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6.3 pm
Mr. Colin Breed (South-East Cornwall): I am grateful for the opportunity to make the second maiden speech today. I was surprised that another hon. Member was
making a maiden speech on this subject, but I add my congratulations to the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) on his speech. I share with him the delight of representing an area of outstanding natural beauty, although I do not wish to debate the relative merits of our constituencies. South-east Cornwall, like the rest of Cornwall, and like Westmorland, is a beautiful area.
My constituency covers the part of Cornwall that is just over the border from England, marked by the River Tamar. It is a largely rural area, and this debate has great significance to the agricultural community. My constituency is mostly countryside and moorland, but it also has long stretches of coastline and river. The fishing community in Looe has been much exercised recently by the fisheries debate.
Like much of Cornwall, south-east Cornwall has suffered recently from the rundown of Her Majesty's dockyard in Devonport. The unemployment generated by the lack of employment opportunities in the dockyard has hit south-east Cornwall hard, and we have some of the highest unemployment rates and lowest wages in the country.
I have pleasure in paying tribute to my predecessor, Sir Robert Hicks, who was a Member much admired and respected on both sides of the House and in the constituency. He held the seat for some 27 years, with the exception of a six-month interregnum in 1974, when the seat was held by my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler). That six-month period is a record for brevity in representing the seat, and I firmly hope to leave that record intact. Sir Robert was a popular constituency Member, and I know that the House will join me in wishing him and Lady Hicks a long, happy and healthy retirement.
Plant diversification is extremely important to the future of south-east Cornwall and, indeed, the planet. New varieties are being encouraged in several ways--including through genetic manipulation, as we have heard--but we must not let the prime cultivars become extinct. The rush to produce new varieties could bring the extinction of many existing varieties that may be considered uneconomic.
I am delighted to remind the House of the recent award of nearly £40 million of millennium and lottery money for the creation of the Eden Botanical Institute, to be constructed near St. Blazey in my constituency. The institute will be the first major foundation to be based on the principles of the Rio convention, about which we have all learnt more recently.
The institute's living plant and seed collection will give pleasure to millions of visitors and will present to the public the central concerns of land use, including the stewardship of nature and the associated conservation of habitat and species. In short, it will ensure that variety is maintained and that sensible diversification is undertaken for the future. The institute will demonstrate the need to produce food economically, as valuable crops, to sustain the world's population, and will ensure that plant variety is an important factor.
That will not mean a diminution of plant varieties, or a concentration on varieties produced by genetically modified organisms. It will ensure that the old seeds and old plants will continue, because therein lies the possibility of future genetic material.
The institute will strive to bring together those who work for real conservation of both wild and primitive cultivars, and for economic crop production. An effective resolution of those often conflicting interests needs to be sought.
Plant variety and diversification will be at the heart of the scientific endeavour in the Eden institute. The institute is only just completing its planning stage, but I believe that, when it is finished, it will provide a considerable resource for conservation projects, not only nationally but internationally.
The institute offers not only this country but the world the opportunity to restore and maintain the old plants, rather than rushing to new varieties simply for economic purposes. In the years to come, we may well value its work. We may find, for example, that some of the new varieties now being produced, which will be given licences and which will be paid for by farmers, do not provide quite the value that we now believe they will.
Mr. Tim Boswell (Daventry):
I first pay tribute to the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall (Mr. Breed), who has just made his maiden speech and introduced his lovely constituency and its interesting developments. He also paid a gracious tribute to our old friend Sir Robert Hicks.
I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Mr. Collins) for his elegant maiden speech, and especially for his warm praise of Michael Jopling, with whom I, too, had the privilege of working in the 1980s, when he was Minister of Agriculture. He is held in great affection in the House.
I welcome my right hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Mr. Curry) and my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) to their new duties on the Opposition Front Bench. I also welcome the Minister of State, with whom we have already had exchanges in the House.
I make it clear at the outset that I have no problem with the Bill, and do not seek to detain the House. The debate is something of a valediction to matters agricultural for me, as I leave my Front-Bench responsibilities for that subject in order--to coin a phrase--to spend more time with the tax system.
I shall give the House three reasons for my taking part in the debate. First, I admit that, at the tender age of about 12, fired with enthusiasm by a lively father who was a farmer with a strong technical interest, and was prepared to take his son at an early age to the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and other such places, I developed the ambition to be a plant breeder--an ambition which I never succeeded in fulfilling.
My second reason for involving myself briefly in the debate is that, until a month or two ago, I had ministerial responsibility for its subject matter, and I should like to
pay tribute to the officials who worked for me, as they now do for the Minister. He is excellently served in that respect.
Thirdly, this is the appropriate moment to declare an interest. As is recorded in the Register of Members' Interests, I am a farmer, so I have a personal interest in the debate. More to the point, I grow Riband, which the hon. Member for Stafford (Mr. Kidney) mentioned. Even more to the point, I save my own seed, as I always have an eye to economy. That interest has not yet been introduced, wide though the debate has ranged. I have the seed treated by the chairman of the negotiating committee of the National Association of Agricultural Contractors, my near neighbour and good friend, Tim Rogers, who looks after it for me.
I wish to record my appreciation of the wisdom of our predecessors, who in 1964--I make no party point--legislated for the first time to protect plant varieties. I remember that, at that time, there was concern that yields of cereals, in particular, had reached a plateau.
We had made advances after the war, as we moved from Squarehead's Master and the other old varieties. For one awful moment, I thought that the hon. Member for South-East Cornwall intended to make the growing of Squarehead's Master or Little Joss compulsory. But he did not go quite that far.
We have now moved on to the Bersee and the Cappelle. Both are French, incidentally. None the less, in 1964 we had a British regime for the first time. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr. Lansley) said, it takes time to build up a breeding programme, but, as a result of that regime, we intensified and diversified the nature of plant breeding--especially, but not exclusively, cereal breeding--in this country.
From that time on, we started a rapid expansion in the results of British agriculture and became one of the world leaders in plant breeding. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, roughly, we were adding about 2 per cent. annually to cereal yields. In due course, that caused trouble for the European common agricultural policy.
Leaving that aside, however, if one is using land, it must be right to use it effectively. There was a 2 per cent. annual increase in yield, about half of which was directly attributable to modern varieties. I argue that those varieties would not have become available without the royalty regime introduced in 1964.
The yield improvements continued--but there was also an important technical development, which leads me on to some of the other comments that I want to make. Superimposed on the yield improvements of the 1980s was an increasing emphasis, both by breeders and in the analysis of breeding by institutions such as the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, on resistance to disease and on balancing the mix of varieties and offerings, so that they were both safer to grow and more appropriate for the market.
The hon. Member for Linlithgow (Mr. Dalyell) was worried about genetically modified materials. It is almost 25 years since a particular variety, Rothwell Purdix, became the dominant United Kingdom wheat variety. It had single-gene resistance to yellow rust, and the whole variety was completely destroyed in one season.
This year, it happens that we have another yellow rust outbreak, and one or two of the major varieties now grown in this country, such as Brigadier, seem to be rather
susceptible. However, as a result of diversification of variety, plus chemical protection where appropriate, especially on the more susceptible varieties, the situation has been contained this year--in my judgment, at least.
All is by no means gloom and doom. British cereal breeding can hold its head up. It has diversified from simple pursuit of high yields to a much more varied and appropriate offering for modern conditions, and continues to improve under the present regime.
The Bill will reinforce that regime, bring it up to date and extend it. That is why I welcome it, and I should like to touch on three features that have been brought out in the debate, two of which arose initially from the speech by the hon. Member for Lewes (Mr. Baker).
The first is internationalisation. I regard that as broadly a positive factor and, until today, I had thought that the Liberal Democrats tended to take the same view. The legislation is implementing an international as well as a European obligation, and I welcome that.
We certainly cannot run away from the rest of the world and its breeding programmes to conduct a private policy behind closed doors on these islands. We must be prepared to be internationalist--although, at the same time, under the regime that we have had since the 1960s, private and individual breeders still exist. There are small breeding companies as well as large ones in the British Society of Plant Breeders.
The second factor that concerns me and the hon. Member for Linlithgow--who is right to say that these matters should be debated--is the question of genetic manipulation. There are different kinds of genetic manipulation, according to whether one is importing genes from a completely different species or is simply bringing in a particular gene to help disease resistance from broadly within the same family of plants.
It is worth recording that if one is a plant breeder--as I hoped to be all those years ago--one is in effect manipulating genes to produce a particular result. There is no absolute conceptual difference between that and using modern techniques such as gene splicing. The important thing is that they should not give rise to concerns about the environment.
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