a wet hen behaving badly in a thunder storm. We have to do more and I hope that my noble friend and the Government will pursue this matter in Europe because, without innovation and support for the research at Rothamsted that my noble friend has just mentioned, we will go backwards, not forwards.