Examination of Witnesses (Questions 540
- 559)
THURSDAY 7 MAY 2009
HILARY BENN
MP, PROFESSOR ROBERT
WATSON AND
MS SUSANNA
MAY
Q540 David Taylor:
You have signed up to the target of 50% by 2030 and doubling by
2050, but food is not an homogenous product. Do you have any idea
as to the nature of commodities which you might want to encourage
greater production of within the United Kingdom and how would
you incentivise?
Hilary Benn: To be honest—I
gave the example of apples earlier—I really do not see why
we cannot produce more apples, but in order to push that you have
got to have more demand for British apples. Actually, looking
at the figures last night, in the last four years the proportion
of apples that are home produced has actually managed to rise
from a rather small 23% to 33%, so that is a bit of progress,
but if you go back over time, of course, a lot of apple orchards
were grubbed up. Strawberries we are growing more because of the
new production systems. I think vegetables and apples would be
a good place, and I think consumers have a very important part
to play in saying, "I would like those to be produced."
Q541 David Taylor:
Susanna looked as if she may be about to reply.
Ms May: No.
Chairman: As the recently appointed President
of the National Fruit Show, I am delighted to have your support
for fruit, but I want to pass the questioning to Gavin Strang.
Q542 Dr Strang:
Do you expect the valuation of sterling against the euro to result
in an increase in production in UK agriculture relative to the
rest of Europe?
Hilary Benn: Clearly, the movement
that there has been in the last year and a half, two years has
improved the position, but I am not going to offer any forecast
on where the price is going to go, for time-honoured reasons.
Q543 Dr Strang:
To pick up a point on production, in a sense we are all saying
we would like to see more British production in certain varieties.
Do you actually look at this? Take milk, for example, which is
a hugely important commodity. Does the department constantly look
at the milk situation and see how you can help facilitate increased
production? Do you look at the situation when it looks as if they
are starting to take the farm gate price down again, which obviously
is a matter of some concern? Does the department consciously focus
on each commodity in that way regularly and seek to help domestic
production, or do you simply see it as all part of the CAP[11]
and all responding to the single market?
Hilary Benn: We obviously keep
a close eye on what is happening. I think it is fair to say that
it has been left to the market for a very long time, because food
production has always been a private sector business, with really
the exception of what has happened in war time and the state taking
powers to direct and to encourage. Since you have taken milk,
Dr Strang, as an example, we are self-sufficient in milk. Although
there are fewer producers, if you look at a chart of milk production
going back over the last 20 years—it has gone down a bit
but it is 13.3 million litres in 2008, it was a bit more 20 years
ago—it has become much more productive. That is undoubtedly
what has happened in relation to it. There is, of course, a continuing
debate about the milk price that is paid to farmers and, more
broadly on the question of prices, there have been various inquiries
into that. The Competition Commission is having a consultation
as we speak on the question of whether there should be an ombudsman,
and that may come to Government to form a view on in due course.
I think if there are particular difficulties in particular sectors,
that is when Defra might become involved, but, generally speaking,
the operation of the markets produce the picture that we can see.
Dr Strang: There is a decline on the
pig side, and there has been concern expressed in the last week
or two that the poultry sector may start to go the same way. Does
that concern you? Are you concerned about the future of production
in the UK?
Q544 Chairman:
To add to that, the concern is (and this is why we asked about
the juxtaposition between the long-term and short-term cycle)
that you can start in the short-term to erode, if you like, your
agricultural and food infrastructure and it is very difficult
to get it back if the future trend says we need more of the things
that we are good at producing.
Hilary Benn: I agree with that,
and I think we absolutely could not be in a position to say, and
it is a caricature where some have positioned themselves in the
past, "Well, we can always buy the food from somewhere",
because I do believe very strongly that it is important that we
have a strong, productive agricultural base in this country as
a matter of fundamental policy. The Pig Taskforce actually is
a really good example of a specific initiative being taken, following
the advice that you have given, working with the industry to say,
"What can we do to assist", and it has been very much
welcomed by the pig sector. There are things that we can do in
government to improve the extent to which we buy UK product, and
you can see the numbers are going up that are reported every year,
but I know that that taskforce is looking at some particular products
to make sure that the industry can produce what those in the public
sector are purchasing. Where there is a particular difficulty,
I think it is sensible for Defra to get involved to see what we
can do to assist, and I made the observation about fruit and veg
because actually we need to eat more of it. We are importing a
lot more of it because people are eating more, and that is a good
thing in terms of our diet, but we do have, as you said, Chairman,
a natural advantage in relation to some of these things, and I
think if consumers demand, then that is probably the single most
powerful lever that can be pulled to encourage more production
if they say, "Hey, we want apples from Britain as opposed
to apples that are imported from somewhere else."
Q545 Mr Williams:
Secretary of State, you rightly talk about the power of the market
and the consumer, but the fact is that since we have decoupled
support from agriculture the amount of food produced in this country,
or temporary food stuffs, has decreased. It seems to me that,
if you are in the business of stimulating or encouraging particular
forms of production, you have actually thrown away every lever
that you ever had in terms of being able to incentivise beef production,
or wheat production, or whatever. If people are really serious
that there is a problem in food security, then we directly have
got to encourage farmers to produce, and the levers are not there
at the moment. You have talked about the wheat production high
yields last year reflecting higher prices. As I understand it,
our plantings are down by 15% this year. What is your view to
coupling and decoupling?
Hilary Benn: It is down because
the price has gone down. At its peak it was £180 and it is
now 90'ish, something like that. So fundamentally, if we were
not as a world to make progress in producing more food for a growing
population, one would expect that to be reflected in the price,
and that would then have a consequence of bringing forward more
production. We did have a system that produced a lot, and more
than we could use and more than we could eat, and it was stuck
in intervention—it was called the Common Agricultural Policy—and
one of the consequences of that policy was that we undermined
agricultural production in other parts of the world. We made it
very hard for farmers in Africa and elsewhere to have a market
because we were selling the stuff that we produced and did not
want at a subsidised price and ruining the chances of them having
a successful business, and we have still some way to go there,
although intervention stocks are very, very different now compared
to when we had big lakes and mountains and so on, and although
there are some in Europe who say, "Told you the CAP was a
good idea. Let us go back to where we were", I am not persuaded
that that is the right approach, because there is also (and this
is the other reason I give) an environmental consequence to that,
as we know only too well. You just say: "Right, produce,
produce", never mind what it does to the raw material on
which production depends—the quality of the soil, the water,
the biodiversity—and we have got to think, it seems to me,
smartly about this. Bob you were nodding.
Professor Watson: Yes, that was
the main conclusion for the international assessment that I directed.
Yes, we have increased food production across the world. It is
not socially equitable; there are still a billion people who are
going to bed hungry every day. There are significant adverse effects—contributions
to climate change, loss of biodiversity, soil and water degradation—and
one of the biggest problems was the OECD[12]
subsidies. They were leading to over production, food being dumped
in sub-Saharan Africa so the local farmer could not be competitive.
The CAP Reform now is moving in the right direction of what I
call multi-functionality of agriculture. That is to say, farmers
should be paid not only for producing food but maintaining the
ecosystem services, maintaining the soil, maintaining clean water,
and so I think we are going in the right direction now to recognise
that we have to integrate biodiversity, ecosystem services into,
and pay farmers for, protecting and maintaining these services
that are so essential; but the fundamental OECD subsidies were
having a major adverse effect on food production, especially in
sub-Saharan Africa.
Q546 Mr Williams:
The Chatham House submission to the Committee said that one of
the roles that Defra could play was to help to secure a thriving
UK food system and would be providing a risk management framework
through which short, medium and long-term risks to food security
could be monitored and managed. What are the main risks? You have
said that, basically, food security is not an issue in Britain
at the moment, but what would be the main risks in the future
to the supply of food to the UK?
Hilary Benn: I think in the short-term—I
alluded to some of them earlier—you could have fuel shortages,
you could have panic buying, you could have drought here. Medium
and longer-term risks: climate change we have talked about, pests,
diseases. There is an example of a changing climate changing the
risk. What is going to happen to temperature and what increased
temperature does to yield? I think there was some evidence, in
the very hot summer of 2003, that we saw, in some parts of Europe,
yields declining because once the temperature gets over a certain
level you do not get so much. The way in which the world market
operates: if other countries were to say, "Right we are going
to have export bans on a more regular basis", or, "We
are going to go for self-sufficiency", then I think we really
are in big trouble in those circumstances. I suppose the answer
to the Chatham House suggestion is, indeed, the assessment of
UK food security, because it is looking at all of these things,
short, medium and long-term. I wonder, Susanna, whether you want
to say a word about that, because it is, I think, a pretty impressive
piece of work. It is in progress and you will see the result when
we publish it.
Ms May: It is work in progress
at the moment. What it is trying to do is to map all of the main
risks, but there are so many potential risks to food security
that what we are really trying to do is capture how resilient
the food system is to the different risks. We want to assess what
the risks are, then look at how they are being managed by different
sectors—sometimes it is for government, sometimes it is
for other stakeholders—and then also look at whether or
not there are any gaps there and, therefore, what additional action
might need to be taken, but because it tries to capture what food
security actually is, there is a high level compendium of evidence
and it is looking, or will look, at lots of different themes which
try and capture all the different dimensions of food security.
It is a large piece of work and, as I say, at the moment work
in progress, but we want to try and provide a framework within
which we can actually think about food security as a problem and
then prioritise what action needs to be taken.
Q547 Chairman:
Does that work include both flows of food into the United Kingdom
as well as our indigenous production?
Ms May: It is looking at UK food
security but, because our food security is so closely tied with
global food security, it does include within it as a theme global
availability of food supply, yes, and global sustainability of
supply.
Q548 Mr Williams:
Will it include some analysis of political instability in some
of the major food producing countries?
Ms May: At the moment it is not
finalised.
Hilary Benn: It is a very good
question. It is intended to be a framework, if you can look through
a framework, which will help us to see what it is that needs to
be done, but it will not be a one-off, because as circumstances
change, obviously, we are going to have to look at it and say,
"We have got a problem here. What are we going to do about
it?", and, sure, political instability will be a factor,
because that may result from problems of food in a country which
may lead to an export ban, which may impact on a source of supply
that we traditionally relied upon.
Q549 Mr Williams:
But if we do not do something to address this problem, there could
be food riots in various countries, and those sorts of issues,
that would really have some effect on food security in this country.
Hilary Benn: That is true. At
one end of the spectrum, when there was a drought in Australia
it had an impact on bread prices here. That is one example of
interdependence. If you have got a particular crop or product
that we buy a lot of and it is not available any more because
there is a problem in the country, then we have got a difficulty
too, and that is why, in the end, it is about the world working
together to make sure that we have got enough food.
Q550 Mr Williams:
This is the main way you are monitoring risk at the moment.
Hilary Benn: Yes.
Q551 Mr Williams:
When do you expect to complete the work?
Hilary Benn: We will probably
publish in the autumn. We were having some debate about whether
it would be before the summer break or after. It will probably
be more likely in the autumn, because we hope to try and get it
right and maybe have it alongside the vision and the plan. We
have not, to be honest, quite decided in what order to bring them
out.
Q552 David Taylor:
The nexus between your last job and this one was probably Doha,
and in the Doha Round there has been action taken against import
bans but little, if anything, in relation to export controls.
This seems to have triggered a process whereby countries have
been buying up huge areas of land in Africa and Asia. I seem to
recall about 25 million hectares, which is an area of agricultural
land within Germany. Does this imbalance our desire to have secure
food supplies? Are we part of that? Are there very many British
organisations acquiring land abroad?
Hilary Benn: It is a sign of some
countries thinking, "What are we going to do to ensure our
food security?" It follows the search for raw materials.
If you look at China and other countries in Africa buying up contracts,
in the end it is for the government of a country to regulate who
is able to buy land. If a government said, "Yes, that is
okay; you can buy it", and then times get tough and the food
that is being grown on that land is being shipped out of the country
to feed other people and the people of that country are saying,
"What about us?", then you could see that you have a
difficulty. Fundamentally it is a contractual relationship between
the owner of the land, the government that regulates and the country
that is seeking to purchase it, and I cannot conceive how you
would have a system internationally for seeking to regulate it.
I am not suggesting that we should, although one or two people
have asked the question, but it is a sign of the times.
Q553 David Taylor:
You are fairly sanguine about it.
Hilary Benn: Let me put it this
way. The chances of trying to regulate internationally those kinds
of decisions, any more than one can regulate internationally contracts
signed between one country and another to buy raw materials, or
others, I think would be quite difficult.
Q554 Mr Drew:
Hilary, you have already mentioned the issue of water, soil quality
and the way in which that impacts on the whole of our world. By
implication, you would be in favour of moving to a low input form
of agriculture. I would just be interested in what is the vision
for Defra to set the strategy up for our farming industry to be
able to pursue that?
Hilary Benn: It is partly a question
of research. Defra is spending about, from memory, five million
pounds a year on soil and water research. We are going to publish
what we are calling our Soil Strategy, which is about trying to
protect against degradation and encourage people to manage the
soil properly. We have changed the arrangements to do with the
Soil Protection Review actually to give farmers greater responsibility,
this is following the Health Check, because I was a bit amazed
when I came into this job and discovered that I needed to take
a decision to allow farmers (going back to Ms McIntosh's question)
to go onto their land when it is waterlogged in order to try and
retrieve the crops which may have been damaged or may not; and
we have now transferred the responsibility for taking that decision
to farmers rather than me having to sign a bit of paper saying,
"You can do it." I think that is quite a sensible change.
We are giving advice on the use of fertilisers. We have produced
a guide. I cannot remember the name of it.
Ms May: The Fertiliser Manual.
Hilary Benn: The Fertiliser
Manual, which is for farmers, which we are in the process
of updating, but fundamentally it will be about farmers thinking
how they can use less fertiliser, how they can manage water better,
hang onto it when it is falling out of the sky, because we are
likely to have wetter winters, so that you can use it when it
is not falling out of the sky in the dryer summers that we are
going to have—because that is what the scientists are telling
us—and also trying to develop varieties of plants which
can cope with, in particular, less water.
Professor Watson: Just this morning
I had a meeting with Don Curry, who I think might be sitting in
the back here today, with Natural England, the Environment Agency
and the Royal Agricultural Society on the very issue of soil and
water research, and we have agreed we are going to do an analysis
of what information is needed to manage our soil and water better,
what information do we already have, is it being used appropriately,
what are the gaps in our knowledge, and we have already agreed
that we are going to jointly do a gap analysis, bring in the private
sector, bring in NFU, then hold a workshop to see how we can move
this agenda forward basically. That was the meeting we had literally
just this morning, but when you get on to research later, we have
got a whole series of LINK projects, so they are collaborative
projects between Defra and the private sector, that are looking
at things like water use efficiency, nitrogen use efficiency.
Clearly, just because of the cost of fertilisers, the cost of
pesticides, we need to think about integrated pest management,
integrated natural resource management. It makes eminent sense.
Q555 Chairman:
Out of idle curiosity, why are you having to do all of this almost
afresh when Rothamsted have been doing it for goodness knows how
long and they have got this new project to probe, if you like,
the DNA of the soil? There seem to be an awful lot they are doing
on this already.
Professor Watson: Absolutely,
and so the question is: is there still a gap? Have we got all
the right programmes now or is there a gap in the research, and
where should the priorities be? So it is not starting from scratch;
it is building upon what we have already got.
Q556 Miss McIntosh:
Secretary of State, you talked earlier about nitrates existing
naturally in the soil to a high level. I would argue that the
EU Directive was wrong on the level it set for the nitrates as
well, and you mentioned the pesticide, that we lost the argument
there. What can we do, on the basis of sound scientific knowledge,
to persuade Europe when they do get it wrong, because it is crippling
the farming community to apply those?
Hilary Benn: I can claim no credit
for the Nitrates Directive. Those who agreed it at the time no
doubt thought it was a good idea. I think if you were doing it
afresh, it would look rather different, but there is undoubtedly
a problem of nitrates getting into the water courses and something
has to be done about it. I think the best way to deal with it
is to have a decent impact assessment, and in the case of the
pesticides regulation, frankly, there has not been a decent impact
assessment. We did it through the Pesticide Safety Directorate
and the Commission did not do it. I think it is absolutely fundamental,
as we take these decisions, that we know the consequence, and
my particular complaint about the pesticides regulation was we
were being asked to sign up to something when we did not actually
know what the consequence would be because no-one could answer
the question in the case of the triazoles I mentioned earlier.
Will these continue to be available or not? The answer is we will
not know until later, and yet we are being asked to sign up to
a process that could rule out something that we do need to treat
a disease that affects wheat.
Professor Watson: Even worse,
there is a philosophical shift with respect to pesticides in Europe
of moving away from a risk-based approach to a hazards-based approach.
If you use a hazards-based approach, we should not have any electricity
in this room; we probably should not be having water, because
we might drown in it. Basically, it is a philosophical shift that
really worries me. Fundamentally it is wrong. It should be a risk-based
approach so that you look at the risks and the benefits, because
if we go in general to a hazards-based approach we are going to
ban most things. John Beddington, as a scientist, has been trying
to lead the charge, but one of the fundamental problems is not
every European country has a chief scientific adviser for him
to talk to. The European Commission does not have a chief scientific
adviser. John is trying to find out how we can actually make sure
that we have got people to talk to in Europe about the fact that
this is a wrong-headed policy and philosophy as well as, obviously,
ministers in different countries having a debate. So this is actually
a very worrying trend, and the triazoles could be the tip of the
iceberg if we are not careful.
Q557 Mr Drew:
I was going to talk a bit about soil, but the Chairman has stolen
my thunder there, so I will stick to something else: the contribution
that we should be making in the area of agriculture to green house
gas reduction. Given that we know that it was one of the sticking
points over Kyoto, when we go to Copenhagen, and whatever follows
that, what contribution is British agriculture going to be asked
to make and what will we now expect from the rest of the world
in the agricultural field to bear down on greenhouse gas emissions?
Hilary Benn: It is a really important
question actually. Why? Because about 7% of our greenhouse gas
emissions in the UK come from agriculture—and 14% of global
emissions. So the idea that we are going to get the levels down
without agriculture making a contribution is really a non-runner,
and you will know, Mr Drew, that the Climate Change Committee
had some things to say about agriculture's contribution when it
produced its report, and the Government is currently looking,
having adopted the carbon budgets, at what the plan is going to
be for making sure that we achieve those. The short answer is
that agriculture is going to have to play its part. We have a
bit of a difficulty at the moment, which is that the two measures
that are used to look at greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture
under the UNFCCC[13]
is (1) livestock numbers and (2) inputs. Now we are going to have
to have a more sophisticated way of doing this, that is the first
point that I would make, but you have to have decent scientific
evidence about the impact that ways of feeding cattle, for example,
will have on the emissions which result from them in order for
that to be accepted as a decent way of counting. In the end I
think it is both a challenge for farmers and land managers to
look at this. The obvious areas are afforestation on land, the
way in which you fuel and run your tractors and machinery because
you can make carbon and greenhouse savings there, there may be
something about the way in which soil is managed, there will certainly
be savings that can be derived from the way in which fertiliser
is used, much more selective use of fertiliser will reduce the
emissions, but it is also, if you think a bit further ahead, an
opportunity for farmers and land managers to say to the rest of
the economy, "Hey, we can help you to deal with carbon. So
you give me some money which I will then use to plant some trees
over here and that helps you to achieve your carbon budget".
I think it is an opportunity if we see it in that way and peat
bogs are a really good example of that because the way in which
you manage your peat bogs can either help them to hold carbon
and greenhouse gases or emit a lot of it into the atmosphere,
principally by keeping them wet as we know.
Q558 Mr Drew:
Let us go on to water finally. A specific question: to what extent
is the Floods and Water Bill an opportunity to be quite radical
in this area? I am not saying it is at the moment, but we were
told yesterday there are degrees and ways in which we can hang
some more things on the coat hanger. Is there an opportunity here
to look at how we use water in an agricultural sense more efficiently
and more effectively by looking at that Bill to set the parameters
more fundamentally?
Hilary Benn: It certainly is intended
to be an opportunity. Let us take a practical example: abstraction
licences. Now, a lot of agriculture will make use of abstraction
of water and we have to make sure that abstraction is sustainable
because if we do not do that then we have quite a fundamental
problem. As a society as a whole we are going to have to look
after and use water much more efficiently, both as householders
and elsewhere, although if we do have more rain in the winter
to what extent will it be possible to hang onto it, to harvest
the water, and I think that will lead to some change in the way
in which farmers use their land because if there is a way in which
you can catch it in a pond and then use it in the summer, I think
that is one of the changes we are likely to see.
Professor Watson: The issue of
water globally is clearly probably the most fundamental issue
we have got, that goes without saying. It is also going to be
a major issue within the UK. We already know that all the projections
of the implications of climate change are indeed, as Hilary said,
wetter winters and much drier summers, and therefore the challenge
will be how do we do things such as water storage. One has to
obviously think through the approaches of water pricing policies.
We have to think about the whole issue of embedded water. When
we buy and sell produce abroad, it is embedded water basically.
These issues are absolutely fundamental. That is why water use
efficiency on plants is absolutely crucial, how can we have precision
irrigation so we use precisely the amount of water we need, so
absolutely central domestically and an even bigger issue internationally.
Q559 Chairman:
Let us move on to research and development. I had hoped my colleague,
Lynne Jones, would be here to take up the questioning but sadly
I think she has been detained elsewhere. Professor Kell, the Chief
Executive of BBSRC,[14]
made under the current circumstances what one might call a challenging
statement when he called for an investment in agricultural science
to be increased by £100 million in order to improve food
security. Can I ask Professor Watson, do you recognise that as
a valid statement because I am also aware that Professor Beddington
has commented that within Defra there has been a decline in the
Department's budget for food based issues. Certainly on the Committee's
recent trip to Brazil we picked up quite a lot of mood music that
there was an acknowledgement within the UK of the need for more
expenditure in the field of science for agriculture if we were
going to tackle the challenges of long-term food security.
Professor Watson: This is one
of the issues that we have talked about jointly as CSA, so not
just John, myself, Gordon Conway from DFID,[15]
we have also met with all the chief executives of the Research
Councils, so not just Doug Kell from BBSRC. We would argue that
one of the areas that does need attention is further investment
and if it were to be available we would put food and water security
as one of our higher priority. Within the Living with Environmental
Change programme, which currently has 17 partners, about to be
18 when DE[16]
CC comes on board, one of those objectives is food and water security,
others are climate change, biodiversity, et cetera. We would argue
that is the one area that should actually be given serious consideration
for an uplift, our reason being simply the challenge we have talked
about. How does the world double food production? How do you do
it environmentally sustainably? What are the challenges of managing
water? We realise this is a very major issue. Doug Kell probably
might argue that this should be a new standalone, our food security
programme, the alternative is to embed it further in Living with
Environmental Change.
11 Common Agricultural Policy Back
12
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development Back
13
United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change Back
14
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Back
15
Department for International Development. Back
16
Department of Energy and Climate Change Back
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