Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 43)
WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY 2009
PROFESSOR TIM
LANG
Q40 Paddy Tipping:
Just describe that in a bit more detail.
Professor Lang: Go back into the
history of the CAP. We all know 1956, 1957 the Straker Conference,
the Treaty of Rome, one of the three founding motives for the
European Union as it now is—the Common Market as it was—was
from the ashes of the Second World War that Europe should never
again experience what we would now call food insecurity—they
did not use that language—but that there should be adequate
and decent production to stop, among other things, the famine
that occurred in 1944 in the Netherlands, let alone the dislocation
to supplies that Europe had had directly through a war. So the
Common Agricultural Policy had to some extent a moral imperative.
It is often portrayed in the British literature as being a hideous,
protectionist, French inspired conspiracy to do the wrong things.
I am not going to defend the CAP at all—I have been a critic
of it for most of my life, as I think you know—but I think
we should not forget that moral and political direction that it
had. I am saying, my colleagues and my reports that we have submitted
to you are gently, as academics, saying that we think there is
a new political possibility for Europe to coalesce around a common
sustainable food policy at exactly the moment where it has severed
links due to political embarrassment and also financial costs
of the old CAP. I welcome decoupling but actually it is throwing
the baby out with the bathwater—it is forgetting the need
to produce food sustainably in Europe. Not least as a climatologist
said extremely emotionally in the British Association meeting
in Liverpool at which I was at, at the end of the summer last
year, if Europe does not recognise that it is going to be in the
front line of the need to produce more food for the world it has
to wake up very fast. I look at the European Union, I look at
the Commission, I look at the Parliament and I do not see a recognition
of the urgency for Europe to increase—increase—its
production as long as that is sustainable in this broad direction
of sustainability that I have been trying to articulate, namely
what is good for the soil, good for water retention, embedded
water and all of those issues, and mainstream public health and
nutrition. I think there is a new vision now for a European food
and farming.
Q41 Paddy Tipping:
But you and your colleagues have been, as you put it, in a gentle
academic dialogue—
Professor Lang: Sometimes it is
fairly brutal, as you know.
Q42 Paddy Tipping:
Let us get on to the brutality of reforming the CAP. What is the
prospect in the near term of getting the common sustainable food
policy for which you are pressing?
Professor Lang: Short term not
much, I will be very frank; we do not see any signs of a mass
outbreak of Greek farmers who are even now, as we know, blockading
the food system of Greece and brought it to a standstill in nine
days; I do not see them going out into the streets for a common
sustainable food policy—I do not see that. I am saying that
this is a long term political project, but it has to begin now
for the reasons that Europe is taking a lead on the post-Kyoto,
Europe has been the arena in which environmental policy has been
hammered out. It has been the lead area, the lead fiscal payer
on agriculture and food and we should be connecting those. It
has actually had a very low role on public health but the Maastricht
Treaty, the Amsterdam Treaty gave it new powers—Section
123, if I remember, under the Amsterdam Treaty gave it public
health powers. It is edging into a coherent position. What I am
saying very forcibly is that my colleagues and I think that Britain
should take the lead; we need to get our own house into order—it
is not. We have an at least three-planet food system where over
consuming is an unsustainable food system. We have an inadequate
diet, it is leading to obesity and all these other public health
issues that do not necessarily concern you but I know do generally.
Our food system is not passing the policy laugh test. So we have
the task of getting our own food system into order to make it
sustainable for the long term, but also I think we can apply that
model and that thinking at the European level. Apart from anything
else I think it gets us out of a political problem at the CAP.
We are locked into a minority position. Whenever the British get
up and try and argue something about the CAP we are marginal before
we even open our lips. I think this view, the common sustainable
food policy offers an opportunity for allies across Europe and
gets Britain out of this largo that it has been locked into over
the last 15 years.
Q43 Chairman:
Thank you very much indeed and thank you for getting us underway.
You have given us a lot of things to chew on of a verbal nature
and we are grateful for that. Thank you for accepting the homework
challenge of defining with greater clarity what we mean by a definition
of food security. Obviously if there are further things that arise
in your mind about which you would like to let us know subsequent
to this or in the light of any other evidence, as always we will
be delighted to hear from you.
Professor Lang: Thank you very
much and good luck with the inquiry; it is very, very important.
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