Food Security

Rosie Winterton Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Relevant documents: Second Report of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Insect decline and UK food security, HC 326; Second Report of the Environmental Audit Committee, Environmental change and food security, HC 312, and the Government response, HC 646; Seventh Report of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee of Session 2022-23, Food security, HC 622, and the Government response, Session 2023-24, HC 37; Oral evidence taken before the International Development Committee on 30 January and 12 March 2024, on the UK Government’s work on achieving SDG2: Zero Hunger, HC 112; and e-petition 611113, Ban development on agricultural land to increase food self-sufficiency.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I will call Philip Dunne to move the motion and will put an advisory 15-minute limit on the clock, which I am sure will be helpful.

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of food security, including the effects on it of environmental change and of insect decline.

I start by thanking the Liaison Committee and the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate on food security, as covered in recent reports by the Environmental Audit Committee, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, and the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, chaired respectively by myself and my right hon. Friends the Members for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill) and for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark). I look forward to their contributions.

Food security affects us all. We all want enough food to feed ourselves and our families. I declare a particular interest in this area as a food producer myself, having held responsibility for my family farm for over 30 years. Our reports are, we hope, in the broadest sense complementary, in that each Committee recognises threats to the country’s food security and makes recommendations to Government on how to mitigate those threats. It may be hard to imagine the UK not having access to enough food to feed our population, but the truth is that British people have already felt the effects of climate change on our plates. Cold snaps and floods in Spain and Morocco were partly to blame for empty salad shelves in our supermarkets last year. We know that extreme weather events both at home and abroad are likely to become more frequent. Cost of living pressures mean that there are households in this country for which insecure access to food is already a daily reality. I commend colleagues on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee for their work on household food security.

In the Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry, we looked at how to keep Britons fed in the face of environmental change. What we found is that food production and environmental change are—not to put too fine a point on it—mutually destructive. Climate change and biodiversity loss threaten to undermine not just food production itself, but the whole food system. Colleagues on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee have drawn attention to a particular aspect of this relationship in their recent report on insect decline and UK food security.

Our global food system is itself one of the biggest drivers of environmental change, contributing to those very factors that undermine food security. In our inquiry, we heard that British farming is responsible for only 0.5% of the UK’s gross domestic product, but 12% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the food system is responsible for 30% of carbon emissions, but 50% of biodiversity loss.

We framed our findings around three pillars. First, we need to adapt our food and farming system to become more resilient to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Secondly, we must mitigate the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on our food system. Thirdly, we must mitigate the damage to the environment that some aspects of our food system may cause.

According to the latest annual statistics of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the UK produced 58% of its own food in 2022 and imported the remaining 42%. My Committee took the view that prioritising, sustaining and improving our dependence on home-grown produce would be key to keeping Britain nourished while protecting the planet. That will be particularly important for foods that are vital for our health but where we currently rely on imports. For example, we currently import 84% of our fruit. We cannot rely on domestic produce alone and even if we did it, would not guarantee food security. We heard that an exclusive focus on producing food here would make us more vulnerable, not less, to extreme weather events such as heatwaves, which are becoming more common not just in other countries, but here in the UK. Food produced here is dependent on the wider global food system. British food still relies on imported fertiliser, pesticide and animal feed.

We know all too well that the global food system does not exist in a vacuum. Health crises, such as the covid pandemic or avian flu; geopolitical crises, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world’s breadbasket; and global supply pinch points, such as the blockage in the Suez canal all affect supply chains, prices and protectionism, and compound the effects of environmental change. We have seen all those things in the course of this Parliament.

When food insecurity is exacerbated by environmental change it can lead to conflict, with devastating consequences. Incidentally, that is why our Committee has just this week launched a new inquiry into the effects of climate change and wider security issues, and I encourage anybody who is interested, including those interested in the impact on food security, to submit evidence by the end of April.

Today, we have published the Government’s response to our report on environmental change and food security, and I wish to thank the Minister and his officials who have engaged with our report. There is much in the response that we welcome, and I would like to focus my remarks this afternoon on some of the responses to the issues that the Committee highlighted in our report.

Under the Agriculture Act 2020, the Government are required to produce a food security assessment every three years. Although that is welcome, in view of the growing risk of volatility of food supplies, we urge the Government in our report to move to an annual publication of its food security report, with which colleagues on the EFRA Committee agree. I welcome the Prime Minister’s recent announcement that the Government will introduce an annual food security index and encourage them to find parliamentary time to put this on to a statutory footing at the earliest opportunity.

We found that one of the easiest wins in shoring up UK food self-sufficiency and mitigating the environmental impacts of our food system is to prevent the food that we have produced from going to waste, so I also welcome the £15 million that the Prime Minister recently announced to stop farm food going to waste. I would appreciate it if the Minister confirmed whether he agrees that the Government’s strategy for preventing food and drink waste, as outlined in their waste prevention programme for England, would be greatly enhanced if it included some targets and timescales for reducing food waste, as was recommended by my Committee.

In response to our report, the Secretary of State committed to taking a decision in the next four to six months on compulsory food waste reporting by businesses. I encourage him to do so before Dissolution. I also encourage the Minister to look at accelerating the regulation of insects as a high-protein source—something that has now been approved by the EU. Insects can be reared on organic waste streams, including food waste, to create a domestic alternative to soy imports for animal feed. It is potentially a tremendous way to have an impact in this area by reducing the millions of tonnes of soy imported for animal feed from countries at risk of deforestation, for example.

One of the key ingredients for food security is healthy soils, which face degradation from increasing droughts, flooding and more intense rainfall brought about by climate change. I welcome the new Government commitment to publish a progress report on the development of a soil health indicator by June. Ensuring that farmers have access to clear information to help to measure the health of their soils, which is a fascinatingly complex subject, is incredibly important, so I am pleased that the Government accepted our recommendation to publish guidance for farmers on soil monitoring. I believe that today the EFRA Committee is publishing the Government response to its report on soil health, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby might refer to in his remarks.

The other key ingredient is water, so I am particularly pleased that the Minister for water is responding to the debate. Food producers need enough of it, and they need it to be clean. My Committee recommended that the Government look holistically at managing water demand so that farmers have enough water in the right place at the right time to be able to feed the nation.

The Government’s commitment to consider more robust water efficiency standards is welcome as a demand control measure, as is their commitment to a third round of the water management grant later this year. We pointed out that the scheme will benefit only a small proportion of farmers in England. Will the Minister state what proportion of farmers he expects to benefit from the water management grant, specifically for establishing on-farm reservoirs and for precision irrigation technology to help British farming to become more water-efficient and better prepared for hotter, drier summers?

Turning briefly to consumption, what we choose to eat can have a big impact on the planet, which clearly affects our future food security. The choices that we make now will affect how much choice we have in the future. In response to our report, the Government pointed to Public Health England’s guidance, the Eatwell Guide, stating:

“Given that most people in the UK do not currently follow a diet in line with government dietary recommendations, improvements in population dietary intakes in line with the Eatwell Guide would go a significant way to meeting sustainability targets.”

All very laudable stuff. What will the Government do to encourage more people to follow this beneficial guidance? Surely if it is well-evidenced advice, the Government should be making more of it.

One landmark piece of work that we are still waiting for is the Government’s land use framework. Time and again, we heard in our inquiry that optimising the way English land is used for all the many demands required of it is the central issue to maintaining food security in a changing environment. When he gave evidence last July, the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries promised us that the land use framework, already delayed, would be published by the end of 2023. Sadly, the Government are now telling my Committee that it will be published in 2024. Will the Minister update the House on when in 2024 we can expect the land use framework to be published? Will he undertake, as my Committee recommended, to publish the Government’s methodologies alongside the land use framework when it eventually appears, to give confidence that the framework will contribute both to maintaining food security and to the Government’s net zero and biodiversity targets?

The other hugely relevant innovation brought in by the Government are the environmental land management schemes, or ELMS. The Government described those schemes as being founded on the principle of public money for public goods, but Ministers have declined our reasonable invitation to designate food security as a public good—as the Minister will be aware, the NFU has been calling for that for some time. Will the Minister explain why?

I did not come here today to be all doom and gloom. The environmental challenges facing our food system are worrying, but they are also an opportunity for the best of technological innovation. Our Committee has been keen to examine over this Parliament how technology can help us to address to environmental and climate changes that we face. Modern technology—be it the use of artificial intelligence and drones to pinpoint the use of fertiliser, the use or methane-suppressing food additives, or alternative proteins such as insects, now mostly grown in labs—opens up new ways of producing food while minimising the environmental impact. I am sure that we will hear a lot about that from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells.

In response to our recommendations on expanding the incentives for farmers to take technological innovations, the Government increased the farming equipment and technology grant to a maximum of £50,000 per farm, and increased its overall budget to £70 million, which I welcome.

The fact that three Select Committees are here to represent recent reports on different aspects of food security shows how important the subject is. We are not alone: the International Development Committee is in the middle on an inquiry on hunger and nutrition. I thank the Liaison Committee for granting time for the debate, and I thank the Government for their response to the Environmental Audit Committee report on environmental change and food security. I commend the report to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.

[Sir Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne), who chairs the Environmental Audit Committee, on which I served for some time. I was pleased that he referred to my Committee’s report on soil health and spoke about baselines on where we are with our soils. A lot of soil testing work has been done in Northern Ireland. As we have heard, although many farmers, particularly arable farmers, are making great strides in testing their soils, none of that data is uploaded to any Government website, and there is very little data on the amount of carbon in our soils and on what we can do to improve the situation.

This is not the first time that this House has debated food security. Perhaps the most contentious issue dominating politics in the 19th century was the balance to be struck between protecting the interests of British farmers and landowners, and the need to provide cheap food to the workers in factories and mills in the industrial revolution. Lord Liverpool introduced the corn laws in 1815, preventing the import of wheat under 80 shillings a quarter, or £20 a tonne. In today’s money, that is double the price that wheat hit after the invasion of Ukraine, although the production stimulated by those protections meant that the actual price of wheat, and hence bread, never reached those dizzy heights.

My own family farm—to which I draw the House’s attention in my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—started business four years after the repeal of the corn laws by Robert Peel’s Administration in 1846. The workers’ cause, led by Cobden and Bright, had prevailed over the landowners’ vested interests. The era of free trade did not submerge the country under cheap imports from the empire and new world, however. British farmers enjoyed a golden era in the 1870s, helped to some extent by the mass exodus of workers from the prairies to make their fortunes in the 1849 California gold rush, and by the little matter of the American civil war between 1861 and 1865. I make these points because of the parallels we see today, as we move out of a protectionist European Union into a new era of free trade. We should not forget that it was only the submarine blockades of the first and second world wars that brought into sharp focus the need for domestic food production. Two years ago, following Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, we once again learned the same lesson.

We face a whole new challenge today: not only recognising the need for domestically produced food, but striking the right balance between food production and the environmental goals we need to achieve. In many cases, those goals can be delivered together, such as through the sustainable farming incentive, but in others, they are mutually exclusive. Surely, for example, it makes no sense to cover our most productive agricultural land with solar energy arrays. We can, of course, also produce biofuels on our land: wheat is used to make the ethanol in E10 petrol, and vegetable oil is used for diesel engines. However, if that means indirect land use changes in other parts of the world where forest is being cleared to create agricultural land, are we really delivering on our overall greenhouse gas obligations?

Perhaps the most contentious issue is that of the uplands—the moors and dales in places such as North Yorkshire and the Lake district. Henry Dimbleby MBE, who was then lead of the national food strategy for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, gave evidence to my Committee. His report is well worth a read, and I agree with much of its content. It correctly states that the 20% of farmland that is in the uplands contributes only 1% or 2% of the calories produced in this country, and suggests that that land would be better utilised by planting trees to lock up carbon. We have already seen that happening in the west of Scotland, with serious consequences for local communities and employment, and the Welsh Government have approached it in a very crude way: 10% of land is to be planted with trees, regardless of the size and viability of the remaining farming business. Farmers have made their opposition to that policy very clear in Cardiff. I worry when I hear that Labour in Wales is a blueprint for what will happen in England if Labour were to get into power after the election. It is disappointing that there are no Labour Back Benchers in the Chamber today to give me their view of the future. Where are they?

We need to strike the right balance between the need to deliver our carbon obligations and the need to support rural communities, while also protecting the landscapes that merit national park designation. My Committee’s report on food security was launched in July 2022, as a direct response to market volatility following the invasion of Ukraine. It was published in July 2023, and the Government responded in November last year. We also looked at food poverty, extending free school meal provision, and the junk food cycle that contributes to rising obesity levels. We made 18 recommendations, which can be read on pages 45 to 49 of the report by those who wish to do so.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow referred to, we were delighted that the Government have already adopted a number of those recommendations. I was particularly pleased that the Farm to Fork summit will, as we suggested, now be an annual event, alongside the publication of an annual UK food security report. In February, the Government announced that they would publish an annual food security index, in line with our recommendation in paragraph 29 of the report. I look forward to other aspects of that report being taken up, particularly the response to John Shropshire’s independent review of labour shortages.

I have two specific points that I would like to raise. First, do sugar beet and oilseed rape have a future in the UK? This is particularly relevant given the report on pollinators. The science is clear that neonicotinoids have a profound effect on bee behaviour and hive viability when those insects are exposed to them. Sugar beet is susceptible to a number of virus diseases, including virus yellows. The vector for those viruses is the peach potato aphid, Myzus persicae. If an aphid feeds on a beet plant, it transmits the virus in much the same way a mosquito transmits malaria. One bite is enough, and the earlier in the season the infection takes place, the more devastating the effect on the yield. In cold winters, there are fewer over-wintered aphids and the risk is low, but if—as in the current season—the scientists at Rothamsted determine that the risk is high, the use of a neonic seed dressing is sanctioned. If that option were not available, sugar beet production in the UK would quickly become unviable. We would have to import beet sugar from countries that have not banned those seed dressings, or cane sugar from tropical areas.

The point is that bees and other pollinators feed on nectar and pollen. Sugar beet is a biennial, and is harvested before it flowers—I know that DEFRA’s chief scientific adviser is looking at this issue. Is there a risk to bees from soil residues that may be taken up by flowering plants, either as weeds in the sugar beets or in subsequent years? The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee report calls for more research on pesticide accumulation in terrestrial environments.

Oilseed rape—those yellow fields that we see in the spring—has declined by about 60% in the UK. That is because of the cabbage stem flea beetle, which can decimate the crop as it emerges, and the larvae that hatch can also be a problem in the spring. My farm still grows rape, but like many of my neighbours, this could be our last year. Seed dressings only need to work against this pest in the first three or four weeks of drilling in August. The crop does not flower until April or May the following year. What evidence is there that there is a risk to bees more than six months after the chemical seed dressing has been used, and just as importantly, what will be the effect on pollinators if we lose this important source of pollen and nectar early in the season? I know some beekeepers worry, as I do, about the law of intended consequences coming into play. Indeed, in the absence of the neonic seed dressings, my own rape crop was sprayed five times with synthetic pyrethroids in the month or six weeks after drilling. This is not a chemical that is bee-friendly, although farmers obviously take the precaution of spraying when the bees are not flying.

For many, the only real alternative crop to sugar beet or rape would be field beans or combining peas. The economics of growing these profitably are not good. Perhaps the Minister would consider including these crops as stewardship options and eligible for support to reduce our reliance on imported soil, which we know has an effect on the planet globally.

Secondly, what will be the effect of the wet autumn and winter combined with depressed cereal prices on our future food security in the United Kingdom? Around 30% of our wheat crop either did not get drilled last autumn or has rotted in the field. With payment for stewardship options looking increasingly attractive and predictable, does the Minister share my worries that increasing areas of land may be entered into multi-annual options such as overwintered bird food, or pollen and nectar, and that we may be short of wheat in future years, or is there a risk that some schemes may even be over- subscribed? Of course, we have other schemes. There is certainly an offset scheme in my area, where quite a large amount of land has been taken out of production because of a housing developer needing to offset a particular biodiversity.

In conclusion, our farmers produce some of the best- quality food in the world. We need to improve the amount of food we produce here, not least because of the environmental impact of international transport, particularly air freight of out-of-season products. We can also deliver the environmental gains that the environmental land management scheme incentivises, but that loss must not be at the expense of domestic production or result in carbon emissions elsewhere.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee.