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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 266-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE ENVIRONMENT, FOOD AND RURAL AFFAIRS COMMITTEE
held at borough market boardroom, 8 southwark street, london se1 1tl
SECURING FOOD SUPPLIES UP TO 2050: THE CHALLENGES FOR THE UK
thursday 11 december 2008 MR TIM LANG, MR CHRIS BROWN, MR PETER KENDALL AND MS JENNY LINFORD MR JAN MCCOURT, MS HANNAH DEVLIN, MS ANNETTE PINNER, MR JOHAN TASKER AND MS CLARE OXBORROW
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course. Oral Evidence Taken before the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on Thursday 11 December 2008
Members present:
Mr Michael Jack, in the Chair Mr David Drew Mr James Gray Lynne Jones David Lepper ________________
Witnesses: Mr Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, City Univeristy, Mr Chris Brown, Head of Sustainable and Ethical Sourcing, ASDA, Mr Peter Kendall, resident of the National Farmers' Union and Ms Jenny Linford, food writer and member of the Guild of Food Writers Mr Jan McCourt, Owner of Northfield Farm, Ms Hannah Devlin, Research Fortnight, Ms Annette Pinner, Vegetarian Society, Mr Johann Tasker, Farmers Weekly and Ms Clare Oxborrow, Friends of the Earth
THE CHAIRMAN: Ladies and gentlemen, in true Today Programme fashion, as the clock is approaching 9.30, we will start. Can I welcome you all to the boardroom of Borough Market this morning. From where I am sitting there is a notice on the wall behind you all that reminds me that this is an ancient market which was held in early times on London Bridge and from 1551 was moved to the High Street in The Borough, so food has been a key activity on the site where we are now for a very long time. We thought this was a very appropriate place to break some new ground as far as the Select Committee was concerned in launching our inquiry in Borough Market into securing food supplies. The reason we have done this is we are always very keen as a Committee to get on the record not just the views of what I might call the normal suspects, some of whom have been kind enough to join me on the top table this morning, and I will introduce them in a moment, but most importantly in this case some people who have some interest themselves in food, either as consumers, part of the food industry or people with a passionate view one way or the other.
Can I say officially that from now on all remarks that are made will be on the parliamentary record. Once our speakers have made their contributions, if you would like to say something then that facility will be afforded to you. If you would be kind enough to remember to say your name because what you say will actually go down as part of the evidence to our inquiry. You may have something very important to say, so may I thank you in advance for what I hope will be some very useful contributions to what we are doing.
Can I introduce those who are surrounding the top table. Just before I do that, can I say there may be some flash photography. I know for some people that may cause a problem, but for the top table we are all right and I think that is the direction of the camera. Can I first of all introduce our guests who are going to make some opening remarks to trigger our discussions and to do our launch. On my left is Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University. I think over the years that I have known Tim - he has helped the Select Committee before in our inquiries - he is a genuinely deeply knowledgeable and, indeed, passionate person about food and certainly having listened to him over the years I have come to respect the fact that he has a very deep understanding of some of the main underlying issues which particularly affect questions referring to the security of our food supply.
On Tim's left we have Chris Brown, who is the Head of Sustainable and Ethical Sourcing at Asda. I know Chris because he came to help us when we were putting our thinking together, of which I will say a little more in a moment, about what we as a Committee should do inquiring into this area. He and a number of others, including Tim and Peter Kendall, came and gave us the benefit of their advice. I know from both the practical point of view of working at ASDA, but also from his contribution to helping the Committee frame its inquiry, he too is deeply knowledgeable on this subject.
On my immediate right is Peter Kendall, the current President of the National Farmers' Union. I pay particular tribute to Peter for coming along at a relatively early hour because he and Tim were in the market this morning for the Today Programme's one minute form of advertising for our inquiry. I say that because Peter presided in elegant fashion over the centenary dinner at the Farmers' Club and you were talking about one of your predecessors, in fact the first President of the National Farmers' Union, who I think was 16 stone when he started in office but 26 stone when he ended. You will certainly be able to tell us something about diet, good practice and food waste.
Finally, on my far right is Jenny Linford, who is a freelance food writer and a member of the Guild of Food Writers. She has done 15 books, one of which has just been launched, A London Cookbook. She also does the mouth watering activity of taking people round London, including Borough Market, and showing them where they can actually buy good food. Jenny very much represents not just the informed person's view about food but also very much the consumer angle.
I am also joined by members of the Committee, they are the ones with the name tags. They are David Drew, Lynne Jones, James Gray and David Lepper. I am delighted that they have been able to join us here this morning.
I am just going to explain very briefly what has caused the Committee to get into this particular area and then I am going to ask our guests if they would speak for a few moments and give us the benefit of their thoughts.
Right at the end of 2005 the Government published a document that it entitled A Vision for the CAP and in it was a discussion ostensibly authored by the Treasury and Defra trying to say what they thought a reformed Common Agricultural Policy ought to look like and what the implications of that would be for the UK's food supply. We did some work on it and one of the parts of our report commented on the fact that words like "food security" did not actually appear in this document as, if you like, something that we should be worried about. The report took the very clear line that if there were any problems with domestic production or anything that we wanted to source, the world would provide, the marketplace would deliver.
If we press the fast forward button to earlier this year, and perhaps developing at the back end of last year, I suppose, we saw something that we had not seen for a long time, a rapid escalation in the price of basic foodstuffs on a global basis. We had, I suppose, been in a decade of falling real prices for food and people had become complacent that anything could go wrong. This Committee did recognise the fragility of the supply chain and some of the pressures arising from things like avian influenza, problems connected with animal disease, so we were not surprised that all of a sudden the world of government reconnected with food and thought it had better look at it again. You will recall that the Cabinet Office were asked initially to prepare a strategic review of everything you ever wanted to know about food, which then ultimately became a strategy document. The Government felt that it should re-engage. Then, finally Defra got in on the act. It is quite interesting to note that for a department which has in its title, and uniquely in our Government, the word "food", it is the only government department that is responsible for one whole £65-£70 billion industry; all the others are in the Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Department. Defra re-engaged all of a sudden in this principal activity and produced its own strategy.
I think everybody's focus on the matter was drawn together when in June there was a World Food Summit, and I attended that on behalf of the Committee. It was a fascinating insight into the juxtaposition between the developed, the developing and the less developed worlds and the challenges that each one of those was facing in terms of either helping to secure food supplies or, even at its most basic, "How do I feed millions of people in places like Sub-Saharan Africa.
When the Committee came to consider all of these matters the one thing that we recognised at the outset was that we were not going to get into the business of writing an encyclopaedia on the subject of food and food security and food supply. That would have meant we would have taken probably about a year, produced a vastly academic work which would have been incredibly well written but deeply uninteresting to anybody and the policy moment, the current interest in the subject, would have passed.
Our job as a Committee is to monitor the work of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Department, so we started from a strictly domestic standpoint where effectively we said we wanted to look at Defra's response to the question of food security. That is exactly where we are going to start our work.
In looking at the supply chain we are looking at two parts. One which is connected, if you like, with the production and ultimate transformation of basic raw materials into foodstuffs, and the second part is the robustness and the security of the food supply chain from the point of view that if something went wrong, there was a massive outbreak of disease, something that Britain imported suddenly was not available, how robust is the food chain to deal with it or if, for example, there was a terrorist attack on a major point of food production could we cope. That is what I mean about robustness. In fairness, the Government and the Institute of Grocery Distribution have been doing some work on that. That is the point at which we start.
The first part of our work is going to be look at the challenges that we face in ensuring that we have a secure supply of food against the background of the two key targets set at the June meeting, which were the world would have to increase its food supply by 50 per cent by 2030 and double by 2050. The question is what part does Britain play in meeting that challenge and what effect globally in meeting that challenge will other people's changes to the way that they deal with food issues have on us. We will want to look at issues from the domestic farming point of view on things like soil quality, water availability, the science base, have we actually got the knowledge to deal with the challenges that this inquiry will throw up, the provision of trained people, trade barriers, the way in which our land and farming are managed.
We are also not forgetting that aquaculture is another key part of our food chain and it is so often the case that one focuses on farming and horticulture but we forget that aquaculture is a key part in the UK's diet and a major source of protein on a world basis, so we will be looking at that.
Once we have identified what we think is a sensible list of the challenges that we face then the second part of our work will be to look at the solutions in terms of what Defra, Government and other bodies should be doing to ensure that we have a secure food supply in this country in the future and that we can play our part in meeting those two global targets.
That is the background to the report that we are officially launching here today. In the first instance, I would like to ask Tim Lang if he would make his first contribution.
MR LANG: Thank you very much. Firstly, if I can say after that introduction, I welcome this inquiry enormously. I thought about bringing along the great 1905 Royal Commission on Food Supply in Time of War because there is an astonishing resonance in everything you have just said to the debates that went on in 1903-05, but on second thoughts I thought you would not be pleased with me, so I did not, but it is huge. These are old questions but in a new form, a new guise and a new context.
We face everything you have just said, Michael. We face the new fundamentals, some of which are old, the soil and the water issues, and some of which are new, climate change, globalisation, the change in world food supply systems, etcetera. It is the jostling of that combination of factors that your Committee's inquiry will undoubtedly explore. There is a great tradition of this, so it is fabulous that this inquiry is happening.
I wanted to just pose five questions that I think we collectively, the people, and you as parliamentarians need to be, and I am sure will be, posing.
The first question is the one that you have referred to, and I agree with you, it is about production. The issue is not how much food does Britain produce but how much food could it produce and should it produce. That combination of 'does', 'could', 'should' indicates the delicacy of the political debate. At the moment, as we all know, home production is dropping, arguably one could even say like a stone. It is dropping very fast indeed. There are those who argue this does not matter and I think that is stupid, frankly. It does matter, depending on your personal predilection, not necessarily because home grown food is intrinsically better, although for some it may be, it is actually an issue of appropriate land use in the new world that you were referring to, the world of nine billion people by 2050, a world already being reshaped by climate change, a world in which energy, which is what has actually driven production rises over the last 60 years, cheap oil, has enabled agricultural productivity to rise in the last two-thirds of a century. That era is probably coming to an end, in which case what does production do, how are we going to produce food, not just for the existing 6.7 billion people but nine billion. Down to us as people in Britain, we need to say "What is our role in that? Does it matter if Britain is only now producing 60 per cent of indigenous production?" Personally, I think it does. I think it is inappropriate land use not to produce food when you have got the climate, soil and capability of so doing.
There are some subtle questions within production, this first issue for your inquiry, like which products. It is not the total figures. The Defra report of 2008 that you referred to, again rightly in my view, did not discriminate between meat and dairy, for example, and fruit or vegetables. I will pick on fruit. About ten per cent of what we consume in Britain in fruit comes from Britain. Chris Brown, as we all do, knows that we are not going to grow pineapple in Britain, not for a very long time and not unless you use extraordinary glasshouse technology, but we can grow apples and pears. Why are we allowing that production to be as low as it is? What would or could it take to increase that fruit production? What is the state of vegetable production? Our debate about food security needs to be more discriminating, not just about the distinction between internationally and home grown food, but about what / which foods to grow 'at home'. That is the first question.
The second question is an issue of what I call values. What is a good food system? I keep on asking this. I am allowed to indulge myself as an academic! But I think this is mainstream politics now. What is our view of what we want a food system to be like? It is actually a values question. Why does the US or France, equally rich societies as ours, not even dream of mass importing its own food? Yet the visceral value of British food policy is the rest of the world will feed us. It is actually a hangover of Empire, dare I say it, a child brought up in India?. We assume someone else is going to feed us. We assume market mechanisms will deliver. In a world when the rest of the world, thank goodness, is getting richer and we are getting poorer, not least due to the pound collapsing, those assumptions cannot necessarily hold. What is a good food system? We have got to juggle sustainability, quality, health, social criteria and aspirations into the business model. That is a values issue.
Thirdly - I am speeding up! - the cultural question. People like me have been saying for a long time that the food system has got to become more sustainable. But to get there, the food system is going to need to bring people with it. People have got used to the cornucopia of the hypermarket; they have got used to untrammelled choice; they have got used to cheap food. Food is always more expensive for the poor than the rich, but how is the behaviour of each going to change rapidly before the demands of sustainability, which it is going to have to?
I will pose a question which, as you know, I have posed to your Committee before. It is what I call the eco-nutrition problem. Both your Committee and the Health Committee have looked at the challenge of diet related diseases, at the time of the Food Standard Agency's creation. But how do we translate the need for healthier diets into food cultural rules? Not fancy nutrition-speak but everyday rules? For instance, do I eat fish or don't I? Do I eat fruit and vegetables? Where from?" "How much do I eat?" is now becoming "How do I get it?" My point is that a juggling of the ecological with the nutritional advice has got to be built into culture. That is going to be an issue of governance, which is my fourth point.
The role of Government is critical in this. Your job as the Committee is to hold Government to account. I am a great fan, as you know, of select committees, they keep ministers on their toes, they keep the system of government on its toes, it is fundamental to democracy and accountability. The issue of governance is have we got the right mechanisms, have we got the right institutions, have we got the right remit to deliver food security?
Fifthly, there is the big question of policy: what is the direction of travel? Is it right? Your inquiry, I presume, is looking at Britain but, as your remarks hinted you only too well know, we exist within Europe and the overarching policy framework is the Common Agricultural Policy. I am one of those people who have been arguing that the Common Agricultural Policy must ultimately become a Common Sustainable Food Policy, but is that likely? Is there room for manoeuvre in that rubric? What is the purchase on it? Could Britain take a lead? I think the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit's Food Matters report was actually a very good lead in that direction. It did map out a different direction of travel. Your inquiry can really lift the political discussion about that perspective. 'What do we want from our food?' means 'what direction do we want the food system to go in?' The question takes us right back to the 1905 Royal Commission, dare I say it! They asked exactly that: 'after 60 years from the repeal of the Corn Laws, what do we want our land to do?' Personally, I think we today have a moral responsibility to maximise our production appropriately for our land, too. But that enters the little difficulty of what is appropriate sustainable production.
THE CHAIRMAN: It is very nice to know that my Christmas reading list has now got one book on it at least, which is the 1905 volume.
MR LANG: It is two volumes.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, I might manage Volume 1.
MR LANG: No, Volume 2 is the interesting one. Those were the hearings.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much indeed for giving us such a thought provoking start. I would now like to ask Peter Kendall if he would be kind enough to comment and then Chris Brown and Jenny Linford, in that order.
MR KENDALL: Thank you very much indeed, Michael. The farming community is really pleased that your Committee has picked up on this theme. We are very conscious that in society the economy is a major focus at this moment in time and how we consider food policy in the longer term might take a bit of a back step in some of the media coverage. For us, as farmers, this is a long-term business so we are really pleased that you are focusing on it despite the economic woes that surround us at this moment in time.
Both you and Tim picked up on some of the Government reports. We continue to be amazed that some of the discussions in Defra, our sponsoring department, still focus on the Sustainable Food and Farming Report of 2001, and you referred to the Treasury report of 2005. I think the Sustainable Food and Farming Report mentioned food security and dismissed it in a single sentence. The Treasury and Defra report in 2005 said our solution can be found in having an overall global trading system. What was even more surprising, if one drills down into both of those reports, I cannot remember the exact numbers but mentions of the environment in both of them number well and truly over 100, maybe 120 mentions, productivity and competitiveness both get six or seven mentions. They are the sort of dilemmas we are facing looking at the reports that have gone on. We are really pleased that there is now the Cabinet Office report you referred to, Michael, and other reports and your own inquiry now starting to look forward and become a developing, forward-looking agenda.
Hilary Benn spoke last night at the Fabian Society and he mentioned the importance of domestic food supply. However, we have a concern that many of the utterances from Government and Defra still talk about our dependence on what the world can do for our food security, not what we can do to contribute to world food security. You mentioned the spikes of last year and the shocks that occurred globally in the key commodity markets. I think it is important to reflect how countries reacted to that. We saw Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia banning exports very quickly. We saw Argentina banning exports of meat. We saw big subsidies being put on fertilizers around the world. China put a 135 per cent tariff on the export of fertilizers to try and keep them within its own country. India currently spends approximately 2.5 per cent of GDP giving cheap fertilizers to its farmers and a similar amount is spent on defence. At the time we thought globally we would find solutions those many countries became more inward looking and protectionist.
You said in your introduction that you are there to hold Defra to account and challenge them. We look to Defra to be a sponsoring department to the food industry in equal measure to being the one that challenges us on our environmental performance as well. Too often, we look at that balance being out of kilter. I look at how BERR champions both production of business and also holds it to account on issues like being a low carbon economy and how it can improve on its performance.
If I can pick up one of the reasons why that is out of kilter. If you look at the Public Service Agreements that are meted out to different Government departments, Defra at the moment has only one and that is about securing a healthy natural environment for everyone's wellbeing, health and prosperity now and in the future. There is no mention in any way of food production in Defra's PSA targets at this moment in time.
It is against that background that when Hilary Benn came to the Royal Show in 2007, his first official duty as Secretary of State, we challenged him on an early warning system, on how we can try and detect if, as Tim said, we are dramatically reducing our production capacity in certain sectors. I am not saying that we want Government to wave a chequebook and buy a solution to this, but to drill down and see what the cause of that decline might be. If in horticulture it is the lack of availability of labour or the wrong priority of use of water in certain areas, the lack of functioning of the marketplace, and I could mention retailer relationships, that is causing that decline then Government and Defra should drill into finding a solution to what is happening. I do think it is important we try and make sure that occurs.
Yesterday, also, Hilary Benn announced the Council of Food Policy Advisors. Following discussions with Tim this morning, there is some scientific reference on there but we would have liked to have seen a stronger production-based focused science within that group. We would have liked to have seen more commercial agricultural representation on that group if we are looking at systems going forward, and I will continue that in debate with Defra.
When I look at the challenges that Michael alluded to at the start, when I see what has happened to our scientific base, and this is a major part of your work so I am really pleased you are going to focus on it, what the constraints are and what can be done. If we look at the productivity gains in the arable sector, in the 1980s we were growing four per cent a year, in the 1990s two per cent a year - John Beddington gave me the figures recently - and today we are running below one per cent a year increase in productivity. In 1970 we had 17 agricultural research stations in the UK; today there are three. We have now cut our research and development spending direct on agriculture by 45 per cent in the last 30 years, it is about 20 million. You do not event get a half decent premiership footballer for 20 million! What does that tell us about our priorities today in agricultural research and development.
I am really pleased that you are going to do this report and I can tell you that the farming industry is pleased that you are doing it and we will be very keen to help you in whatever way we can.
THE CHAIRMAN: Good. Thank you very much indeed for those encouraging words. Now I will turn to Chris Brown.
MR BROWN: I will lob in my favourite report as well as we are listing them. Mine is slightly more contemporary than Tim's, it is the Food Industry Sustainability Strategy which was where as an industry we came together to look at and agree ways forward and it is disappointing that we have not seen too much activity from that delivery.
I looked in the Little Oxford Dictionary for a definition of robust and it said, "vigorous, straightforward". The straightforward bit I struggle with because sometimes I say this is a really simple industry and sometimes it is an incredibly complex one. Looking at the terms of reference and the direct questions that you were kind enough to give me, if I look at the agricultural scene as we see it, I think we see a resilient industry, an industry that has coped with rather more challenges than we would have expected to have had in recent history, one that is competent, one that is technically advanced, and I will come back to that point, and one that has delivered safety, plentiful, affordable food. It is right to point out it is 54 years since the end of rationing.
In terms of things that probably need to be addressed, you have to look at the way that the farming base is structured. I am not sure that necessarily new thinking is coming about as quickly as it should, perhaps it is conservative with a small 'c'. It is probably apt that we are here at Borough Market. I certainly find the best debates that I have about food and about consumers come from people who operate farmers' markets and not directly with the public. There is no difference between selling eight lambs a week and 8,000 lambs a week. They are very sensible conversations that I have with these people.
I think we need to start this national debate. Is the Committee going to be looking at producing more food from our own resources because that is where we start to get into some interesting issues. We have fantastic benefits within the UK. We have the benefit of climate and soils. Peter has talked about the cereal yield and we have the world's highest cereal yields in this country and we can deliver on that. If we are going to continue to meet the challenges that the Committee has provided around how do we increase food production, are we going to stop concreting over it for a start? Is planning going to take due notice of the agricultural land that it is using up? It is apt to point out that London's western market garden now goes by the name of Heathrow and there is no sign of that coming back into agricultural production soon!
The emphasis of this discussion will have to return to one of increasing productivity. Certainly when I entered the industry that was one of the things we were talking about. We were talking about increasing levels of fertilizer application and about putting 350 kilos of nitrogen on grassland, not restricting it to 170. There is the dilemma which Tim highlighted of competing needs for land, that for food production, that for land use and that for biodiversity, which we have not addressed as an industry or as a nation.
When it comes to the issues of soil and water, the marine environment, I go back to the science bit. For those to be addressed we have to have the tools to do so. Peter is right: there was at one stage an Agricultural Research Council which supported Institutes of Soil Science, Food Science, Meat Science and others. That was combined with an extension service that was tasked with linking research results into systems that could be adopted by a wider range of farmers. We now have a very limited, fragmented research base. It is scary to look at the number of agricultural facilities that have closed and university departments that have closed. Obviously, the extension service no longer exists as it once was.
It is interesting if you look at the Defra food security consultation that it proffers global agricultural R&D spend as an indicator but, curiously, it does not require a parallel domestic measure: a case of do as I say, not as I do perhaps. I think we are starting to rely too much on overseas R&D and we need to make sure our own science base is tailored to the requirements for our own circumstances.
You asked me to talk about local food. Asda has 14 local food hubs which have got 600 new suppliers supplying in to us and that is 7,500 lines which are going in. They provide a level of quality, flavour and taste which national brands cannot match. Our local sausage range will double its sales this year over last year and will achieve about £7 million of profit. There is an opportunity there, and one which, I think, to be fair, most of the major multiples are now addressing. The economic climate is going to see more switching of purchasing. Value is a combination of quality and price and that is going to be much more prominent in customers' minds.
Defra has to assist in defining the business framework. There are almost too many conflicting interests to be reconciled. The Secretary of State has said that, "We will need to cut the greenhouse gas emissions associated with food production". Taking ruminants, we can reduce methane production by reducing the level of forage in their diets, but 70 per cent of England's agricultural area is grassland, that is what ruminants are there to consume. There is little point in denuding the uplands to feed cattle and sheep on grains imported from overseas. Where is the balance? Where is the debate? How will the competing aims of development, biodiversity, productivity and climate change be reconciled? From a business perspective, where we see a lot of pronouncements, we are increasingly looking for clear direction for us to be able to frame our longer term business strategies. There is a huge question to be addressed and I commend the Committee for doing so.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much indeed. Right, Jenny, would you like to give us the consumer perspective?
MS LINFORD: Right. Good morning. As a food writer, I have been writing about food since 1990 and in those days food was a quiet little backwater that was not particularly fashionable and then it became very fashionable and became a lifestyle accessory. In 1990 you did not have to be a celebrity to have a cookbook published but now it really helps.
It seems to me that it is only recently we have seen issues bubbling up to the surface, exactly as Tim said, this whole realisation that food is very important and is very complex. I cannot say if I write a recipe, "Go and buy some cod", because is there going to be any cod? In fact, when you look at the nature of what we are doing to fish around the world, can you give a fish recipe with a clear conscience? What happens when I go shopping, do I buy something organic or do I try and shop locally to support local growers who are non-organic? There are all of these that comes up. It is a sign of our times that our celebrity chefs, people like Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, are addressing the issues, they are looking at what our schoolchildren are eating and how our pigs and chickens are being kept. The political dimension of food is very much coming to the fore.
Personally, with regard to the inquiry, there are two areas that I would like to suggest should be looked at. The first one is markets. I wrote a book about British cheeses earlier this year and talked to over 100 cheese makers. At the moment in Britain we have a very buoyant cheese scene and we actually rival France in the number of cheeses we make and people do not realise that. When I talked to the cheese makers what came up over and over again was the importance of farmers' market. One lady up in Scotland, who has been making cheese for over 40 years, said that the best thing that ever happened to her as a cheese maker was the local farmers' market, so she can take the stuff there, she can make money, she gets cash value, she cuts out the middle man and new cheese makers can try, they can take things along to get people to try them and get feedback. That is very important.
What is sad is that when you look at markets in the UK they are under threat. Speaking as a Londoner, from Newham in East London to High Barnet in the north, traditional street markets are really fighting to survive. These are not glamorous, chichi markets where you trot along and pay a lot of money for some bread; these are basic, down-to-earth markets where people who are shopping on a budget but care enough about getting fresh food, good fresh food to cook for their families, want to go shopping there. The land that these markets are on is under threat often by developers because, until the recent property crash, it made more sense to put a block of flats up than to keep the market going. What is really sad is that when you look at local communities people want to keep the markets, they use them, but if markets lose control of the land, at some point somebody buys that land who does not have a long-term stake, the market has no protection. Personally, I feel it would be great to see some sort of local protection or duty on local government to protect markets and keep them there.
Markets are obviously a way for growers to reach the public and make money. The whole point about markets is they are cheap instead of paying expensive shop rents in London. We have seen that in Borough Market. When Borough Market started its retail food side, one of the best things about it was that it provided a way for growers in Britain coming down from Cumbria, say, Peter Gough or Tim Wilson from Wiltshire, Ginger Pig, they come down and tap into London's consumer market because they can afford to do that. It seems a very logical area that we should look at and support. There is the idea of local food co-operatives, which is another thing that is growing, where people are buying food and it is reasonable for the consumer and also supporting local food producers.
The second area that I think is very important is the idea of food knowledge which Tim was talking about. When I started writing about food and cookery I did not realise that cookery was going to become a vanishing skill. In my son's primary school playground I meet other others and when they find out I am a food writer lots of them say to me, "Do you cook from scratch every night?" and I say, "Yeah", and they are absolutely amazed. They just do not know how to do it. They do not want to do it. It is just from a different planet. Within that de-skilling of food, they are buying ready-meals, buying vegetables already chopped up, they do not whether it is a fresh vegetable if they look at a market stall. We are seeing huge amounts of food waste, which seems to be quite a fundamental area. Staggeringly, we seem to throw away about a third of the food we buy and half of that is edible food. It is wasted because people are buying too much food, they are not using it carefully. We have been used to food being cheap, used to it being ample, being available all the time. Now as we hit a recession, food prices have gone up and anybody who shops for food has seen the cost of their bill go up and up and up. This is time to embrace those values for cooking, making us be organised, preparing and being frugal, not expecting to have everything all the time in your laps.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much indeed, some stimulating comments. As somebody who has an allotment I very much warm to some of the things you were saying.
Right, ladies and gentlemen, you have been very patient in listening to what our panel has had to say. Would anybody like to make a comment or ask a question because this is your moment to contribute to our inquiry? Obviously we recognise that you have shown considerable interest in coming to join us this morning. There is always that horrible moment when somebody thinks, "Am I going to be the first person?" I am looking around and if anybody would like to raise their hand, you could be the first person! Would you be kind enough to give us your name?
MR McCOURT: My name is Jan McCourt. I am the owner of Northfield Farm which has traded at Borough market for very nearly ten years. I was the recipient some years ago of the NFU President's Award for Great British Food in 2001 which was very much based on the early work that I did here at Borough and elsewhere in supporting other farmers. I am interested who else is in the audience. Do we have any actual food producers here? Do we have any other stall holders from Borough?
THE CHAIRMAN: No, it looks like you are on your own!
MR McCOURT: That says quite a lot about what is going on in general and very specifically here and now. To an extent I think it undermines what you are trying to do, which is a great shame, because as set out and taking down the various points each of your principal speakers have made what you are doing is very worthwhile. However, looking from my perspective as a very small producer but someone who works with a lot of other producers as well, be it a maker of a biscuit or a baker of a bread or raiser of a sheep, a pig or a beef animal, there is a real perception of us, particularly the small producer, despite what Mr Brown said about the laudable Asda food hubs, of really being in a hinterland, of being totally ignored and forgotten.
Part of that hopefully, marvellous though this Select Committee's work is going to be and has been in other areas, is from that position. There is a distinct lack of any joined-up thinking in terms of the approach to these problems. Rather like a schoolboy I spent some time last night reading your report on the potential of the rural economy. It was fascinating to read and what came out of that, in effect, at least in my reading, was a criticism of the way that Defra is set up and its priorities, and you alluded gently at the beginning of your talk to that.
I think Jenny's mention of education, in effect, and the earlier mention from Tim of the culture of food are absolutely key to it. One of the things that needs to be established right away at the very beginning is how do you actually define food and what is your definition of food, because, of course, you could solve, and I am criticising Mr Brown ---
MR BROWN: Most people do!
MR McCOURT: I am sure you can take it. In my very modest way I am known to be something of a supermarket basher. If you read the press that has come out very recently in terms of the value lines of some of your competitors in particular, not yourself as far as I am aware, one can solve the problem overnight in terms of the lack of supply of food by emulating the very, very tiny amounts of what I would call real food that goes into a lot of these value line products. A sausage roll at nine per cent meat is not a sausage roll in my opinion. Then when you drill down into the economics of some of these products, the only person they represent value to is the supermarket that is selling them and they are not value at all to the consumer.
I know that my little business has a perception of being very much at the top end of the scale, whatever that means, but in some ways that is fortunate and in other ways a rather restrictive perception because one of the things I am evangelical about is the concept of value in food versus price. There are many brilliant things that Borough has done, among which without Borough I would not have a roof over my head or my business, but one of them is it is twinned with La Boqueria in Barcelona and they sponsored a group of six or eight of us to go there back in March this year to trade. I went down with my 14 year-old son, who did all the real work, and one or two of the others, without being unkind to anyone else, real producers, people who do make things and in some cases actually farm, and it was the most extraordinary experience. I would go so far as to say that this Committee cannot do its job without going down to La Boqueria!
MR GRAY: Hear, hear!
MR McCOURT: I know that raises all sorts of other issues! The culture of food down there is absolutely extraordinary and the understanding of value is extraordinary. I take small issue with Jenny who said something to the effect earlier that markets are all about cheap food or cheap prices.
MS LINFORD: No, great food.
MR McCOURT: I said "small issue". What we noticed very clearly was every single consumer that we had contact with, and obviously there were ex-pats but the majority of them were local people, looked not at the price that was attached to the particular food, they looked at what it represented in terms of value and part of that value was the experience of talking to us, the experience of tasting it. If for their pocket the cost was too high, they simply bought less. They simply bought a sliver of stilton from us as opposed to half a stilton, or whatever it might be. I spent six days doing quite a lot of research, walking around, speaking to a lot of producers and the cultural issue which Tim referred to is absolutely key to that. Obviously there is a place for supermarkets and there is a place for the very tiny producers, such as myself, but at the moment there is a huge imbalance between the two. It has been focused on in great depth in some of the farming press recently. That cultural issue, that educational issue and that concept of value are absolutely key to whether or not we see a food production industry which is dominated by huge players where food is an absolute commodity in the same way that oil or petrol or diesel or gas is.
In some ways my very modest crusade has been to de-commoditise the commodity, to bring people back to understand that food really has a value way beyond just its nutritional value. I think that element of it and the whole joined-up involvement of different governmental departments is important, particularly at the moment because we are at an extraordinary opportunity from a food producer's point of view in terms of this wake-up call. The wake-up call is not so much the scares that you referred to earlier, although they are important and part of it, but the whole economic debate and the struggle to revive businesses, small businesses in particular, whether in rural areas or not.
Although I hate to say it, because I am not a great fan of this Government, some really good work is being done in terms of injecting realistic practical advice into small businesses. The models are there. There is a huge amount of wisdom in this field in the fields, for want of a rather trite description. There is a lot that can be learnt from the producers themselves. What they need in return is more help in actually taking their businesses forward. It is a very, very tough game. In one sense, I agree it is the same to rear eight pigs as 8,000 or whatever, but where one falls down, and I know I am guilty of it, is in the individual business structures. I think we are at a critical stage and it is possible that we lose the little players, such as myself and others, and culturally as well as in terms of quality and holding the big players to account that would be a great shame.
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much. May I congratulate you on the passion that came through in what you are saying. One of the great values of doing something like this is that we do hear from those who are directly involved. Sometimes on select committees bodies that represent large groups of people come and talk and there is a dilution effect of the passion that you quite clearly feel. Is there anybody else in the audience who would like to talk?
MS DEVLIN: I am Hannah Devlin from Research Fortnight magazine. I have a question for Chris Brown and Peter Kendall. I am interested in the Science and R&D Standing Commission. What do you think would be the most immediate priority to increase spending on in terms of research? I also wanted to ask if there is something particular about the agricultural industry that makes it not well set-up to spend on R&D itself and why it should rely more on public spending?
MR LANG: It is their inquiry, not mine, but I will happily answer it to feed these thoughts to the Select Committee. On my priorities for research spend, although I agreed entirely with what both Peter and Chris said, and I thought they would say that so I did not say it, I can work myself up into a deep lather. Can lathers be deep? I think so. You know what I mean.
THE CHAIRMAN: It depends which brand of soap you use.
MR LANG: Of course, Neal's Yard bought at Borough Market, where else! I get into a lather about the collapse of agricultural R&D. Just when we need it, we have not got it. This is going right across politics. It goes back to Rothschild, who I do not think most people here would know, David Lepper probably vaguely knows. A few people nodding, that is good, it shows our age! Rothschild was the science adviser to a previous government in the 1960s and essentially created a view that we did not need blue skies research, it should all be left to near-market and near-market should be commercially linked. Essentially, in a rush over the last 20 years we have seen the tail end of Rothschild's thinking just when in food and farming we need to have very long-term, not necessarily commercial, thinking.
Having given you my overview, my first point is we need research on eco-nutrition. We do not know what a good diet is. We do not know how to link a good diet for public health to a good diet for ecology. What is a food system which protects biodiversity? There are many schools of thought. I will give it starkly that I have heard given at Rothamsted. Blitzkrieg your growing land and put the biodiversity into fringes. The other is getting the biodiversity into the field and eat it. They are two very different approaches. They need to be looked at and that requires science.
The second is specifically an issue about multi-functionality. The pressure on land is immense already but is going to get even more immense. We have got to combine food production with fibre production, with fuel production, with retention of amenity, carbon sequestration and water sequestration. How do we manage that in a country like Britain which has, I think, geologists, teachers, almost every geological sub strait bar a few known on the planet. We have an incredibly varied soil, so we have got to have very precise issues. I nearly said it before, Michael, and I am now going to say it because I blame research for that. Defra has spent seven years trying to work out the indicators by which we judge soil health for the soil inquiry and somewhere at least in your inquiry that must be a footnote.
THE CHAIRMAN: It is a key issue.
MR LANG: It is absolutely key. We need to know what do we want from our soils. That is a huge agenda. We need a new rebuild, higher education and extension service that you referred to, Michael, for sustainable food systems, not just for farming but for the food supply chain. The need for co-ordination across that chain has immense implications for research and higher education. I would say that. The new food co-ordination requires input even from people like my team based across the Thames in the middle of the biggest city in Britain - I can almost see my university just across the river. I am based just over there. Urban perspectives on food are just as important for food research as that from rural Bangor University or Aberystwyth or whatever. The new agenda requires a rebirth, not of the Agricultural Research Council, but of a Sustainable Food Research Council. The beginning of that thinking is coming through projects that you will know and probably a few of us here know about, but a lot more cross-sector thinking is needed. Ultimately research and education strategy is about money, but we need to ask: money for what. The goal has got to be about sustainable food. Frankly, we do not know the answers and Government is divided on it. FSA keep saying, "Eat fish", and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution have said, "Don't". What do I do? What is the research base? The evidence is equally good for both. How do we put that together? That is actually a science policy issue. We have got very good science policy research here in Britain but it has not been let loose enough on food and agriculture. I would like to see that, not just new resources but better use of existing science resources.
THE CHAIRMAN: The Committee has been concerned about this, notwithstanding the subject of today's discussions, and Lynne Jones has been following up and doing quite a lot of work in looking at the background to our current science situation within the Defra family of challenges. I am going to ask her to say one or two words.
LYNNE JONES: When I indicated that I wanted to say something it was not really about that, other than to say that we have got some excellent research going on in our research institutes and we must protect those and expand upon them. I would not like people to get the impression that there is not a lot of good, high quality work going on. I think that needs to be an important part of this inquiry.
I recently went to Brazil on behalf of the Committee and it was interesting to see the really high importance they are giving there to their agricultural research base. The EMBRAPA organisation started off in 1974 with about 20 scientists and they did get a lot of help from this country and now they have got 8,000 scientists, and I forget the exact number of PhDs. They have got 39 research institutes and are about to open another three. We need to take note of the importance that they are giving to that.
I wanted to ask a couple of questions and I suppose it is relevant to the Brazil issue. Obviously one of the worries is the deforestation of the Amazon as a result of the production of beef and soya, for example. Chris raised the issue about why are we denuding our uplands and then having livestock production based on imported animal foods which potentially has environmental consequences. What are the drives to that? I spend a lot of time in the Welsh uplands and farmers there are struggling. I know that lamb production in our uplands has gone down substantially. We have gone from a situation where we probably had too many animals on our uplands to currently having insufficient. What has driven those trends, if people would like to comment on that?
My final point is on the culture. Jenny mentioned talking to parents in the playground and about amazement at the idea that we should cook a meal from scratch. We have gone a long way from when I was brought up and the cabbage was boiled for about three hours before you ate it. Our standards are much higher in many ways and there is enormous interest in food, all the TV programmes, all the celebrity chefs, yet we are not cooking at home. How have we got ourselves into this situation? I get great pleasure out of cooking and I cannot understand why people do not enjoy it and do not do it. We have got the Jamie Oliver Ministry of Food, perhaps we should look into that in terms of what needs to be done to change the culture.
MS LINFORD: It seems a chore, which is very sad. People who do not do it do not even want to do it. (a) they do not have to and (b) they have no desire to. It is very strange for the parents. I really like to know what I am putting in my child's mouth and when I look at a packet label I think, "I'll just cook it myself". It seems that is quite a fruitful route to tap into, the desire of parents who love their children, which is all of us, wanting to get into the idea of good food being made at home, which is quite potent.
THE CHAIRMAN: Just before I bring Peter in, last week I went to a presentation by one of our leading supermarkets on their supply chain and they had one of their butchers along to show us about different cuts of meat. This was in the evening and after they had done this, they turned round and said, "Right, there you are, get on and cook it", so I am afraid it was back to the kitchen even for this humble Member of Parliament!
MR KENDALL: On why production is falling, it is bizarre because as we speak there is promise of a new WTO deal taking into account no non-trade issues, ie environmental and welfare concerns, so we have lower trade barriers. In the EU mostly - the French will not do it - we are removing production link support, so where you now have a payment for managing the land rather than production, and in this forum I will be quite controversial, I believe we do need to think about how we do want the market to give that steer. As a farmer, I do not want politicians and bureaucrats from Brussels deciding what I should and should not grow, that is a dangerous avenue to go down, but we are. The declines you talk about are the result of that change in agricultural policy from one that was paying you to put as many sheep on there as possible to one where you put the right amount to produce the right quality for market.
Can I just reply on research and development. There is a 20 year payback in agricultural R&D and that is why it is different. We are talking about having to give incentives. As an organisation we fought to get the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board to work closely together. There is a £56 million pot there that goes into promotion, market failure solutions. We want them to collectively find ways of putting that money together, so the industry shows it is putting its money where its mouth is. We would encourage the Committee to look at incentives. In the same way as you reward venture capitalists or people who speculate in theatre productions in the City, you get additional tax breaks because you are taking a very long term position and they are high risk and often only very few come home to give you a dividend.
THE CHAIRMAN: Is there anybody from the audience? I see two more hands and I know David Drew wants to come in. Time is going to be fairly tight on this. I am going to take the lady at the front, the gentleman at the back and then I see a hand right at the back. Perhaps you would be kind enough to do them one after the other and then the panel will respond and I know David Drew wants to make a brief comment. Lady here in the second row.
MS PINNER: Thank you. My name is Annette Pinner. I am from the Vegetarian Society. For me, a really high priority is this fundamental question of behavioural change and what we should eat to make the best use of our resources and how that can be dealt with, especially as some of the conclusions are very likely to be unpopular. I am thinking of Tim's examples of pineapple and apples, but obviously from the organisation that I represent meat and dairy as well. How are we going to move away from what seems to be the underlying principle that there is a demand that must be met to actually working more in harmony more consistently with what our land can supply?
THE CHAIRMAN: Thank you very much indeed. The gentleman down there on my left-hand side.
MR TASKER: My name is Johann Tasker from Farmers Weekly magazine. This question is to Peter Kendall, Tim Lang and Chris Brown. There are people who think we should be more self-sufficient or less self-sufficient and the question is how self-sufficient in percentage terms should we be in the indigenous foodstuffs, ie the food that we can grow in this country?
THE CHAIRMAN: We will park that one for the moment and take the final question from the lady at the back.
MS OXBORROW: Clare Oxborrow from Friends of the Earth. I just wanted to pick up on something Lynne Jones said about deforestation in Brazil to grow soya because, of course, this is a significant issue not just for biodiversity loss but also for climate change. I think when we are considering food security for the UK we also need to consider what impact our consumption is having on the ability for others in developing countries to meet their own needs in terms of food supply and the significant use of soya for the livestock sector is one really big issue where this all comes together. It will be really interesting to hear comments on that.
THE CHAIRMAN: Clare, perhaps you might like to remind everybody of the name of the campaign you have just launched?
MS OXBORROW: Thanks. We have just launched a new campaign called the Food Chain campaign and we have a new report that is called, What is Feeding our Food looking at the impacts of the livestock sector.
THE CHAIRMAN: Very good. Let us just take, if I may, the specific question that Johann put from Farmers Weekly. I will start in the order which he put it, which was Peter Kendall and then Tim Lang and then Chris.
MR KENDALL: You heard what I said earlier on about an early warning system and I deliberately do not put targets on it because if you put targets on it then you would have politicians and bureaucrats managing that outcome, and that has not proved successful in the past and I suspect it will not be again. The point I made about an early warning system is it does point the finger back at regulators, it does point the finger back at trade policy or even EU policy. If we are going to see our sectors decline because we bring in foreign products produced in a low welfare environment then we have issues with the supply chain and how the relationships work with some of the big retailers. I do not want to set targets but I do want us to drill down and see what is causing the success or failure in helping to stimulate a successful sector.
MR LANG: I will deal with Johann's question about home grown and indigenous. As you know, we are about 70 per cent home grown production and indigenous products at 60 per cent. By its nature I would say we should be raising that. I do not see why we should not be eating only British apples. I do not see why not. I know why we are not, it is because we have not got the apple trees and we took the CAP grants to grub up our fruit trees, et cetera. We all know what went wrong, but to rebuild and re-skill that will take time and will be expensive. Do I want that to happen? Unequivocally, yes. It goes back to Jan McCourt's eloquent plea for production and culture to get closer. Here's an example of how you do it, or this has to be part of that. Am I happy to see the production graph going down? No, I am not, for the reasons I have said, not out of petty nationalism; I am very happily British. My concern is for appropriate and sustainable land use. A new agenda is cutting across what has been a highly politically charged debate. We have to use land everywhere appropriately and sustainably, whether we are talking about Brazil or Botswana, Malawi or us. To allow your productive land to drop, as we are doing, is immoral.
The second question from Annette Pinner about the behaviour change, I think your question was a statement. As you know, I agree because I have said very much the same thing. Behaviour change is already happening. A culture that has shifted people in just 30 years to where children think pizza and curry are British foods and are their favourite foods can deal with behaviour change. I do not think we should be frightened of behaviour change, the issue is what has been driving it and how can we drive it in a more sustainable, equitable land use.
Clare, on your point, although you did not ask it specifically of me, the issue of soya and livestock is an indicator of a meat culture that has gone barmy. I am actually a great fan of the debate that the FAO Livestock's Long Shadow Report two years engendered. These very important figures, both globally and also here in Britain, are of us growing and using very important agricultural land to grow grains that we could be eating, and arguably should be eating, to feed to animals. It is a very inefficient land use.
People like me are dusting down 1960s and 1970s' academic research about efficiency and conversion ratios and saying this logic is back and it is back in an era of climate change and water shortage. All of your three questions were the same sort of question. It comes to the point that I hope appropriately, Michael, I was trying to say, that behind the production question that the Select Committee inquiry is going to address is this very difficult word of "appropriate". We have got to nail down what is appropriate land use because it is actually needed.
MR BROWN: What is left? As somebody else has given the number I will not as well other than to give an example. The scientist debate has steered away from demand economies to command economies and that is a really interesting thing to explore. If you take the apple example, the customer is now telling me that they want red-skinned apples. Gala apples outsell, that is what they want to buy. It has taken time but we are actually seeing increases in British red apples coming through, and that is the way the market should respond. By the same token, there was an interesting debate which the Committee might like to explore about what is our strategic reserve in terms of production and how much are we going to say, "We need to hold this as our national bank account" - maybe banks is not the best example to use - but also to flex in terms of what the market and customer is demanding.
THE CHAIRMAN: Time has beaten us. David, I know you just wanted to make a quick point and then I think we are going to have to wrap it up.
MR DREW: It will be very quick. I am pleased that we got on to the issue of demand because we spend a lot of time talking about supply, so I welcome that.
The second point is we had the Curry report, not the big one but the small one on county farmers, which has virtually disappeared without any trace. Again, there are some issues about access to the land for people who want to do some interesting things. I know Tim has talked and written about this. There are some real access issues to do with where we may be looking at slightly different arrangements on how we produce and subsequently prepare our foods. I hope we can look at all of those, Chairman.
THE CHAIRMAN: Well, Members of the Committee are the ones who ask the questions and help to set the agenda, so I think the answer on that is an unequivocal yes.
Can I thank our four speakers who have helped us in such a stimulating way to launch this inquiry. If nothing else, it has revealed not only the passions but the complexities which are involved when you come to talk about food which I am afraid we do tend to take for granted. In the United Kingdom for a long time it has been left to the buying directors of companies like Asda, the procurement directors of companies like McDonalds and manufacturers like Northern Foods, they are the ones who have decided in many cases what food policy is going to be. Recent events perhaps have given back ownership of that particular debate to the consumer, to us. As a group of, if you like, the people's representatives, we are going to pick this up and run with it. We will do our best to try and ask the questions which very usefully have been posed both in the questions from the audience, for which I thank you all very much indeed, and the challenging points that our four speakers have made. Thank you all very much for coming and launching this particular inquiry in a genuinely novel way for the Committee.
If you have been stimulated and feel you want to make a further contribution we are always able to have written submissions. They do not have to be long, they can be sent electronically to the clerk of the Committee, but the most important thing is they will be read and will form part of the evidence which ultimately will be published as part of our final report.
The one thing I would say about the Select Committee's work is that it is a genuinely democratic process, we welcome all contributions. Sometimes in those contributions there will be a little nugget that we certainly will not have thought about but which you would make as a significant contribution to our efforts.
Thank you once again for coming. Thank you very much to Borough Market for allowing us to use this splendid facility. We are now going to go off to Jan's stall to enjoy some breakfast! Thank you very much indeed.
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