Agriculture: Animal Feed

Lord Greaves Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin of Kennington, for securing this short debate on an important issue and congratulate her on the parliamentary campaign that she is waging on this issue. I am sure that we will hear a great deal more from her on this topic before too long. I also congratulate her on her very comprehensive survey of the issue and the measured way in which she has put forward proposals for change. By and large, I associate myself and the Liberal Democrats with what she said.

I shall make a few more peripheral comments as I do not want to repeat everything she said about this issue. The background is that many millions of tonnes of edible food are sent to landfill in this country as well as a lot more inedible food. It is estimated by the community interest company Food AWARE that perhaps 18 million tonnes of edible food ends up in landfill. Other people have different estimates of the amount of food that is thrown away and where it ends up, but what is common to all of them is that it is many millions in all cases. Again according to Food AWARE, we are in effect throwing away £23 billion a year, a figure that is rapidly rising as food prices are going up at the moment.

The environmental damage that this creates is obvious. Landfill costs and the landfill taxes that local authorities have to pay are equally obvious. Perhaps a little less obvious is the effect on people. Many people, particularly those on low incomes, are unable to afford what is described as, and is, healthy food and end up buying cheap junk food, although the price of that may be going up too. The effect of this food policy is ironically increasing malnutrition among such social groups and at the same time there is an increasing problem of obesity in the country. People are eating the wrong food, and they are eating too much of it. They are getting fatter, but they are not getting healthier. Disposal costs are passed on to consumers in higher prices and the landfill taxes that local authorities have to pay.

The NFU, quoting research at the University of Sussex, suggests that 20 million tonnes goes in the bin from domestic use alone. I do not know where it all goes. A lot of it perhaps does not go to landfill, but many million tonnes of food are still being thrown away. The statistics across the world are fairly well known. In Europe, on average 90 kilograms—200 pounds —of food is thrown away per person per year. In North America, it is even worse. Other parts of the world are similar. In industrialised Asia, it is 180 pounds. In much poorer parts of the world it is less. In south and south-east Asia it is 33 pounds, in Latin America it is 55 pounds and in sub-Saharan Africa it is only 11 pounds.

The fact that the richer parts of the world are throwing away so much edible food is a global disgrace. There is enough food produced in the world to feed the entire global population and, in fact, the projected global population for many years. The fact is that those of us in countries such as ours are depriving people in other parts of the world of that food because of the amount that we throw away. Looking at the famous waste hierarchy, the first thing we have to do is not to talk about what we do with the waste food that we throw out but to cut down the amount of waste food that we have in the first place. Efforts are being made by supermarkets, caterers, commercial producers of meals and some households, but it is nothing like enough. Until we tackle that basic problem, all the other things are really irrelevant.

The NFU is not against what is being proposed, but quite rightly advocates caution. It points out that feeding waste from catering establishments, including home kitchens and restaurants, has been banned, even if it is only vegetable waste, ever since the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, which some of us remember with horror in our own areas.

The noble Baroness went back 9,000 years, which is a long time even for the House of Lords. Those of us who go back to the years just after the war remember when we all had pig bins in our streets in which we put our food—thoroughly smelly things they were—in order for it to be taken away and made into pig swill. We do not want to go back to that kind of thoroughly unsanitary situation, but it appears that a cautious but determined approach to using much more waste food for feeding animals, particularly pigs, which are capable of eating animal and vegetable waste food, is a sensible way forward. The NFU is not against that. It says:

“This coupled with the obvious environmental benefits of reducing the tonnage of waste disposed in landfill each year, will lead to mounting pressure on the UK Government and within the EU to re-instate food waste into livestock diets. Yet due to historical precedents, the issue must be approached with an air of caution”.

I do not think any of us can disagree with that. Studies that are taking place are being approached in that way.

In order to do anything with domestic food waste, anaerobic digestion has an important part to play. I understand the point made by the noble Baroness that ultimately anaerobic digestion puts a great deal of the CO₂ back in the atmosphere, whereas if you feed it to animals it just recycles it within the system.

Whether food waste is used for anaerobic digestion, feed to animals, generating energy or whatever, it has to be collected. There are great concerns at the moment about whether local authorities will be able to collect food waste separately in ways that allow it to be reused and recycled under the proposals being put forward by the Government and being promoted particularly by the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, even though it seems essentially to be a Defra matter. His obsession is weekly collections of food waste. They are an excellent idea if the food waste is collected separately from everything else. If it is simply put into the grey bins with the residual waste and mixed up, and given the state of the technology that most local authorities have access to at the moment for the separation of the waste that has been collected, that food waste will simply end up in landfill. That would be a highly undesirable side effect of what Mr Pickles is proposing. Of course, where local authorities at the moment are not collecting food waste, it will make no difference because it simply goes in the fortnightly collections, but where local authorities are already collecting food waste separately, would like to do so or would be willing to do so, the fundamental question is whether the amount of money that Mr Pickles is offering to local authorities—£250 million in total—will be able to be put towards separate weekly food waste collection as opposed to food waste going in the grey bin.

I asked a Written Question about this recently and got a brush-off, really, which was, “We are still thinking about it”. I do not blame my noble friend the Minister here because it was not he who gave the Answer; the DCLG replied to the Question, even though it is a Defra matter. There is real confusion here and it really would help if the Minister could either answer the question or, if not, go back to his colleagues in the DCLG and say that lots of local authorities want to collect food waste separately and want to collect it weekly, but if Mr Pickles is providing all this beneficence to local authorities can he please provide it in a sensible way and not in a very old-fashioned way that just results in the stuff going to landfill?