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25 Mar 2009 : Column 129WH—continued
We followed that up at the beginning of this year with an electronic survey of local authorities and dioceses. The survey asked all local authorities to confirm what actions they have taken or are planning to take regarding asbestos management in their system buildings. That was a joint survey, carried out by ourselves and the HSE. We will be jointly scrutinising the results once it is completed and considering whether further steps are needed to ensure that local authorities and schools fulfil their legal duties. Failings identified by the survey will
be followed up by the HSE and we are happy to consider the results of the hon. Gentleman’s survey alongside that work, if he wishes to make that information available to us.
The hon. Gentleman cited international examples of asbestos management in schools. We considered the complete removal of asbestos in all schools, as is the case in America, but looking at the evidence, it was decided that complete removal caused serious danger to workers and building occupants, and that it was therefore best to leave asbestos in place if it is not deteriorating. In Northern Ireland, asbestos remains in place, but it is strictly managed by the education and library boards. If the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2006 are followed and if periodic checks and surveys are carried out on the state of asbestos, it can be safely managed and the risks can be minimised.
The hon. Gentleman also argued for a national register of asbestos surveys. Although it is essential for duty holders to maintain surveys at a local level, I am concerned that a national register of schools would duplicate the work already undertaken by local duty holders—in most cases that is the local authority. A national register of schools is not currently necessary because we have the existing processes. However, it is fair to say that we will keep that under review.
The hon. Gentleman made a further point about training. Head teachers and governors need to be aware of their responsibilities under the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2006 when commissioning building or maintenance work. That not only applies to renovation projects, but to smaller scale modifications, such as installing interactive whiteboards and computer cabling.
The hon. Gentleman’s suggestion of including training for head teachers in the national professional qualification for headship is a good one. Training already includes a module on estate management, and we will undertake to work with the National College for School Leadership to see whether we can further embed the management of asbestos and wider health and safety issues into the training. It would also be appropriate to look at the content of the diploma course for school business managers, which is also run by the NCSL.
Reaching local authority staff is also a priority, and I welcome the recent publication by the Federation of Property Societies, “Compliance Monitoring in Council Premises”, which includes detailed guidance for local authority and school staff on the implementation and control of asbestos and other health and safety legislation.
All secondary schools in Rochdale are now involved in the Building Schools for the Future programme, and are in the procurement stage with a view to signing contracts at the end of the year. Under BSF, the responsibilities and liabilities for dealing with asbestos are set out in the standard contractual documents produced by Partnerships for Schools. They currently require local authorities to provide a type 2 asbestos survey to bidders. Local authorities have to confirm that one is available when they submit their outline business case to PFS for approval, and include one as part of the documentation provided to bidders at tender stage. The bidders then normally take a type 3 asbestos survey. Once a local education partnership is set up, local authorities are again required to provide a type 2 survey, or could arrange for the LEP to procure one. Again, that will inform the process for a type 3 survey.
Major refurbishments undertaken under BSF would normally include the removal of all asbestos, and any deteriorating material would normally be identified by a type 2 survey and removed. The documents will be updated to reflect new HSE guidance for the surveys that I described.
Nothing is more important than the health and safety of children and the teachers who work in our schools. We are committed to doing what is necessary to ensure that asbestos in schools is managed safely, and we will be looking closely at the results of the survey that we have undertaken, which is due to close at the end of this month. We will continue to communicate with head teachers, governors and local authority staff. As I said, parents must have confidence in the safety of the school to which they send their children, teachers and school staff should feel safe at work, and pupils should feel safe and secure in their learning environment.
4.52 pm
Livestock Industry (Climate Change)
4.57 pm
Kerry McCarthy (Bristol, East) (Lab): It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr. Benton, for this debate, which is about an issue that has been of long-standing interest to me. Until recently, I was part of the small minority who were aware of it. It was always mentioned in the context of the debate around vegetarianism, as an add-on to the main arguments about the ethical case for giving up meat, the health benefits and so on.
I should probably get this out of the way straight away and say that I am a vegetarian. Actually, I have been a vegan since 1992 and a vegetarian since 1981, but I hope that I can convince people that I am not calling for this issue to be treated with the seriousness that it deserves because of my ethical concerns about vegetarianism. I am not trying to use this debate as a Trojan horse to push that case. I genuinely think, from an environmental point of view and also a development point of view, that we need to look at the impact of increasing meat and dairy consumption around the globe and the consequent growth of the livestock industry.
As I said, this was very much a marginal issue, but it is now crossing over and becoming mainstream. One of the key points in that process was when the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation published its report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow” in 2006. It looked at a range of issues, including the impact of the livestock industry on land use, soil, water, biodiversity depletion and climate change. The report’s conclusion was stark:
“The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
The basic fact is that the livestock industry uses huge amounts of water, grain, energy and land. On the UN figures, it is responsible for 18 per cent. of total global greenhouse gas emissions. That is more than the emissions from all the world’s planes, trains and cars put together.
I should say at this point that this speech will almost unavoidably be full of statistics, which I appreciate makes for dull listening, but it is important to get some of the facts and figures on the record. There are many different statistics floating around, and it has been difficult to come up with the definitive ones. For example, on the livestock industry’s contribution to global greenhouses gases, the Government use the figure of 14 per cent. I shall use my figures and hope that we do not get into too much to-ing and fro-ing.
The first factor that I want to identify is the sheer amount of grain or soya crops that it takes to produce feed for animals. It takes 8 kg of grain to produce l kg of beef; 4 kg to produce the equivalent amount of pigmeat; and 2 kg for the same weight of chicken. That pushes up food prices throughout the world. Raj Patel wrote in his excellent book “Stuffed and Starved”:
“The amount of grains fed to US livestock would be enough to feed 840 million people on a plant-based diet. The number of food-insecure people in the world in 2006 was, incidentally, 854 million”.
But to return to climate change, my second point follows on from animal feed: the livestock industry also uses an absolutely huge amount of water. It takes 100 times as much water to produce 1 kg of beef as it does to grow 1 kg of vegetables. That is a particular factor in countries where water is a scarce resource.
The third factor is the amount of fossil fuel energy that the industry uses. It takes 2.2 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of plant protein; four times as much to produce 1 calorie of chicken protein; 17 times as much to produce 1 calorie of pork protein; 50 times as much for 1 calorie of lamb protein; and 54 times as much for 1 calorie of beef protein. Basically, it takes almost 120 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of beef.
The fourth and possibly most important impact is the amount of land use. It takes almost 21 sq m of land to produce 1 kg of beef, if we factor in animal feed, compared with 0.3 sq m to produce 1 kg of vegetables. Currently, about one third of all arable land in the world is used to produce animal feed crops, and that means deforestation, which releases carbon into the atmosphere. Large swathes of forest are being cleared to provide land to grow soya and grain to feed to cattle.
In the climate change debate, we are all familiar with concerns about biofuels and deforestation, but deforestation for new pasture lands and to create arable land on which to grow animal feed is responsible for about one third of livestock emissions globally. About 100 million tonnes of crops are being diverted to create biofuels this year, but 760 million tonnes are being used to feed animals, so I hope that that puts the issue in some context.
According to Friends of the Earth, which is to be congratulated on its “Food Chain” campaign that examines the environmental footprint of the food that we eat, more than 3,000 square miles of Amazon rainforest were cleared between August 2007 and August 2008. On that trend, cattle and soya production will destroy 40 per cent. of the Amazon in the next 40 years.
A short while ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Father Edilberto Sena, who has been on a crusade since 2001 to stop the world’s largest private company, the trans-national grain trader Cargill, from using the vast new port that it has built on the Amazon river to export its soya from Brazil to northern Europe, to supply the intensive meat and dairy industries of Britain, Holland and France. He told MPs about the destruction being wreaked in Brazil and particularly his local community by that growing trade. Almost 80 per cent. of UK soybeans are imported from Brazil, so there is a strong link between meat and dairy consumption in this country and the deforestation of the Amazon.
The fifth impact is emissions. As I have already mentioned, the livestock industry contributes 18 per cent. of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 9 per cent. of global CO2 emissions, 37 per cent. of methane emissions and 65 per cent. of nitrous oxide emissions.
This is where we reach a fairly delicate subject, which I shall try to treat as delicately as possible. Methane is released by what is politely termed natural livestock emissions—slightly less politely, flatulence, belching and manure produced mainly by cattle. It has about 25 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide, and 1 g of methane produced by a cow’s natural emissions therefore warms the planet 20 times as much as 1 g of CO2 from a car engine.
Livestock is also responsible for most of the world’s nitrous oxide emissions, and that is related to fertiliser and muck spreading. Although nitrous oxide represents
only a tiny proportion of global greenhouse gases, being about 1,000th of the world’s CO2 emissions, it has a much more powerful effect. It has one of the longest lifetimes of any greenhouse gas, lasting up to 150 years, and it has about 300 times the warming potential of CO2. There are also other concerns about the environmental impact of the billions of tonnes of waste—unrelated to climate change—that those animals produce. The waste leaches into the water supply and emits 30 million tonnes of ammonia each year, and that translates into 68 per cent. of the emissions that cause acid rain. Pesticides are also an issue.
Those are the concerns, and the issue must be set in the context of the huge increase in the consumption of meat and dairy products over recent years, which has been caused by rising living standards in the developing world and the adoption of western diets, particularly in countries such as India and China. The United Nations report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options” states that in 2003, on average, India consumed 5 kg of meat per person, the UK consumed 83 kg and the United States 123 kg. However, developing nations are increasing their meat consumption rapidly. In India, it has gone up from 5 kg per person in 2003 to 28 kg in 2007, and in the UK, in the developed world, we eat 50 per cent. more meat than we did in the 1960s. Meat production globally quadrupled between 1961 and 2001, and it is expected to double again by 2050.
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD): The hon. Lady makes a very cogent case on some very important issues. Does she accept that the most significant part of farming’s carbon footprint is transport and food miles? Will she acknowledge, among the statistics to which she refers, that over the past 10 years the proportion of meat consumed in the UK that was produced in the UK has gone down by 12 percentage points, from 75 per cent. to 63 per cent? She refers to the fact that much of the rainforest has been destroyed to create pasture land, so that livestock can be reared over there and exported here, so will she not accept that a strong British livestock sector is a powerful way of combating climate change, because it ensures that we reduce the amount of miles involved in getting food from the field to the plate?
Kerry McCarthy: I deliberately have not entered into the food-miles debate, because it is not possible to do so in the time available, but there is another debate to be had about food miles, and I support the idea that, wherever possible, people should buy food that is grown locally. It is complete madness that we import New Zealand lamb, for example, when we can get such meat much closer to home.
On the solutions, I am sure that the Minister will be relieved to hear that I am not suggesting that we must go vegetarian or vegan to save the planet. However, Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin, researchers from the university of Chicago, said that becoming a vegetarian does more to fight climate change than switching from a gas-guzzler to a hybrid car. The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also said:
“If all families would just have one meatless day a week, this would have the same beneficial effect on greenhouse gas emission as taking almost one million cars off the roads for an entire year.”
It would also be equivalent to replacing 1 billion light bulbs with energy saving bulbs.
Dan Rogerson (North Cornwall) (LD): I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving us the opportunity to hear her arguments and debate the issues. She has concentrated on meat eating, perhaps understandably, and referred to dairy only a few times, but some issues may be there. She has framed the debate about livestock in general, so I should be interested to hear whether she has anything further to say about dairy. In some parts of the developing world, dairy is a stronger part of the diet than meat, because of price. Following the intervention of my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), I wonder whether the hon. Lady agrees that the debate is not so much about what we eat but where it comes from. On biodiversity in the UK, the livestock sector is keenly involved in maintaining the historic landscape that we all enjoy.
Kerry McCarthy: I have already addressed the point about food miles and the fact that local food is better. I recognise that farming makes a contribution towards biodiversity and protecting the environment in the smaller sense of the word in the UK, rather than in the climate change sense. Although dairy products are to an extent a feature of the diet in developing countries, in Asia and particularly in China, they are not, but they are increasingly becoming a significant part of the diet. So all the points that I have made about animal feed and so on relate to the dairy industry and the growth on that front as well as to the meat industry.
The choice is either to reduce consumption or to try to find ways to tackle the emissions produced by the livestock industry. That is similar to the question in the aviation debate: should people be asked to reduce the number of flights that they take or should technological advances within aviation be considered? The best solution would be a combination of both. But I expect that the Minister will probably focus on the technological advances and how we can reduce the emissions that are created, so I shall make a brief comment on that point.
I draw the Minister’s attention to a report from Farming Futures, which is supported by the farming industry, including the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association. That report suggests that the way forward is to make changes to cows’ diets to prevent them producing so much methane, to have anaerobic digestion plants to deal with waste and by optimising fertiliser efficiency to reduce nitrous oxide emissions.
A methane tax was considered in New Zealand, and it was hoped that that would raise $5 million and that the money would be spent on funding research into ways to reduce emissions from livestock. However, that proposal was opposed by farmers and was replaced by a general carbon tax. Researchers in Australia reckoned that reducing emissions from animals by between 20 and 50 per cent. would result in cows producing more milk, because every time a cow releases a natural emission it loses energy. It is bizarre that people do such things for a living and I am not sure how it would be measured, but that example proves that the research is out there and that there are ways of doing that.
Oxfam has put forward a contraction and convergence plan on meat eating, which is similar to the idea of contraction and convergence in respect of broader climate change. The basic premise of that plan is that there should be a sustainable level of meat eating, which
would involve those under the limit coming up to it and those above the limit coming down. Oxfam says that to preserve the situation as it is to prevent an increase in emissions but not to reduce them overall, the level would be about 33 kg per person.
Compassion in World Farming has also been campaigning on this issue and has talked about the need to factor it into any international discussions on climate change. Friends of the Earth, as part of their “Food Chain” campaign, has come up with some fairly radical suggestions. It has said that Government should stop subsidising intensive livestock farming and instead invest in research into local feed production, and it is talking about public sector procurement and saying that environmentally damaging food should not be purchased for schools, hospitals, care homes and so on. It also mentions changing global investment policy at the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and talks about other forms of bilateral finance and ensuring that the issue is addressed in international climate talks.
The key thing is making sure that people are aware. It comes back to the food miles debate. There has been a lot of discussion about how easy it would be to mark the environmental footprint of food. That is difficult, because we are all familiar with the argument that to import something from Africa may result in longer air or freight miles, but that if similar produce were grown in Holland, for example, where artificial lighting, heating and so on have to be used, the environmental footprint could be higher although the number of food miles would be lower. It would be difficult to attach some imprint on to food that gave a clear idea of its environmental footprint, but it is important that we are aware of that and factor it into our discussions.
This is not about finding a back-door way to promote vegetarianism or veganism but about climate change. I had hoped that another hon. Member would call for this debate, which is why, since “Livestock’s Long Shadow” was published a couple of years ago, I have been sitting on it hoping that they would do so, but none has, which is why I am here. John Harris, who writes for The Guardian and is a long-term vegetarian, said in an excellent piece last year:
“right now, this is actually more about human lives than those of animals”.
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