Examination of Witness (Questions 1 -
19)
WEDNESDAY 5 JULY 2000
PROFESSOR SIR
JOHN MARSH,
CBE
Chairman
1. Professor Marsh, I see that you have become
emeritus. I hope that is not a painful condition.
(Professor Sir John Marsh) It is a tremendous relief.
2. You will be familiar with the ways of Select
Committees and the ways of Government from your long involvement
with both. We are undertaking a report on organic farming. We
start with no preconceptions at all. We do not start from the
belief that organic farming has a particular religious significance.
As far as I am concerned, the Committee wants to explore the market
place, how big it is, how it has been created, how long it will
last, who will supply it and what mechanisms are necessary in
order to supply it. That is how we shall start, but where we end
up depends on you and other witnesses. First, I have a simple
question. Is it in our national interest to promote organic farming?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) The answer to that question
depends upon those aspects of organic farming that the market
process itself will not satisfactorily deliver. There are two
ways in which things may go wrong. One is that the perception
of organic farming and its value may be inaccurate or erroneous.
If that is a serious issue, clearly there is need for some form
of correction in order to put it right. The other area is that
organic farming may deliver a bundle of public good which the
market does not reward, and if that public good is valued, it
needs to be delivered. The question that then emerges is: is organic
farming necessarily the best way to provide that flow of public
good?
3. Is it fair to summarise your conclusion that
public policy should not be involved in subsidising organic farming
directly, or only incidentally, as it delivers environmental benefit
or other desirable public good.
(Professor Sir John Marsh) Certainly. It is important
that one pays for deliverables. One real problem, that we have
had with the Common Agricultural Policy, is the argument that
it was necessary to maintain prices in order to maintain farmers'
incomes. That is a misleading argument and one that leads to a
great deal of wastage, but it has come about because we have not
identified an issue that concerns the social position of farmers
and the transition through which they are going. One can make
the same mistake in the environmental area, in that we do not
accurately identify and properly reward those things that we want
to receive.
4. No doubt we shall hear quite a lot of people
say, "Gosh, there is a great expansion here; the consumers
want it; we are not producing much so that means there will be
a lot more imports; Continental governments have been more generous
in giving conversion grants and, by God, we had better catch up
and give more so that we can supply more from our home market,
not least because we know what the words `organic bread' mean
and we are not sure what it means if it comes from Belgium".
What would be your answer to that general sort of thesis?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) The general answer to that
is that, if other people are prepared to subsidise that output
on our behalf, and it is satisfactory in regard to what our consumers
require, which raises the question of the definition that is attached
to the imported product, we should welcome it and release the
resources that otherwise would be consumed in the United Kingdom.
5. If we were to stop supporting the conversion,
would that stop the expansion of organic production, or would
people simply find a different way of doing it?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) The difficulty about supporting
conversion is common. You pay people who are not doing what you
want so that they do something different, but you do not pay the
people who are already doing what you want to continue to do that.
If you take the view that the market should determine the level
of supply of the product and its competitiveness, it seems to
me that the market could safely be left to resolve the issue without
any form of conversion premia, particularly if, in addition to
that, the added public good values were identified and rewarded,
and that provided an efficient and competitive way of delivering
those values.
6. When the Government recently increased the
amount of money available—the action plan announced an additional
amount—did you say, "Whoopee", or did you say,
"They have given in to pressure"?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) The second rather than
the first.
Mr Todd
7. Taking the logic of your argument, with which
I largely agree, presumably you would say that it would be a function
of the retailer who is seeking a supplier of organic produce to
meet customer demand to support conversion of farms to organic
production if that were the most efficient way of meeting that
customer demand?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) The answer is that the
retailer should be in a position, if he wants to secure the supply,
to offer such terms to the supplier as make it attractive for
the supplier to enter into the process of conversion which has
to take place before he can deliver.
8. I have made precisely that point to some
retailers who clearly regard it as a duty of the Government—partly
because they have seen Government do it—to offer conversion
premia. They are prepared to offer guarantee supply terms for
a period of time to secure the willingness of a farmer to provide
the produce that they want.
(Professor Sir John Marsh) If I were a retailer, it
would be absolutely excellent if I could tap into the public purse
in order to supply what I need. However, I do not believe that
that is a good reason for public policy to do that.
9. I believe there is a lot in that. Obviously,
the current arrangement with retailers is that they are prepared
to offer long-term contracts, but not to fund conversion. Presumably,
you would support a more flexible approach by retailers that perhaps
offered some premium and in return, in normal business terms,
would offer slightly less attractive terms for continued supply
if that balanced the benefit that they were offering.
(Professor Sir John Marsh) Yes.
10. I also take it that you would profoundly
disagree with the proposed Bill for target setting for organic
conversion in this country, in which the Government would set
a target for conversion?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) That is a step in the direction
of the planned economy from which I would wish to withdraw rapidly.
Mr Todd: We are in complete agreement.
Mr Drew
11. Obviously you make a number of fairly dismissive
comments about the consumer reaction to organic food. Do you say
that from a scientific basis, or do you just see this as somewhat
warped in terms of their market appreciation, or do you just have
a thing about organic food?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) I have no "thing"
about organic food at all. I am content that consumers should
buy organic food if that is what they want. I am concerned, not
so much that they have faith in organic food, which is a matter
for them to resolve, but I am concerned that there should be an
implied suggestion that the ordinary, conventional supply of food
is in some way lacking in nutrition or in some way damaging to
the environment, or in some way unhelpful in terms of human health.
It seems to me that those statements, without in any way entering
into a scientific debate, are not demonstrated to be true by any
evidence that I have seen.
12. Would you argue that there is need for research
to prove some of those things, such as that organic food tastes
better, looks better, and is better for you? Do those matters
need to be researched properly?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) I think there is need for
research across the whole area, not just research limited to organic
food, but across the whole economy of food. We need to understand
better how food affects human health in relation to its nutritional
quality. As far as taste is concerned, that is probably an aspect
that the market can resolve. People make choices and if they do
not like what they eat, presumably they choose something different
next time. In relation to the interaction of particular farming
systems, one looks not only at systems as a whole, but also at
parts of those systems, and particularly at the way in which those
systems are managed. The way in which those systems impact with
the general environmental goals that we have is also something
that needs careful research. One has to look at those issues in
some detail in order to uncover those parts that are positive
and those that are negative. Most systems have aspects of both.
13. If you were, therefore, to take the view
that at least some of the arguments in favour of organic farming
are hype, or are certainly blurred, is there not good value in
that if organic standards are higher that will drive up the standards
of conventional food which must be a good thing.
(Professor Sir John Marsh) I question the word "higher".
The good thing about the organic debate is, firstly, that it raises
awareness of concerns which are proper concerns that people should
have. Secondly, one of the excellent things that it produces,
at least within this country, is a defined set of protocols so
that, in a sense, we give some assurance to people as to how organic
food is produced. I think that is very important. I am sure that
as one looks at the broader areas of agriculture, some of those
lessons are being learned in the form of various assurance schemes
that we see, schemes that are concerned to convey to consumers
and to retailers some confidence about the product that they buy.
What is higher and lower in terms of standards seems to me to
depend on from what position one begins. If one looks at the food
in terms of its appearance, in terms of its durability and so
forth, you may conclude that some of the conventional products
are of a higher standard than some of the organic products. Again,
I believe that those are judgments that one can safely leave to
the market.
14. Are consumers getting good value for money
from organic produce, or are they being misled by advertising
and general hype?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) It would be extremely arrogant
of me to say that consumers were not getting good value if I implied
by that that they did not know what they were doing. It would
also be an indication that they were not getting good value if
in some sense there was an artificial restriction on the supply
of those products. I do not believe, from my position, that I
can say "Yes" with any confidence to either of those
statements. That does not necessarily mean that there may not
be some consumers who have a degree of faith in this process that
may in the end prove to be unjustified.
Mr Jack
15. Professor Marsh, we have all assumed that
the word "organic" implies certain attributes which
perhaps an alternative growing system does not have. Can you help
me in terms of understanding the basic growth processes—not
the plant pathology—that are involved, certainly so far
as crops are concerned, when we talk about organic. I am not a
chemist and I am not a scientist, but I understood that the basic
chemistry of growing anything by any technique involves organic
chemistry. Is that correct?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) You are asking an economist
to answer a question on which he is wholly incompetent to adjudicate.
My view on that is similar to your own.
16. Let me approach this matter in a different
way. We were talking about the attributes that come from the adoption
of the so-called organic regime. If we wind back the clock to
the form of agriculture that existed before modern agri-chemicals
came into existence, could we say that that was a sort of organic
regime? If that historic fact is accepted, has food improved or
not, compared with the outputs of yesteryear under simpler agricultural
regimes?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) I hear some horrendous
stories about things that people put on growing plants when they
became diseased long before we had a well organised agri-chemical
industry. The assumption that no chemicals were used, in a sense,
is a slightly misleading one. It is clear that if you look at
what happened before we developed a systematic means of providing
plant nutrition and controlling plant disease, we had a product
that was much more subject to hazards and, therefore, much more
likely to be variable in quality and uncertain in supply. In that
sense it would be inferior when looked at over a time scale. It
is quite clear that one attribute that we have seen in our society
is not simply the individual product, but the tendency for products
to become more uniform or at least more classified in a uniform
way over time, so that if one looked at the matter historically,
I suspect that one would see that the range of variation within
a product was greater than the range of variation one would find
today with products grown in the conventional way. I would have
no real belief that the set of products that currently are available
are less nutritious. They may well taste different, but that would
probably be the result of preferences exerted through the market
place over time, affecting the way in which producers operate.
On those grounds I could not judge whether that was better or
worse. That, in a sense, is what the market has delivered.
Mr Opik
17. Proportionally, how much more land is needed
to produce the same amount of produce organically compared with
what we may call conventional methods?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) I wish I could give you
a simple, straightforward and honest answer. I know from what
I am told—this is hearsay rather than first experience—that
in general the yields of organic crops tend to be lower than the
yields of conventional crops. In that sort of situation, how much
more would be needed, to some degree, would depend upon the vulnerability
of each crop to disease regimes and so forth. In one sense, at
the moment because the relative standard of crop health in the
country is fairly well protected by conventional agriculture,
it may be that the yields of organic farms are, to some degree,
underpinned by that. If one were to get into a market place in
which the whole area was organic, there may be more serious problems
of that nature, and proportionately the area of land required
would grow. As I say, I cannot give you a simple and straightforward
answer. The general direction is that more land would be needed.
18. Following on that, can organic farming be
bad for the environment?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) You have to ask yourself
what you mean by good and bad for the environment and what is
the environment. If one looks at the global market place, if one
takes reasonably commonly agreed views as to where the population
of the world is going, and the implications of that in terms of
food requirement and the repercussions of that population not
only growing in numbers but also growing in real wealth, it is
difficult not to believe that there will be quite heavy pressure
on productive resources globally. If you diminish in a way the
productivity of the most suitable areas, you are likely to have
to spread your production to less suitable areas. As you do that,
some of those less suitable areas are likely to be environmentally
more fragile than the ones currently used. If you look at the
problem the other way around, and look at it in terms of the individual
farm and the individual plot of land, I am quite prepared to believe
that organic farming, in terms of criteria such as biodiversity,
will score relatively highly. There is a balance, and a balance
that one has to recognise consciously and on which one has to
come to a decision. Where does your responsibility lie? I am particularly
concerned about the responsibility of moving the technologies
forward, so that as we encounter that increasing pressure on resources,
we are capable of coping with it. One difficulty that I have with
some thinking of the organic movement is the rejection outright
of genetic modification, which seems to me to have an important
role as we look downstream.
19. It sounds to me as though there is a balance
to be struck between organic farming and protecting the environment
of the countryside and its changing nature. What is your view
about that?
(Professor Sir John Marsh) Clearly, protecting the
countryside is very important in a society which is mobile, wealthy
and influenced by television programmes that have made the population
more knowledgeable about the countryside. It is a genuine public
good, but it is not a free public good. Therefore, one has to
determine how far we shall take a protecting operation, and how
far we shall say that the price of that is actually too high and
we shall have to allow changes to take place even though, in the
process, we sacrifice some things that we really like.
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