Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 2nd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind words. He is exactly right to say that we will have no hope at all of tackling poverty globally if we do not take a bigger interest in preventing climate change and the annihilation of the natural world that we have seen in recent decades. The people on the frontline in relation to nature destruction are the world’s poorest people. They are the people who depend most directly on the natural world, so he is absolutely right.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

10. I welcome the Minister to his post. I am sure he will agree that the food and farming system has a major impact on climate change in developing countries, from deforestation to water use and mountains of food waste, but that is not really talked about in DFID terms except for some small livestock programmes. Can he assure me that it will be at the top of his agenda as a Minister in this Department?

[Zac Goldsmith]

As we heard from the Secretary of State in his first answer, we have committed serious sums of money to enabling smallholders around the world to adapt to climate change. We have also launched an initiative at the UN called the Just Rural Transition, which is about shifting the way subsidies are spent around the world on land use, away from unsustainable use towards sustainable use, just as we are doing in this country. The OECD tells us that the 50 top food-producing nations spend €700 billion a year subsidising land use, on the whole very badly. If we can shift even a fraction of that, it will have a much bigger impact than all the world’s aid departments put together.

Trophy Hunting

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 15th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, and I will come to the points he raised later. Despite the appalling background that I and others have already described, we do care about nature in this country. It is often rightly said that we are a nation of animal lovers. I am proud of things that have happened even on this Government’s watch. We have banned microbeads and ensured that CCTV is required in every slaughterhouse. We are finally prohibiting the use of wild animals in circuses. That took a while to happen, but it is happening. We have banned the ivory trade. We have world-leading legislation. We have extended the blue belt to protect vast swathes of the world’s oceans. We have done much more besides that, but the need to protect animal welfare does not stop at our borders, and that is why I want to highlight the issue of trophy hunting today.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

No one is in any doubt as to the hon. Gentleman’s commitment to these issues. He just mentioned things outside our borders. I apologise if I pre-empt what the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries) is here to say, but there is also real concern about what is happening in Woburn on the estate owned by the Duke of Bedford. Tourists are paying up to £7,000 to shoot deer there. That is another form of canned trophy hunting, but it is happening in this country, not very far from where we are now. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that also should be prohibited?

[Zac Goldsmith]

I think that issue will be raised later in the debate. It is not an issue that I know a huge amount about, but from what I do know, I very much share the hon. Lady’s concerns, and I thank her for raising them.

On a personal level, I believe that shooting beautiful endangered wild animals purely for sport is barbaric and perverse. I think the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs spoke for many when he said recently that he had an “emotional problem” with trophy hunting. It is no surprise that a poll found 93% of the public opposed to trophy hunting. Earlier this week, the Commons digital engagement team kindly asked members of the public for their views in advance of this debate, and there was a huge response. Many thousands of people responded and, unsurprisingly, the vast majority were opposed to the practice, describing it as “abhorrent,” “appalling”, “barbaric”, and more besides.

Members will remember the tragic story of Cecil the lion, a beautiful and much celebrated animal, shot dead by a trophy hunter in Zimbabwe in 2015. I remember feeling sickened by the sight of celebrity hunter Melissa Bachman gloating on Twitter and Facebook, smirking alongside dead bears, crocodiles, lions and so many other beautiful animals, but the issue goes far wider than the stories that occasionally make it into the mainstream media or even social media. A 2016 report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare revealed that as many as 1.7 million hunting trophies crossed borders between 2004 and 2014, at least 200,000 of which were from threatened species. The US accounts for a staggering 71% of them. In 2016, 1,203 trophies were taken from the most endangered species of all—those listed on appendix I of the convention on international trade in endangered species.

Some of those species are in real trouble. Wild lion numbers, for example, may now be as low as 15,000, which is a 43% decline in just 21 years. Only 415,000 African elephants remain, when there were more than 3 million a century ago. The black rhino population has recovered a bit, but there are still just 5,000. It therefore seems perverse that the hunting continues, and in many cases is all perfectly legal. We sometimes hear from the hunters when they are pushed, charged or challenged that they do it for the love of the animal or for the love of nature, but could anyone who loves and respects the noble lion or the gentle giraffe even entertain the idea of paying thousands of pounds to butcher them?

Leaving the EU: Live Farm Animal Exports

Debate between Kerry McCarthy and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Monday 26th February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy]

I am talking about 2012, which is far more recent than that, and as I said the Government went along to the negotiations and were not prepared to take the side of those who were arguing for an eight- hour limit.

It is important that the Government are held to account on what I see as a promise to end the practice of live animal exports that was made during the referendum campaign. That is because—as the petition rightly states, although I do not think we have heard quite enough about it this afternoon—the transport of live animals, no matter what the end result is, whether they are going for slaughter or for fattening up overseas, causes a huge amount of unnecessary suffering.

It is important not to forget the tragedy that jump-started the long-running campaign for a ban, which happened many years ago. In 1996 nearly 70,000 sheep were left to die either from heatstroke, suffocation, burning or drowning, after the ship that was carrying them caught fire in the middle of the Indian ocean. Although, thankfully, an incident on that scale has not happened again, countless animals continue to endure gruelling journeys every year.

In 2012, 40 sheep had to be euthanised after being crammed into a truck, and just last August it was reported that 500 sheep spent four days without any access to food or water while they were being transported to Turkey. Also, many people here will have seen today’s story in The Times about how every year more than 5,000 calves—unweaned and discarded by the dairy industry—are sent on journeys of more than 135 hours from Scotland to Spain. That number had doubled from the previous year; I think the 5,000 figure is from 2016.

[Zac Goldsmith]

The hon. Lady is making a very good speech and I just want to add one more point. I believe that in the past two years 20,000 calves have been sent to Spain. In Spain there is a requirement that a calf should be given bedding for only the first two weeks of its life and not beyond that, whereas a British calf has the right—if I can put it that way—to have bedding for six months. So the standards in Spain are dramatically lower than those in the UK, which is another reason why this issue is about not only whether an animal is going to be slaughtered, but the conditions in which it is living when it reaches its destination.