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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 177-ii House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL development COMMITTEE
Sustainable development in a Changing Climate
Tuesday 10 February 2009 MS VICTORIA JOHNSON, MR JONATHAN MITCHELL, DR MURRAY SIMPSON and MS GILLIAN COOPER DR TOM MACMILLAN, PROFESSOR TIM LANG and MR PAUL STEEDMAN Evidence heard in Public Questions 80 - 137
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Tuesday 10 February 2009 Members present Malcolm Bruce, in the Chair John Bercow Richard Burden Mr Marsha Singh Andrew Stunell ________________ Memorandum submitted by Tourism Concern
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Ms Victoria Johnson, New Economics Foundation, Mr Jonathan Mitchell, Overseas Development Institute, Dr Murray Simpson, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, and Ms Gillian Cooper, Tourism Concern, gave evidence. Q80 Chairman: Good morning, thank you very much, all of you, for coming in to help us with this inquiry. I wonder if you could introduce yourselves for the benefit of the shorthand writer; if we could start with Mr Mitchell. Mr Mitchell: Good morning; my name is Jonathan Mitchell, I work for the Overseas Development Institute, just across the river, a development policy think tank. I head the tourism programme and the rural livelihoods programme. Ms Johnson: I am Victoria Johnson, I work for the New Economics Foundation, Climate Change and Energy Team. It is a think tank based in Vauxhall and is an economic think tank looking at environmental issues, social justice and well-being. Dr Simpson: I am Dr Murray Simpson, a senior research fellow at Oxford University, working in the School of Geography on tourism, climate change and development. Ms Cooper: I am Gillian Cooper and I work for Tourism Concern which is a non-profit organisation looking at maximising the benefits of tourism to developing countries and communities. Q81 Chairman: Thank you very much for that. As you will appreciate, the title of our inquiry is Sustainable Development in a Changing Climate and we mean the physical climate and the financial climate; we are looking at both aspects of how these things impact developing countries and, in particular for this session, the role of aviation and tourism and fresh produce and so forth. I wonder if I could start with you, Victoria Johnson, as you take a rather different perspective. In your report Plane Truths you are in favour of a carbon tax, focused at a sufficiently high level to discourage demand for air travel, which is a perfectly understandable concept, but first of all could you actually explain what level you are thinking of, what impact you believe would be necessary to have an effect on discouraging air travel. Also, are you talking about a distinction between long and short haul flights, because clearly they are different options? Ms Johnson: First of all in the report we did not set an actual level for a carbon tax, although we did look at some economic analyses that had looked at the Air Passenger Duty as it was in 2001 and a doubling of that, which has happened now, and another Conservative Party-proposed green tax, all of which we set at a level of €15 per tonne of carbon. The analysis showed that that would have a very small effect on air travel, one of the reasons being that the elasticities for air travel vary, but we did make a distinction between short haul and long haul flights for two reasons, mainly that it is much easier to substitute the mode of transport for short haul flights. In the Plane Truths report we looked at tourism flows from the UK to tourist destinations and found that around three in every four flights are short haul flights, a large proportion of which are under 500 kilometres and it is actually perfectly reasonable to assume that you can use other modes of transport for that distance. A lot of the travel is also short breaks, and in terms of the Committee meeting today and the impact of the tax on developing countries and the tourism industry there we found that only nine per cent of all the flights leaving the UK actually go to what are classed as global south countries. Other than that if you reduce short haul flights significantly and have a higher tax for short haul flights there will be less impact on long haul flights, in particular those to developing countries. Q82 Chairman: We might explore that also with the other witnesses in terms of how much of an impact that would have, but in terms of the money raised do you have a view as to how it should be applied? One suggestion is that it should be allocated to developing countries to cope with climate change adaptation; is that something that you would support or that you have a view on? Is it just a tax to discourage aviation which disappears into the general coffers, or do you believe it is a tax that should be specifically applied in a particular way and perhaps do you think it could be applied in ways that would be directly beneficial to developing countries who are suffering from climate change rather than causing it? Ms Johnson: In the report we suggested that the tax be used for investment into low carbon modes of transport such as rail links and also contributing to adaptation aid for developing countries. Q83 Chairman: You mentioned statistics about the number of flights and the percentage of flights going to developing countries, but do you accept that there could be an implication either now or in terms of future development for countries which have either developed niche markets to supply fresh produce to Europe or to America, or who have developed a tourism industry to encourage long haul tourists? Do you accept that for some countries that could be a significant disincentive or deterrent to the development of these sectors? Ms Johnson: One of the key analyses that we did in the report was looking at the impact of curbing aviation growth or halting aviation growth from 2009 and we forecast the impact on total GDP from 2009 to 2025. In that analysis we looked at four countries which were Kenya, Dominican Republic, Thailand and the Maldives, so they were four very different countries - the Dominican Republic has a very high level of all-inclusive resorts and Kenya, Thailand and the Maldives are developing countries, with the Maldives being a small island state, all of which have quite a high dependence on tourism, particularly tourists from the UK. In that analysis we compared the halt in growth with the forecast provided by the UN World Tourism Organisation and we found that from the UK only - and I should make it clear this was specifically halting growth in aviation from the UK - the impacts on GDP were not as high as we had expected. If I can just read out some figures and I will then explain them in some more detail, for Kenya by halting growth the real revenue lost between 2009 and 2025 was 0.07 per cent; for the Maldives it was 3.42 per cent; for Thailand 0.17 per cent and the Dominican Republic 0.39 per cent. In that figure we did include something called leakage which I am sure you are familiar with but includes the money that basically leaves the national economy. We looked at a number of different leakage rates from 30 per cent to 60 per cent and we also looked at linkages as well which means the money that actually stays within the economy. Whilst there is a loss and you cannot deny that there would be a loss - it is only logical to assume that there would be a loss to the economy - it is less than we would have expected. Our conclusion from that was that because such a large amount of money was repatriated to international tour operators and spending on imports, tighter regulation of the tourism industry, which is one of the most unregulated industries, would actually be one solution to dealing with such a loss so you would not necessarily have to grow tourism in order to increase the real revenue to developing countries, based on the examples that we used in the report. Q84 Chairman: If I have understood that correctly what you are saying is that the same amount of business could grow the economy if it was more fairly shared. Is that the implication of what you are saying? Ms Johnson: Yes, in the sense that if more money was spent in the local economy and used to support the local economy rather than leaving the country that would be the case. Q85 Chairman: I have to say that some of your figures for those countries, particularly for somewhere like the Maldives, seem surprisingly small but I accept that is your evidence. Perhaps I could bring in the other witnesses, not necessarily to comment on that, although you are welcome to do so if you want to, but given that that is a proposal on aviation tax, to try and discourage aviation, and obviously we try to evaluate how that is going to affect poorer countries, what is the likelihood of there actually being either a global carbon tax or any other form of tax on aviation, perhaps in time for the summit in Copenhagen this year? Is there a realistic prospect of that happening? Dr Simpson: In terms of a direct answer to your question there are a number of countries looking at aviation tax and obviously the EU emissions trading scheme is one of those elements that may put pressure on for an aviation tax to come in, but it is not as simple as just an aviation tax, there are other issues surrounding the price structure of aviation, not least oil of course, but we know from experience that that fluctuates dramatically. Also, there is carbon offsetting, which is a voluntary scheme that at the moment is completely unregulated, which certainly should be regulated as soon as possible because at the moment it is pretty free and footloose out there with the internet and people setting up companies to try and charge money for carbon emissions on flights. I would certainly agree that tax or offset payments should be directed towards the developing countries or regions to which travellers are going, but I would have to contest a couple of the remarks by my colleague here, particularly on the impacts on GDP, not just the fact that those figures are probably too small, but also the benefits derived from tourism to communities and the economy of developing countries and regions such as the Caribbean are far, far wider than just figures on a GDP scale. The livelihoods of the communities in, for example, the Caribbean region are highly dependent on tourism, including secondary sectors, and the economies of those nations as well as other developing countries would be severely affected by a drop in travel to those destinations. Having said that, as you said Mr Bruce at the beginning it is very vague as to what the price would have to be as a tax to actually restrict people's either ability or inclination to travel. Work that we carried out at Oxford and with other colleagues last year at the time of the extremely high oil prices indicated that basically there would be little or no effect on travel to long haul destinations by an increase of, say, £60 on a flight per person. I would like to make that point as well. The complexities involved in the tourism and travel distribution chain are perhaps one of the key issues here, and the reason I raise that is because an aviation tax on its own to try to deliver adaptation finance or the ability for developing countries to mitigate their carbon emissions is not going to be sufficient on its own to address the problems and complexities of climate change in those countries. Tourism is, as I said, a complex distribution chain and interventions would need to be made at every stage of that chain, including on the ground and in hotels, prior to travel and also activities that are conducted by travellers when they are there in the destinations as well. Q86 Chairman: Can I just ask the other witnesses about Copenhagen? It seems to me that there are proposals coming from the developed countries and proposals coming from the developing countries; which one is more likely to gain ground; is anything likely to be agreed particularly on aviation? What is the prospect, for example, of a levy, taking your point that probably it would not actually have much effect on travel but would raise some income to be applied specifically to developing countries? Do any of the other witnesses want to comment on that? Ms Cooper: I do not necessarily have a comment on the cost of the levy, but to support my colleague here in some of the comments that he has made in terms of the dependence of a lot communities, particularly Caribbean communities - and I come from the Caribbean - on tourism, the impact of a reduction in long haul flights would be extremely damaging, looking again at the many levels of the economy that are dependent on tourism. One of the things I can say is that if there was the cost of that levy put towards assistance to adaptation, to changes, certainly some of the policies would suggest that there needs to be a lot more emphasis placed on incentives and concessions for small and medium enterprises within destinations so that they can take better advantage of the tourism industry - because at the moment a lot of the concessions and incentives are focused on large and multinational businesses - and so that they can have more of the linkages that are needed to ensure that other sectors of the economy can benefit from tourism. At the moment very few of those concessions and incentives are applied locally and nationally within the economy so I think a levy that would help those kinds of adaptations as well, so that they can get more impact from tourism, would be very important. At the moment we are already seeing a real impact on the economy because of the economic climate. There has been a huge loss of jobs and those may translate into very small GDP figures but actually the impact nationally is extremely significant in terms of loss of jobs. There are very few other comparative economies and small countries have very little opportunity to compete otherwise within the global economy. Dr Simpson: If I might jump back to the aviation tax, you were asking about the likelihood and I can see you would like an answer to that question. Probably the short answer is that it is unlikely and if any aviation tax was applied it would have to be structured very, very quickly to make sure that the benefits are derived by the developing countries because the last thing that would be most beneficial to the communities and to the global warming situation is for funds to simply go into government coffers. There is a proposal that is in process at the moment with the Inter-American Development Bank from our partners, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre - Oxford University is working with the five Cs on projects in the Caribbean - that we would try to establish some carbon neutral destinations which would involve a trust being set up, and the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank and probably the Caribbean Development Bank would be administering that trust. It is not in place at the moment and the project is not yet funded, although we are anticipating that it will be, but that would be a framework within which to operate such a tax. Q87 Chairman: Thank you, that is helpful. Mr Mitchell. Mr Mitchell: If I could just make a few comments, one would be the caveat that I have not read the report - I will read it and we would be quite happy to make a submission on that. My other comments would be that I agree with you, I think the GDP impacts for highly tourist-dependent poor countries are likely to be higher than the figures I have heard. As I say, I have not looked at the analysis but I will do so before confirming that. The work that we do in ODI is basically in the low-income, long haul tourist destinations that Victoria was speaking of, and my feeling is that they would be very seriously impacted if a tax was implemented on long haul flights that was sufficient to reduce or indeed halt the increase in demand. If I could just paint the scenario as an economist, in the destinations we are talking about often the contribution of tourism to the economy is between ten and 20 per cent of the economy. Quite often the contribution of tourism to exports is between a quarter and a third of the exports, so these are very significant economic sectors within the kinds of countries that we have been talking about. The work that we have been doing at ODI though is not to just focus on the macroeconomic figures from an office in London, we have gone out and we have traced the tourism dollar. We have now done that in about ten countries across South East Asia and Africa. What we find is that the official statistics do not tell you the whole story, exactly as a number of my colleagues have related, because what the official statistics tell you is what the spending is in hotels, the transport sector and in restaurants; what they do not count are people in the craft sector, they do not count the thousands of very poor people working in the agricultural sector and they also do not tell you about the spending of tourist workers through induced impacts elsewhere in the economy. What we have found is that actually the benefits of tourism to fragile, poor economies vary but they are nearly always very much larger than the official statistics will tell you, if you roll your sleeves up, actually go into a destination and actually look where the money is spread around. Generally between the low level of about 10 per cent and the higher level of about a quarter of in-country spending is going to the very poor, so the stereotype that tourism only benefits the elite within countries - they do benefit disproportionately but the idea that the benefits do not trickle down to the poor fortunately is only the case in a small number of countries such as Cambodia, where there are very poor linkages between tourism and the local community. The benefits, particularly for the poor, are much larger than the official figures would suggest. The very short paper that we wrote on leakages has also been circulated to the Committee and there we found some of the more hysterical figures that actually have remarkable impact in the literature, such as that 75 per cent of the benefits of tourism leak out of developing countries, generally are wrong; the arithmetic is just wrong and the paper explains why. I am quite happy to go into that if you are interested. Generally the leakages at the very worst from developing countries are about a third. If you have a country like Cape Verde, which is essentially the tourist destination of sandy islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, they import almost everything and the leakages are about one-third of the in-country tourism spending, much lower than the figures of half or 75 per cent which, unfortunately, are bouncing around in the literature. The way I would look at the analysis is to go beyond the official figures and I would certainly question leakage figures if they were higher than that because that is the worst case scenario that we found. In, frankly, weak economies - we are doing a lot of work in Ethiopia at the moment - the leakage rate there is actually miniscule; it is extraordinary that in countries like Tanzania and Ethiopia, some of the poorest countries in the world --- Chairman: Can I bring Richard Burden in here because I think you are moving into an area that he has questions touching on so it might be appropriate to bring him in at this moment. Q88 Richard Burden: You may have been moving on to it generally, not simply in relation to leakage, but a lot of the discussion so far seems to be about what the impact may be in the event of levies, taxes and so on. I suppose I would just like to explore a bit more things from the other way round, about what contribution tourism does make to developing countries as far as trying to look at the potential of tourism for poverty reduction is concerned, what the benefits are but, perhaps more particularly, how they could be increased. What are the areas that we do need to be looking at? Mr Mitchell: That is exactly the area that we have been focusing on. Our interest is to reduce poverty in developing countries, we are not actually interested in tourism per se, it is how it can be used as a tool for achieving that, so where it does not work, like Cambodia, we say so. The reason, just to give you an example, Cambodia and Vietnam are neighbours: about seven per cent of the money spent in Cambodia goes to poor people but in Vietnam, next door, about 25 per cent of tourist spending in the country goes to poor people, so why the difference. There is a whole range of issues, but at the higher level the regulatory and enabling environment are extremely important. Quite often when you are dealing with tourism as a private sector-led activity people forget the importance of actually having an educated population that can mobilise the opportunities offered by tourism, of having infrastructure which allows tourists to get into the poorer areas. For instance, in Cambodia where there is an extremely high level of corruption a lot of the benefits of tourism are sifted off by a very markedly small number of people within the elite rather than being spread around the population, but what we have found is that the indirect linkages between tourism and the non-tourist economy are where the majority of the poverty reduction takes place. Within tourism, working in hotels and restaurants, poor people do disproportionately get jobs in those sectors because they are unskilled or semi-skilled, so you do have a bit of poverty reduction there, but where it really works is ethnic minority women selling silk goods in the highland areas of Vietnam, for instance, or in Laos. There are 1500 fishermen in Lake Chamo in Ethiopia and the majority of the tilapia and Nile perch that they catch are being sold at two or three large hotels in Addis Ababa. It is those indirect linkages, therefore, where you can get tourist spending to move out of the tourist sector and into the agricultural and craft sectors for instance that are important. They can have a dramatic influence but again it does not count for much on the national accounts because these people are earning, perhaps, one or two dollars a day, so you can have thousands of people earning that amount of money and it hardly registers, but it has a colossal impact in terms of people and the socio-economic impact. Dr Simpson: Work by the Department for International Development and other agencies is important to highlight the knock-on positive effects that Jonathan has just described there to raise awareness of travellers from developed countries like the UK as to how benefits can best be derived, to make choices to travel to destinations, stay in hotels and conduct activities that are going to have a positive effect on the secondary industries and on the livelihoods of individuals that are involved in providing things like fish and foodstuffs to hotels that they are staying at. At the same time, as Jonathan says, the regulatory frameworks within individual countries are also important to be strengthened so that that process is enabled. Things like micro-finance, where we have seen good examples in India and other countries where poor people, people living on below $2 a day, are able to actually access finance to start very small businesses to be able to provide services to hotels and activities that are being used by tourists. I would just re-emphasise that factor of benefits going to the poor through livelihood activities such as money from tourism encouraging the development of communications, the installation of fresh water supplies, roads, increased food security, all of these are very hard to measure and it is important to be able to go down into rural communities and establish what is happening there, how it has happened and what sort of strategies can be employed to encourage it. It is not a perfect world, certainly research that we have conducted and colleagues of mine have conducted shows that often it is the case that a small minority of a real community are the people who benefit, not the vast community, and that can be a problem, but the point is that there are benefits to be achieved and we need strategies to try and maximise those benefits as much as possible. Ms Cooper: If I can add, it is important to remember as well that often the fishermen and the women craft-makers and so forth are eking an existence out of what is already there and those regulatory frameworks are extremely important for strengthening those linkages. At the moment they are making an existence and living from what is there without those kinds of policies that strengthen the linkages that they can have so there is not an exclusive but an agreed system where they can sell their craft products to particular locations, using them within the hotels, that can then be used within a local network. Often there is an emphasis placed on creating tours with tour guides and so forth, but often that does only benefit a small number of people within a community and there needs to be a lot more creative analysis as to how those benefits can be spread and how to spread those linkages. If I can also say, the whole policy development process needs to be looked at in a much more holistic way. For many countries tourism affects the entire national development but the decision-making about how tourism has developed is done in isolation of national development planning, and so many people in small and medium enterprises, in poor and marginalised communities, benefit from tourism but do not have an opportunity to participate in how those policy development processes take place. There needs to be a broadening of how many people can be involved in those development processes. Often cultural products as well which have a benefit for the national and local society can add value to tourism products and have a certain amount of resilience in times of economic decline, and those need to be developed a lot more. I just wanted to broaden it a little bit more, not just from looking at the destination at a local level but looking at the global value chain for tourism, and you can see often where the linkages happen in the global value chain, so there is the commission that is taken from the tour operator which then puts pressure on the price and often the wages at the destination. You then have situations often where tour operators have late payment for operators in the local destinations and often cancellation of those fees, so that those fees do not get paid in destination countries. There is a real vertical integration by the large-scale tour operators and they often compete with in-bound operators who are based locally, so there are all of these levels within the global value chain where money is lost and where the local destination does not often benefit from it. New enterprises that develop, even if they are new attractions or events or crafts and so forth that are developed, they need to kind of break into that market, which is often structurally determined and they find it difficult to then get themselves on the tourist route. There needs to be support for that as well so that new enterprises can be encouraged and benefits derived from that. One other thing to add as well is that a lot of foreign exchanges losses that you see are also absorbed within the destination and not by the tour operators and the big tour companies based here, so all of those things within that value chain also need to be assessed as to where those losses can be minimised. Q89 Richard Burden: One last question from me, is it possible or helpful to generalise about whether high end tourism or mass market tourism is going to actually be generally better from a development viewpoint? You have placed a lot of emphasis on the regulatory system in the countries concerned, on how far there is activism in developing linkages and the right kind of promotion to tourists from abroad about what kind of tourism is better from a development point of view. Is that really it or in general terms is high end tourism likely to be easier to develop than the lower end or mass market or is it just irrelevant and it could be either? Dr Simpson: There is not conclusive research to say that high end is better or mass is better for benefits to poor people. Very quickly, mass tourism is of course looked down on by a lot of researchers as perhaps detrimental to a destination, but in fact if the frameworks are in place for the provision of, for example, foodstuffs by local people to those all-inclusive hotels, it may well be that an all-inclusive hotel is much better for the local community or the regional community in the developing country than a small boutique, high end tourist facility which is supposedly more eco-friendly. I am using very broad, generalised terms here but it is very important to be careful not to generalise about mass tourism being bad and the supposedly small eco-tourism good; it is not as simple as that. Mr Mitchell: If I could just add very briefly on a more uplifting level perhaps, what we found is exactly what Murray is saying, there is not a good type of tourism and a bad type of tourism if your concern is poverty alleviation in destination. Package tourism is not bad, it can be very good, and independent tourism can be very bad. We have also found that there is no segment of tourism that is either good or bad. We have got excellent examples of cultural tourism that has a huge positive impact on the poor, but in other places not at all - there is game-viewing that is great in, for instance, Tanzania and not very good in Central Africa in terms of gorilla tourism as relates to benefits to the poor. I think those kind of easy handles where this is the good type of tourism do not actually hold up to empirical analysis, and that is a good thing because countries do not then tend to choose the type of tourism that they have, it tends to be given by God or a bit of clever marketing. The implications of what I am saying are that any country, whatever type of tourism it has, can make it more pro-poor through the kinds of measures that I and my colleagues have mentioned, which is a positive message. Dr Simpson: If I might just add to that it is useful to think more about sustainable tourism being the way all tourism should be and try to put aside ideas of eco-tourism - which is a very misused term anyway - and/or mass tourism, but if you look at issues of sustainability and sustainable development and try to apply those to all tourism then you are starting to go down the right path to delivering benefits that we are talking about. Q90 Mr Singh: It has been a very interesting discussion so far but let us try and pin it down a little bit. What should the UK Government be doing; should it be encouraging long haul flights to developing countries or discouraging them? Ms Johnson: I agree with a lot of the points that my colleagues have been saying but I do still feel very concerned that some developing countries are specialising in a market which is extremely vulnerable to exogenous shocks from oil prices to public health outbreaks or scares, to conflict, to climate policies as we are talking about today, to changing consumer tastes, recession and so on. I do think that is something that we ought to bear in mind but I do not think encouraging long haul flights is anything that I could possibly support. Bearing in mind again, as I mentioned earlier, that in terms of aviation the distribution between flights is very skewed towards short haul, that is something that I would encourage the Government to discourage by using the right financial instrument. Linked to the issue of vulnerability also is something I did not mention, that is vulnerability to geophysical events or extreme weather events which have the potential to have huge impacts on tourism destinations. Parallel to that are the changing global climate conditions, and if you link all those up together that to me does not seem like a sensible strategy. I would add also that in our report we made some reference to the bilateral trade agreements that the EU has made with a number of countries and one particular case that we made reference to is Mexico where regulations have effectively made it illegal for Mexico to regulate its own industry. The UK Government and other European governments have actually supported those bilateral trade agreements and I would say that one thing would be to address that immediately as a means of improving and also allowing some of the more pro-poor tourism strategies to develop. Dr Simpson: It is too complex to answer that question so simply. As I mentioned right at the very beginning the tourism supply chain is so complex interventions are required at every level regarding addressing climate change and, in particular, very briefly going back to Richard Burden's point about working in countries, DFID needs to be looking at the impacts of climate change on the livelihoods of the people in developing countries that are involved in tourism at every different sector that is linked with tourism. In many countries that are dependent on tourism to a great degree every sector is linked, so there is an inherent need to look at that on a macro level but also going into micro sectors. I suppose in summary, to try to answer your question if I can, again based on work that I and colleagues conducted last year, the general emphasis - in some ways supporting what Victoria is saying - is that less frequent travel over short distances is important, so if I can simplify that perhaps by saying if somebody is going on holiday six times a year for three days then it would be much better if they went on holiday three times a year for five days each, so less frequent travel over short distances and, by definition, you could extrapolate that to say longer holidays over longer distances. If we are trying to marry the complex problem of delivering benefits to developing countries which are by their nature long haul, then I suppose if pushed you would have to come down on the side of saying that it is better that somebody travels to a developing countries for two or three weeks once in a year than travels five times to the south of Spain in that year because overall the damage to the planet will be less and the benefits to poverty reduction will be greater. Q91 Mr Singh: Trying to bring it to a very local level, I have a constituency where the ethnic minority population is largely made up of Kashmiris from Kashmir and Pakistan. They travel not as tourists but as family visitors, to keep family links. They also have an impact on the economy they travel to, a huge impact; if there was a carbon tax which the consumer was paying - and these constituents of mine are not advantaged, they are disadvantaged - would this not be an unfair tax on the poor people in society and would it not discourage the economic impact that they have? Dr Simpson: Absolutely. I have just one sentence on that and again it comes back to something we mentioned at the beginning of the session, which is that an increase in the cost of travel will not have a great impact on arrivals except on people of a medium to low income, you are absolutely right. If anything, therefore, you are actually affecting the human rights and freedom of movement of the people who actually should be able to do that, yes. Mr Mitchell: Your point is an important one because there are lots of stereotypes in tourism about what a tourist is and quite often they are not who they are meant to be by the stereotypes. What we find generally is that diaspora tourism is hugely important in South Asia; in Cape Verde it is driving the whole economy, it is not just visiting friends and relations. Very often we find that when tourism begins to develop the economy people actually go home, they can actually go home, and we have seen that in Cape Verde and in Ethiopia. A lot of the tourism investors are people that know the international market and so they are well-placed to open hotels; the same in Vietnam actually, so it is much more significant than going back to see mum once a year, sometimes it allows people actually to create a vibrant economy that allows them to make the choice to go back, maybe at retirement but increasingly at working age. Could I go back to your first question very briefly? There are several levels at which the British Government could think about intervening. One is a point that has been made very well already which is to make sure with the existing tourist flows that the maximum benefit is extracted for the destination countries, and there we are talking about things that actually fit in very well with DFID's development agenda about improving the business environment, empowering women and reducing crime. These are the things that stimulate linkages and stimulate developments, so that is one level. Also there is a real window of opportunity with the private sector and we in a sense are blessed in Britain in that we have some of the largest and most powerful international tour operators. If you go along the panel we will all have different views on them, but it is a real asset because an incremental change in their business practice has a tremendous influence on the destinations and what you have at the moment with a couple of the very large tour operators is, probably for the first time, some very responsible practice coming in at board level within those organisations - for instance, with the travel life programmes they are rolling out for the hotels that they are working with in terms of both environmental and socio-economic improvements. I have seen it at destination level and it has a huge impact; if the British Government could work with that through UK companies that would be tremendously important. Finally, tourists are people so I would make sure that you prosecute sex tourists when they come back to Britain; I would help educate tourists that actually out-of-pocket expenditure is very important and that that is what benefits poor people. I would deal with the big stuff up here, therefore, but also at a very individual level as to how people should behave. Q92 Mr Singh: Why do we need to have this discussion about poor countries, developing countries, least developed countries given that their carbon footprint is so small? Why can we not just exempt them from taxes, levies, offsetting? Mr Mitchell: There are people much better qualified to answer but if I could make one very brief comment on this. Q93 Chairman: You are all going to have to be brief because it is a very interesting discussion but we have still got quite a lot of questions and we are going to run out of time. I do not want to constrain anybody, but could people be brief. Mr Mitchell: Very briefly, I share your bewilderment, to be quite honest. I understand the Committee is going to go to East Africa and, having spoken to our Climate Change Group, you will each generate under two tonnes of carbon which, at the current shadow price of carbon, will be £45. That will be the UK Government's view of the total cost to the environment of your trip. The benefit to East Africa of you being there, as business tourists in this case, will be 20 or 30 times that. Development is about trade-offs and it amazes me that we obsess about the £45 worth of damage and we fail to see the hundreds of pounds of benefit to the developing countries. I share your bewilderment. Ms Cooper: To be really brief, we need to look at this in the context of the fact that, for myself, coming from the Caribbean, this is after having had the removal of a preferential market for bananas, the loss of commodity prices for bananas as well as sugar, and so this is the only economic avenue that many countries have, and so now many people within the region see it really as a slap in the face. I agree that it is a real frustration. Dr Simpson: It is very hard to define where you are going to draw the line. Q94 Mr Singh: DFID has definitions of developing countries. Dr Simpson: Of developing countries, yes, but most of the Caribbean does not fall into that category so what you will do, for example, is that you will actually discriminate against the Caribbean. By applying such a line using the 32 LDCs you will actually create more of a problem in the Caribbean because they will be suffering to a greater extent because they are more dependent on tourism than perhaps one of those less developed countries. Q95 Mr Singh: You could refine the criteria. Dr Simpson: It would be pretty hard to do it in three minutes, but let us say, for example, one way of addressing it is to have a higher rate on short haul so we have a blanket tax, if that is the way the Government decides to go, with a higher rate on short haul, so then what you are doing is saying it is an even playing field apart from the areas that we do know are creating more emissions because of the frequency of travel to those short haul destinations. Q96 Chairman: With the proviso that short haul is quite often essential if you are talking about islands. Dr Simpson: That is right, and trying to encourage the trains to work better and things like that I suppose. Q97 Andrew Stunell: It has been a fascinating discussion with lots of stuff about linkages and leakages. The first is good and the second is bad and quite a lot of the figures that you have been talking about are clearly in dispute. We have had over the last decade a lot of discussion about fair trade products; how do we get fair trade tourism so that those leakages are actually much more positive linkages? Dr Simpson: There was a project which was launched two or three years ago on fair trade tourism by the fair trade organisation and my understanding, but I stand to be corrected, is that the project was not completed. It certainly has not been implemented widely enough if it was completed and I agree it should be done. I know Tourism Concern were involved in that; perhaps you can shed some light on what happened. Ms Cooper: Yes, I can say it is something that Tourism Concern has been working on for about ten years and trying to really decide what are the principles of fair trade tourism. We had a project which we tried to get some funding for last year, which unfortunately did not go through, which would have worked in partnership with many of the fair trade movement key players. The trouble with fair trade is that at the moment it has been applied to products and it is much more of a complex picture in terms of putting a fair trade stamp on a service, so which bit of that global value chain do you look at as being fair trade, where do you put the stamp on it? Is it the product, is it the tour operator that is selling the product, is it both of them? It is a much more complex analysis that needs to be taking place but we do feel that not only is it certainly very much needed but it is something that can be done, so it would need to have a real analysis as to where that links with the commitment of all of the different people within that value chain who can look at it. Certainly the key principles of a fair trade tourism product would be ensuring that the workers within the tourism sector are organised and able to influence decision-making policies, that they have very good linkages within communities that ensure that inputs and services are provided by the local community, that the tour operator who is selling the product also has fair trade principles and markets it in a way that ensures that people understand what we are trying to achieve by fair trade tourism. Certainly now is the time - in the sense that the movement has really grown, particularly in the UK which has the greatest amount of fair trade customers or purchasers - to try and talk about what would be a fair trade tourism product. Dr Simpson: There is a plethora of certification for tourism out there already. That is one of the problems, to be honest: there are so many certificates. We have got to the point now where the United Nations have even got together to provide a certificate for the certifications. Whilst there may be some merit in that, it is a pretty bizarre position to be in. As I have mentioned before, the principles of sustainable development are what need to be applied to tourism. There are examples that can be used, but it is very complex because of the complexity of the distribution chain. Q98 Andrew Stunell: I wish we had longer to explore this. You have defined leakages as bad things and leakages as good things. There has been an interesting contribution from Mr Mitchell about possibly tour operators developing their corporate social responsibility to be more effective. That is what has happened with Fairtrade goods, the voluntary movement has begun to influence the commercial sector. Do you see scope for that happening? Are there ways in which that can be supported by what the Government does, either by taxation or regulation or in some other way? Dr Simpson: Perhaps I could give you a practical example. In the Caribbean there is the Sustainable Tourism Zone of the Caribbean, a project which has been instigated by the Association of Caribbean States, which is an organisation that works at ministerial level across the whole of the Caribbean Basin - so 32 members, which includes the Central American states as well. They have established, with the assistance of my colleagues and I, a set of indicators for sustainable tourism which can be applied to address all of the different complexities. It is not perfect, but it is designed to do exactly what you have just said: to drive the demand for destinations under membership of the Sustainable Tourism Zone of the Caribbean. It works in the same way as Fairtrade, but more investment is required, more members are required, and so on and so forth. Mr Mitchell: I think there is a great opportunity here, because you have the corporate sector, in my view - I think there are different views, but this is my view - tackling this seriously for the first time. The thing about tourist corporates is that they do not know much about development. They know a lot about flying people around and running airfields, but they desperately need an official development of support for what they are doing. They are charging their own customers a levy, they are creating quite a lot of money through organisations like the Travel Foundation, and, to be frank, they need support from development practitioners and some official recognition of what they are doing so that those funds can be used more effectively. I think there is a real opportunity for the private sector, which sees its responsibility and is raising money, and the UK Government, which has in DFID a lot of development expertise and can recognise the efforts that are being made by the private sector. Finally, I do not think leakages are always bad. There is a leakage in Laos, where most of the rice is brought from Thailand. It is poor rice farmers producing that, so it is a loss to the economy of Laos but in terms of poverty I would not distinguish between a poor Laotian farmer and a poor rice farmer in Thailand. In terms of poverty, it is fine. Being able to distribute the benefits of tourist spending over a wider geographical area, so it is not focused just on destination, is a positive thing. Q99 Andrew Stunell: Would you pick out one single thing that DFID could do to help that process forward that you have been describing? Mr Mitchell: At the moment DFID has an interesting position because it invented a lot of the stuff we have been talking about today. In 1999 DFID funded a lot of the work that fed into the UN conference at that time that developed pro poor tourism as an idea. It supported it for a couple of years after that and has now back-pedalled from it, to the point where there is quite a strong position that they will not support tourism. Q100 Chairman: Does it matter that the UK Government is withdrawing from the UN World Tourism Organisation? Mr Mitchell: Indeed. Dr Simpson: It does matter, yes. Mr Mitchell: No one on this panel would say that tourism is going to work everywhere and that all you have to do is encourage tourism and everything will be fine, but to deny a whole sector that is very important in some places I think is misguided. I would drop the complete sanction/prohibition on mentioning the word. Ms Cooper: And also make sure that the link with climate change is emphasised. We need to come back perhaps to one of the reasons why this Committee has been put together on this particular topic: the climate change issue. Climate change is a massive threat to tourism in developing countries from both supply and demand. DFID need to play a very, very strong role in dealing with those issues: tourism, climate change, and development. Chairman: What both of you have just said is very strong evidence for our inquiry. Thank you. Q101 Andrew Stunell: Looking at the ways in which the climate change aspect of this should be developed: "How do we make tourism a less serious carbon footprint problem for the receiving countries?" (for want of a better term) is another branch of the Fairtrade arm. Dr Simpson: Sure. One of the approaches that we are trying to develop for destinations around the world, but in particular in the Caribbean at the moment, is to try to establish carbon neutral destination. That would mean that from the moment Mr and Mrs Bloggs, if I can use that term, leave the door of their house in Rochdale, right though their experience of travelling to St Lucia in the Caribbean, their hotel, the activities conducted there, to their return home, they have a zero impact in terms of carbon emissions. As I have mentioned before, the complexity of the chain and interventions at every aspect of that provision of tourism to those people is vital. There are a number of components to do with carbon offsetting, with energy efficiency in hotels, with mitigation and changing behaviour and choices of activities when they are away, with food miles, for example, where the food that they are eating in the hotel is produced, and so on. It is a complex issue. To try to develop that carbon neutral experience is a priority and, also, will provide a marketing advantage for developing countries and long-haul destinations. If people can travel to a long-haul destination, know that they are having livelihood benefits and socio-economic benefits to the people who are living there, to the economy of the developing country, plus having a zero impact in terms of carbon emissions, then we are starting to get somewhere. Q102 Andrew Stunell: You were very dismissive of the various certification schemes. Dr Simpson: I was not dismissive. I just told you there were a lot of them. Some are better than others. Q103 Andrew Stunell: Is it in-country regulation, international regulation, UK ...? Where do we put the levers on? Dr Simpson: It is at every different level really. Certainly we have to do it at home but we also have to encourage and assist in the destination as well. Coming back to where the tax or levy, those funds go, we have talked a bit about trusts managing those funds and using them for adaptation (for example, dealing with the impact of warming sea surface temperatures on coral reefs, beach erosion and so on), the supply side, but also dealing with mitigation, in terms of energy efficiency in hotels and the flight itself. Again, we come back to the need for more work to be done across the chain at every stage. Q104 Andrew Stunell: Are destination governments up for that, or do they just want the maximum number of dollars? Dr Simpson: My brief answer to that would be that they are definitely beginning to respond and definitely beginning to embrace it. Over the last 12 months I personally have seen an enormous increase in the interest and commitment by developing country governments, and have travelled - and offset my travel - giving presentations on exactly these topics. Q105 Chairman: We are going to have to bring this session to a close. Perhaps I could draw it together. It seems to me that a number of you are saying that, in a sense, the amount of carbon that is emitted, in terms of the space developing countries have, is such that they should not really be constrained. The counter to that is: on the other hand, given there is a need to reassure people that something is being done, then probably it should be done but not in a way that destroys their opportunities but helps them enhance them. Is that a fair summary of what you are saying? I am including Victoria Johnson in that. Is that acceptable? Dr Simpson: Yes, except it is not just a question of making people think that something is being done; it is actually doing something. Q106 Chairman: I appreciate that. Victoria, are you happy with that? Ms Johnson: I am happy to agree with that, although there are obviously lots of things I would disagree with. Chairman: I appreciate that. We obviously know where you are coming from. We could have gone on longer. It is very interesting. There is a lot more in this than we perhaps appreciated. Mr Mitchell and all of you are making the point that DFID have gone through a really quite strange convolution on the issue. You are clearly stating that they have got it wrong at the moment on this dimension. The evidence you have given us has been strong and helpful. Thank you very much indeed. Memorandum submitted by Food Ethics Council Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, City University London, Dr Tom MacMillan, Executive Director, and Mr Paul Steedman, Research Fellow, Food Ethics Council, gave evidence. Q107 Chairman: Thank you for coming in and for being patient. As you have seen, we had rather a lot of issues to cover in the last session. Obviously we have slight time constraints. I do not want to cut you off. If we can keep our questions short and you can keep your answers brief but to the point, that would be helpful. You are obviously aware that we are looking at the interaction between aviation and food miles - or fresh produce, because clearly we are covering flowers and things like that, which appear to have become quite significant employers in certain parts of the world but could be under threat if people believe they are not the kinds of products they should buy. Of course, in the simple context, that is the case. Before we start, perhaps for the record you could introduce yourselves. Dr MacMillan: I am Tom MacMillan from the Food Ethics Council. The Food Ethics Council is a charity that provides independent advice on ethical issues in food and farming. We produced a short report last year on air freight which was part of a larger piece of work on food distribution and food miles in a more encompassing way. Mr Steedman: I am Paul Steedman, a research fellow, also from the Food Ethics Council. Professor Lang: I am Tim Lang. You have put me down as "Timothy" - which I think only my grandmother, dead for about 70 years, called me, so I do not know where that comes from! I am happy to answer to most names, but usually Tim Lang. I am Professor of Food Policy at City University where I run the Centre for Food Policy. I am also a Commissioner on the Sustainable Development Commission. Chairman: Thank you. Q108 Andrew Stunell: Given the carbon emissions generated by aviation, should the United Kingdom Government be discouraging the importation of air-freighted food? Dr MacMillan: I think there is a long-term and a short-term answer to that. In the short term, no, it should not. The parallels with the tourism situation are very clear, and either banning or restricting air freight by putting in place very expensive certification systems about how products are produced and so forth, so that it narrows it down very heavily and attaches a heavy cost to it, risks pulling the rug out from communities that depend on that industry. In the long term, I expect in due course we will get on to questions about food security and the security of supply from a UK point of view, and you can turn that question of security of supply for us on its head and think about security of demand for countries and communities that are investing heavily, sometimes with UK Government support, in export oriented horticulture. I guess the answer is not that they should not be making those investments and we should not be supporting them in that but that it is incumbent on government to be at least as circumspect as supermarkets are here about security of supply, about security of demand for countries that are putting a lot of eggs in the basket of export horticulture. The answer is: no, we should not be discouraging air freight in the short term, but we should be cautious about risks associated with it over the longer term. Mr Steedman: If we are interested in the climate change aspect of this, why focus on air-freighted food per se? The issue when it comes to climate change in this narrow sense is aviation: it does not matter whether it is food or anything else that is flying. If we are interested in climate change, what matters is total carbon emissions and it is about achieving that 80 per cent cut or whatever figure we arrive at. In that context, the question is what is happening with aviation. I guess we can be relatively relaxed about what proportion of our total emissions aviation, and within that air-freighted food, forms if we are seeing those overall cuts that we need. At the moment in very few sectors are we seeing the kinds of cuts that we need. If we look on that basis at what should happen with aviation overall, then I think we probably need to be seeing that cutting and reducing too, but if we see deeper cuts elsewhere then it is not necessarily a problem. Professor Lang: I would like to turn your question around the other way. The issue is not should we discourage food imports but should we be growing more. That is the more interesting and more politically difficult question. My answer to that is: yes, we should be growing more, because if you look at which food imports there are, you cannot grow pineapples or papayas or mangoes in this country but you can grow apples and pears, and yet we are growing almost none and we are importing a lot. But Paul is quite right: the critical issue is the total CO2 or greenhouse gas equivalent emissions. The second answer to your question is it depends what you want to do with your land. At the moment we are treating land as a limitless commodity. We are saying, "Ours is expensive here, so we will go and site food production where it is cheap" - and usually it is where labour is cheap. Whether that is sensible mid-21st century land use I very much doubt. You asked: "Should the UK discourage food imports?" I do not think you said "air-freighted". Did you mean that? Q109 Andrew Stunell: Yes. Professor Lang: Forgive me, I did not hear that. I think in that case I will go along with Tom's answer. I think in the short term we have got it. In the long term, we need to discourage air-freighting generally. It is a pretty stupid use of fuels, non renewable fuels; it adds unnecessary CO2 emissions; it is the fastest growing form of freight. It is bonkers. Is it important at the moment in the overall scheme of greenhouse gas emissions? No, but it is rising. Dr MacMillan: Perhaps I might add one more strand to that. Professor Lang: You have got us going now! Dr MacMillan: It is the fastest growing form of freight over the medium run, but in November and December and more recently we have seen it drop off very, very steeply. Professor Lang: Because of the recession. Dr MacMillan: Yes, which is partly affecting the kinds of things people are buying but also affecting the economics of freighting the stuff by air. Professor Lang: Forgive me interrupting. I disagree with that. I think it is mainly because the pound has plummeted. It costs a huge amount of pounds to buy things that are sold in euros and dollars. On top of that, is the point that Tom is making. Dr MacMillan: The decline in air-freight by 22.6 per cent in December was international rather than UK specific, so it applies across the board. Professor Lang: Yes. Dr MacMillan: The debate around organic air-freight labels and the close attention with which organic producers in Sub-Saharan Africa were watching that debate illustrates some of the vulnerabilities that are attached to this model of development. That was a little add-on to it, but, like Tim, another way of turning the question around is to say that the whole debate and controversy around air-freighting food put the cart before the horse really, if we are interested in climate change and food. Flying food accounts for something like 0.3 per cent of overall UK emissions, 0.2 per cent is down to flying fruit and veg around, and only a slice of that comes from flying in fruit and veg from developing countries, so we are talking about a small overall proportion. That is not an excuse for not doing anything about it, but when you compare it to, say, meat and dairy, which accounts for eight per cent of overall UK emissions, it puts into perspective claims by food companies, by retailers and by government to be doing something about climate change and emissions relating to food when you say "Okay, if people are making a song and dance about dealing with the aviation side, surely you have to make a song and dance 20 times as big or however many it is" - it is more than that - "about meat and dairy" and have that kind of more difficult conversation with your customers and with your constituents. Professor Lang: I agree with that. Q110 Andrew Stunell: Professor, what exactly are food miles? Do you think we are pricing them in? Professor Lang: Are we pricing them in? No, because "food miles" means all things to all people. I invented the term really to try to inject what I then thought, and still think, was a sorely needed cultural dimension into the debate about trade. Trade discourse and trade policy was entirely, and still largely is, dominated by a neoliberal perspective that assumes protection is bad, free trade is good. I come from the public health department - that is where I am based - where the word "protect" means good things. You protect public health, you protect the environment. My motivation about food miles was to try to get a debate going about where food comes from. Most people think food comes from Tesco. It does not actually. That is just where they buy it. The idea behind food miles was to think about the environmental implications of where food comes from, the energy implications of where food comes from, but, above all, it was an attempt to try to inject a very simple notion into everyday understanding. In that sense, it has been very successful, but, as I would be the first to say, it was not intended to be an articulated version of measuring greenhouse gas emissions. It is precisely its plasticity that was its strength and still is: it means all things to all people. Mr Steedman: To follow up on that, one of the problems recently is that the way particularly industry groups within the food sector and, indeed, government departments have chosen to use and interpret food miles has been an overly literal one. Professor Lang: Yes, I agree. Mr Steedman: It becomes what we have termed carbon reductionism. It basically says it is just a direct measure of carbon emissions and carbon emissions are the only thing that really matter anyway, when in fact for most people thinking about food miles - and indeed when Tim coined the term - the sense is that it encompasses a whole range of things around people's concerns about diverse high streets - the cloned towns issue - around animal welfare and animal transportation, around a sense of where food comes from, both in terms of the people who produce it but also the land and the environmental dimension. It has been tremendously damaging that there has been this reduction of everything to grams of carbon. I think we need to keep that very strongly in mind. Professor Lang: I think that is absolutely right. The public is ahead of the analysts. I have just had a presentation, as a member of the Council of Food Policy Advisers of the Government, from the IGD (Institute of Grocery Distribution) - and it has now been referred to in the press so I can say this - in which it is quite clear that the British public has an extremely strong commitment to "the local" in a fairly indistinct way. It sees the point that there is no point having empty fields here when you could grow things here. There is a very important policy and, indeed, political (with a small 'p') battle going on for where food comes from, how it is grown, the meaning of it. Tom rightly raised the issue of food security. I think the issue of food miles has entered that very general discourse, not just the issue about greenhouse gas emissions. Q111 Richard Burden: Given that - and we are not just obsessed by terminology - do you think it is losing some of its usefulness now? Professor Lang: Food miles? Q112 Richard Burden: Yes. Professor Lang: No, its usefulness has got bigger and bigger by the year, precisely because it is multidimensional. Q113 Richard Burden: Do you think people understand it as being that? Professor Lang: It does not matter. Q114 Richard Burden: Surely it does matter, because if it is being used and people think of it as being about emissions - emissions equals distance - then that confuses things rather, does it not? Professor Lang: I do not think it confuses policymaking at all and nor does it seem to confuse the public. If you look at the analysis of what the public is thinking, there are very clear distinctions between, say, commitments to climate change reduction and commitment to localism. They are making very sophisticated distinctions - very sophisticated ones. Mr Steedman: I think that is quite right, but I think it is also true that where people are using it in that way that is a problem. The answer is not to say, "Let's scrap food miles." The answer is to say, "Let's be more robust about what it means." Professor Lang: I think that is happening. That is why I do not worry about it: it is happening. There is a very tight debate going on in the Carbon Trust, PAS 2050, trying to measure greenhouse gas emissions in the lifecycle of a food. We are developing the methodology of how to do that. Equally, I think we have very clear notions about the nutritional advantages and disadvantages of food. You could say "Oh, well, 'healthy food' is a useless term." No, it is not. It covers a whole very complicated discourse of everyday understanding about the fact that you eat food and you get nutrients from it. It is no more than that. I agree, and I think we are all agreeing, that the term is not worth wasting too much time over, but it has become a shorthand for an entire discourse about food that was missing. It was missing, but it is not now, and it was long overdue to go back into it. Q115 Richard Burden: I think it did have a contribution, but I just think that, alongside the debate that you say it has opened up, there is also now someone in a supermarket, not an activist, who when they see two punnets of strawberries there in the winter, one of which is produced in Africa and comes from Africa and the other which comes from the UK, might say, "Winter. Food miles. The UK is better" when it may not be Professor Lang: It is not "may" it is definite. Unless it has been flown around the world the wrong way and then got to us, it undoubtedly would be the grown-out-of-doors strawberry that one should eat, if you want to eat it. It will be tasteless, but you could eat it with lower carbon. Q116 Richard Burden: The Soil Association's position has changed with their decision to allow air-freighted produce to carry the Soil Association's label. Do you think that decision was the correct one? Dr MacMillan: We have said we think it is. It comes back to the point I started with: if you are faced with the "What do we do now?" question, then by stopping air freight or, as they were planning to do, making it more difficult to air freight and putting on costs that might end up squeezing out the suppliers who were most vulnerable and most on the margins of the market anyway, you are not really achieving very much and you are causing quite a lot of harm. However, if we can use the Soil Association position, if you like, as a window on to the bigger situation and the same kinds of issues facing the supermarkets as well, it is not enough just to say, "Okay, we have decided we are not going to do anything about air freight, now let's leave it at that." In effect, less so for the Soil Association than for retailers who have a much larger turnover, the challenge is then to say, "Okay, now we have said we want to do something about environmental issues and we want to respond to public concern about climate change, here is our strategy, that is based on really robust lifecycle analysis and so forth, to tackling the biggest hot spots, the biggest sources of emissions across the board, in terms of what we sell and what we do and where it comes from and the kinds of things that through all sorts of ways we encourage or discourage our customers to eat." Likewise, on the development side, it is not enough to say, "Okay, problem solved, we are not going to ban air freight." Having flagged it up as something that is an issue people care about and an issue that is important to be acting on, again it is no longer good enough to say, "Trust us, anything we bring in from a developing country is good for development" or "We have in place a charitable wing that sends money to communities in this part of Africa" or wherever it is. If you like, the anti has been upped, and the onus is now on companies and organisations within the food sector to show, through things like the analysis of value chains (who is getting the money along their supply chains), through stronger commitments on protecting neighbour rights and improving working conditions amongst their suppliers, they are doing all these things without passing costs down the supply chain, whether they are the costs associated with accrediting for environmental or for social claims that have been made. If you like, the air freight debate has given a lot of the groups who have been involved in that debate a sharper focus on what it is they are looking for, and how you might go about demonstrating that you are providing that if you are a company or if you are an organisation like the Soil Association. Professor Lang: I am a great fan of the work these two have done on that issue, but I will say in the Soil Association's defence that the fact that they, essentially an organic farming lobby and certification body with membership and social values, stepped into that terrain was a sign that there was a government vacuum. I think you would agree with that. Dr MacMillan: Yes. Professor Lang: My colleagues here would agree with that. They got a lot of opprobrium for doing I think a very honourable task, which was to raise the discussion about something that needed to be raised. It was fantastic. I think they were very honourable about that. I think what it points to is that the vacuum is not just of government giving a co‑ordinated lead but of what I have called omni-standards. We now have a whole series of different criteria by which to judge what is meant "sustainable food". I spend my life trying to work out what is a sustainable diet. I do not know what it is - no one knows - but I think we have the beginnings of understanding about some of the criteria by which we might judge one. It is not just about the health of the soil or air freight; it is more complex than that. This is exactly the same discussion as your previous panel were making about tourism: that it is very complex. The truth is that you have bilateral deals and twinning of single issue going on about how to judge food, because there is no leadership at the European level or at the national level to explain what a sustainable diet is. What does Mr Tesco do? What does the organic farmer do? What does a consumer do? Do they eat a product because it is good for their health or good for fair trade, or good for birds, or good for climate change? Talking about coffee, you can go along the supermarket range of coffee and you have to decide which box you want to tick when you buy. This is absurd - completely and utterly absurd. It adds to the confusion. That is a failure of governance by government: not joining up DFID with the Department of Health, with Defra, with the Food Standards Agency. We have to address the issue of omni-standards or this issue that you are asking us about will just be replaced by other issues. The challenge, as the previous panel were saying absolutely correctly, is: what is a food system that will be meeting the objectives of sustainable development? What we have is rhetoric about that but not much delivery. We have a few bilateral deals, a little bit of labelling here and there. When an organisation like the Soil Association raised it, odium was poured upon its head for raising it. It was right to raise it. It was right it raise it. Q117 John Bercow: Professor Lang, you assert with alacrity that you know where public opinion stands on the issue of aviation and food miles, and yet, in making that assertion --- Professor Lang: I am sorry, I am not sure I said that. I am sorry, but carry on. Q118 John Bercow: I think the record will show - if you will allow me to develop the point to which you can then respond - that you said public opinion was strong on the matter; though you also said that, whilst being strong, it was relatively indistinct. There appeared to be a commitment to what might be considered to be environmentally friendly food but that it was relatively indistinct. The point after which I am chasing, if you like, is whether either from quantitative or qualitative research you have a sense of how people's commitment on this subject stacks up against or withholds pressure from the potential influence of price. In other words, people have a strong view and they have basic commitment as intelligence on this subject and awareness are increased, but, on the other hand, they have issues of the pocket to consider. Then, related to that - if I may pose the question - do you have any sense that public opinion on this matter varies markedly from one socio-economic group to the other? The great problem is that one can have a commitment on these matters but how strong is it or how easily does it fray at the edges in a credit crunch? Professor Lang: I am nodding - and the record never shows nods, so I thought I should say that. The problem you are raising is an incredibly difficult one, which is how do markets reflect values. The danger that we have at the moment in public policy but less in commercial policy - and I will come back to that briefly, if I might - is that we have a set of values about environment, about health, about social, soft issues like fair trade - important to me but seen as soft - and then we have price, convenience, safety, which are hard issues. There are numerous industry analyses/market research analyses which make that distinction. In truth, what happens when people go and buy food is that they make very fast decisions. Most of the research shows that people decide at the point of sale in about a quarter to a half of one second. Very quick. There is basically an argument going on about how to frame that point of sale to deliver values alongside and inside price. Again the previous panel was referring to the cost internalisation argument - essentially, as you know: does taxing air freight add to the cost and carry the full environmental burden of what otherwise is externalised and not costed? The question I am going to throw back to you - I do not have an answer to your question, but it is absolutely an appropriate question - is: How do you translate environmental and social and social justice values into price? At the moment it is not happening. The Fairtrade labels try to do that and do it with considerable success, but even the proponents of fair trade would say they are not doing it enough and it is not linked enough to environment. How do you cost biodiversity? Your second point is a difficult one as well, which is the class dimension/income dimension. The short answer is that we know, from studies over 150 years, that the poorer you are, the more money proportionately you are spending on food, even though the absolute amount of money that you are spending on food is less. In which case, the poor have to be incredibly thrifty buyers. They are much more price conscious than are people with no money, one would think. But studies done by the Co‑operative Group, for example - which are in the public arena so I can refer to them, but I have seen others by big retailers which are not in the public arena - show that the values are equally spread across all socio-economic groups; it is just that there is the potential for more affluent people to do something about it, to translate it into behaviour. Their aspirations are equally high across all socio-economic groups. That would be my summary. I do not know what my colleagues think about this. Mr Steedman: I would be 100 per cent behind that. Absolutely. I guess there is a slight trickiness, as Tim says, when thinking about how people are when they are in the supermarket. They are in shopper mode at that point, so price and convenience and those sorts of issues do come to the top of people's minds because they are acting as shoppers, but those people are still citizens and still have values when they are not in shopper mode. Indeed, they have expectations that those values will be taken care of by other people. People expect, for example, when they go and buy produce in supermarkets that health and safety and due diligence have been taken care of. They do not need to worry about that. They do not need to trade off whether this one has been produced in conditions that have health and safety built in versus the cost and the price, they just expect that that should be taken care of. With a lot of these values, people have expectations similarly that those kinds of things should be built in. They can worry about whether it is on a special offer and know that their concerns as citizens, those values, are taken care of and embedded already. Dr MacMillan: Part of the problem is that, as a shopper, with some of these trade-offs you cannot make the right decisions, so you are in a situation where whichever way you turn you lose. The air freight labelling episode, in which a couple of retailers labelled air-freighted produce, illustrates that quite well, in that if you are a shopper you have two choices: either you buy the green beans with the air-freight label on them or you do not buy them. If you are a retailer you have the options to sell or not to sell but you also have an additional third option which allows you to square that circle over the longer term, which, as we were saying earlier, is to put in place a policy on air freights that looks to the long term and is within an environmental strategy that tackles your biggest sources of emissions. As a shopper faced with that sort of binary choice, you do not have that third option. Alongside your co-shoppers you have an influence on where things head, but you do not have a strategic influence in the same way that a retailer does. Q119 John Bercow: How feasible would it be to develop a "Good for Development" label, as suggested by the ODI? What elements would it encompass? Dr MacMillan: On that specific proposal, part of the merit of it is that it is very accessible: a lot of people would be able to use that label. I guess the nearest thing in the UK might be something like the red tractor: it is on a lot of different products and it does not cost that much necessarily to put it on. The difficulty with some of that is that it frames the whole debate as a battle of labels, which takes us back into precisely the problem we are talking about here, which is that as a shopper you cannot trade a lot of these things off. If the logic is simply that a "Good for Development" label would raise the profile of the contribution of trade to development, then it is not entirely clear that attaching it to products as opposed to just campaigning would achieve better results and it may run into all sorts of problems about how you make trade-offs. If specific claims are being attached to those products about the quality of the contribution to development - there is a suggestion in the ODI of having gold, silver and bronze standards, where suppliers might have to demonstrate they are ticking various boxes in order to get the next level up of label - you risk running back in to precisely the problem that the costs of doing that, however subtly, do get pushed back down the chain on to producers, which is the whole premise that ---- Q120 John Bercow: I can tell that you are apprehensive about whether such an approach would be wise, for the reasons you have started to outline and on which Professor Lang may wish to elaborate, but I wonder if I can couple with the question that I have just asked the related question of whether, in addition to being practicable, it would be effective in terms of increasing the demand for developing country exports. Dr MacMillan: The short answer is I do not know. There are examples of labels working very, very effectively: Fairtrade and Organic labels, in terms of changing how people buy, are very, very effective. There are examples of labels doing very little indeed: the air freight labels being the closest to this conversation, where, as you may already have heard from others, the retailers who used them found they had a petty negligible effect on sales and their consumer research found people interpreting them in all sorts of different ways, sometimes quite differently from how you might expect; for example, that they might be fresher, or that they were often seen as a positive thing simply because they were a label and so they must be good. It is very hard to tell what effect it would have. Professor Lang: I have to declare an interest: I am a sceptic about labels. Again the previous panel referred to views that I share. There is almost an overload of them. But by that scepticism I do not mean to say that arguing for the tightening and making overt of the standard that a label represents is not a good thing. It is. I have considered the ODI's suggestion carefully and I am not yet clear why such a label would be an advance over the various fair trade and social labels that are already competing for information. Maybe they are right, but with great respect to that initiative, I personally would not want it to happen unless we had an omni-standard. We have to have a framework which goes across social, health, environmental, quality standards. We do not just need to have more and more niche standards competing for that split second to which I was referring earlier or half second or nanosecond when a person chooses. It becomes an invidious situation. We want to have a ratcheting up of improvement across a whole variety. Q121 John Bercow: I am not sure I am going to be able to persuade you to say this, Professor Lang ---- Professor Lang: Have a go. Q122 John Bercow: --and you might say you do not believe it anyway. I just have a hunch, just a smidgeon of an idea in my mind, that your unspoken fear is that with this plethora of competing labels there is a danger that you lose simplicity and clarity, and that the consumer ends up ---- Professor Lang: Confused. Q123 John Bercow: -- dazzled, flummoxed, misled, and needs to be educated by a single standard, a single label. Professor Lang: No. Good try, but I am going to batter back. The reason I was arguing what I was arguing is not because I want to have overload. We already know the great lesson and great advantage of labels is that they get producers to change specifications and to tighten them up and to clarify down their supply chains. You get traceability from the need to have a label. That, most people in food supply chains will say, has been a great advantage. You get some coherence and consistency. The reason I was saying what I was saying about a label is because what you the Committee are discussing and asking our views on is not something that one can just put on to a label; it is about in which direction of travel you want the food system to go. How do you want people to choose what they choose? Where does responsibility for improving standards go? That is the core policy challenge. In that context, you asked us two questions: Is it a good idea and is it practicable? I am sure it would be practicable. I am sure it would. My point was: Why do it when there are already Fairtrade labels? What would it add to that? The Fairtrade label has a high recognition - a lot of companies' studies show that and, indeed, the Fairtrade Foundation's own studies and FLO (Fair Labelling Organisation International) show that - why add another? Why not say, "Improve the fair trade standard. Keep the label and improve the existing one"? Why add another? Q124 Chairman: That is what we are groping for. You said at the beginning that air-freighted produce existed. Half of the case was that they should not really be there, but in the meantime we do not really want to make all these poor people even poorer so we have to handle it. Some of us are saying, "Maybe they should be there if they are properly defined and if they are properly assessed." Are we looking for a fair trade level that goes into that and says, "We have looked at the carbon footprint and we think that Kenyan beans are a good buy. They are a fair trade product"? The worry we have, as you know, is in the very simple situation where people are saying, "They're flown in. Bad. Don't buy them" and all these people are being thrown out of work. Professor Lang: Forgive me going back to it: that is why my colleagues and I at the Health Centre are arguing omni-standards. It should not be, taking your Kenyan green beans example, "Kenyan green beans, yes or no"; it depends when, it depends what their carbon load is, and it depends whether you can have something even lower in season grown, and trucked less distance, locally. It is that. It is a much more complicated appreciation of what the consumer choice really ought to be if we are to have a sustainable diet. That is a rule that applies whether you are a consumer in Rochdale - to go back to the previous panel's example, and I used to live in Rochdale - or whether you are in Botswana. The same rule/principle of sustainable diet ought to apply but the manifestation of it will be different in different places. That is an entirely different way of looking at the issues. It is not: "For long distance trade or only for short." It is not: "For green beans or not". It is that you have to judge them across a multiple set of criteria, and we now know what those criteria are beginning to look like. Q125 Chairman: Is it reasonable to assume from your kind of input that Tesco or Waitrose or what-have-you with some kind of fair trade partnership can simply be trusted to say, "We will establish that and you will have Kenyan green beans" - if I can keep that product in the frame - "when they are appropriate" and therefore the customer will know, frankly, if Kenyan green beans are in the shop it is okay to buy them. Professor Lang: Now we are getting to it. This is the crux issue. Let me be very harsh: in the British food retail offer, if you go to Marks and Spencer, its Plan A commitment implies that; if you go to the Co‑operative group it implies that - exactly what you have said. In other words, they are doing choice editing. They have said, "We are making a commitment to try to do the right thing across a number of different principles." They have made company decisions to do that. They are different actually, so that adds to the consumer's confusion. But if you go to Tesco, you have to wander to different places in the supermarket shelf, and you can go for biodiversity here, you can go for Fairtrade there, you can go for healthy over there, and you can go for value/low price there. They are still operating the smorgasbord approach - you know, it is up to you. The fundamental choice that the British food system has to make is between whether it is going to try to tick lots of boxes to have a sustainable food system by 2050, in which case you have to start going, if not the Marks and Sparks route or the Co-op route, an omni-standards route. The sensible thing is to have one level playing field for all the food system, and because Britain is part of the European Union, probably in the next ten/20 years we have to make that European-wide - because, even if we have reduced our imports from the European Union, we are within the same policy framework. The way forward is not this product or that product but let us get omni-standards everywhere, and whether you go and shop in Tesco here or in France, it should not make any difference. The products may be different because the carbon mode or whatever criteria may be different. It is a different model. Q126 Chairman: If you are an agricultural minister in East Africa or a small farmer growing products which you now have a market for in the EU, how are you supposed to operate your values when we are deciding what we think? Professor Lang: The short answer is that you may grow for the British when it is appropriate but you grow for your region all the year round. At the moment what Britain is doing is distorting Kenyan agriculture. It is a neo-imperialism, if I may be very stark. We have got rid of the Empire and we are doing it through the supermarket chain Q127 Chairman: We are going to see some of these people. Are you suggesting that they are not making a decision based on a product that they have a customer for? Professor Lang: Of course they do. Q128 Chairman: There is added value and they are employed. Professor Lang: They are doing it and they have a very good market - and good luck to them. I am not criticising them at all. To go back to my framework - which I think Paul and Tony would agree with, but I am articulating my version of it - what a sustainable food system looks like is what we are all trying to struggle to clarify. We have the beginnings of a good idea of what that may mean. The problem is that countries like Kenya, because they are poorer and they are developing and they are in a dependency role for exports, are in a very weak position. My response - and I think Tom put it much better earlier - is: in the short term, carry on supporting that. It is absolutely essential. Suddenly to cut the umbilical chord from Kenyan agriculture would be disgraceful and irresponsible - it would be counterproductive too, but let us forget that. But whether in the medium and long term Kenya's agriculture should feed Britain for midwinter greens, I am not so sure. Q129 Chairman: I understand that. In different debates we have discussed the European Union and indeed the United States policy on free trade. I think Mr Bercow has articulated it: "If free trade is such a good idea, why don't the Europeans and the Americans practice it?" Professor Lang: Absolutely. Q130 Chairman: If you take that view, let us say they decided to grow tomatoes, they would probably find that their local supply was undercut by Italian tomatoes dumped by the EU in Nairobi, whereas they can sell flowers shipped by freight profitably in the UK. Professor Lang: That is the reality. Q131 Chairman: That is the point: people make decisions in the markets they are in rather than the theories. Obviously as a Committee we are trying to address that as a practical problem. In that context, is there a role for government in this? So far you have talked about the role of voluntary organisations and retailers. Is it fair in fact that the food industry is subjected to this huge degree of comment and speculation compared with lots of other products that probably are flown around the world and nobody even bothers to ask? Professor Lang: That is a very good question. I think that is largely because there is a very articulate and very fruitful civil society movement in Britain. Tom and Paul are an example of it. The Food Ethics Council is an NGO. We have a very well respected NGO sector which has captured a lot of public imagination and thinking. That is why the focus is very heavily on food but not on textiles in the same way. Frankly, there ought to be more on textiles, but I do not happen to work on textiles so I talk about food. Is there a role for government? Yes. I think so. I look forward to my colleagues' reply. Not to have a clearer position from government would merely add to the current policy mess, or policy cacophony, if you want to put it that way. I think DFID ought to engage with other institutions of government and is beginning to do so much more than it used to do around public health. It has to address more coherently environmental considerations of trade than it has done, but it is beginning to do so. I would like this Committee to encourage more coming together by the great organs and institutions of state that shape and relate to the food system: the Department of Health; Defra; the Food Standards Agency; the Environment Agency, which has an enormous role; the Treasury obviously; DCMS - you know, you name it. The good news is that after the Food Matters report, the Cabinet Office strategy in the report that came out last July, the Government has now set up a Domestic Affairs (Food) Sub-Committee. Let us hope that that starts trying to get some coherence, but all I can say, as an outside academic rather than speaking as an occasional government adviser, is that there is a long way to go. It has to move very fast indeed or else the commitment to sustainable development will be increasingly seen as an irrelevancy and marginalised by recession and marginalised by the commitment to try to sort out responses to the recession. To summarise: yes, there is a very big role for government. For much too long it has been hiding behind the power of the supermarkets, behind the power and the incredible sophistication of the food companies. It is not acceptable. Not even Tesco, the third, shortly to be the second, biggest food retailer in the world can resolve climate change. Not even Tesco can sort out a methodology for embedded water in food. There has to be some coherence and pulling together. That, it seems to me, is what we pay our taxes to government of do. Dr MacMillan: On "Why food?", first of all. It is important to remember that it is a big chunk of our lives and our impacts on the environment and on other people's lives in other parts of the world. Just in climate change terms it accounts for about one-fifth of overall UK emissions. That is not all of our UK emissions by any means, of course, and there are other sectors that are also large, but it is one of the biggest sectors that has an impact on climate change and so it is not unreasonable for it to get a fair amount of attention. The other point is that it is something that people feel strongly about, partly because you eat it, and you eat with other people as well. There are all sorts of social and cultural reasons why it is perhaps a more important part in many people's lives than other things on which they might spend the equivalent or more money. The momentum that food issues pick up in the public domain in part reflects that importance that people attach to it in general. On the role for government, I have just a few more things to add to the mix. One area that came up in the earlier session as well is to have greater clarity on allocation. You will all be familiar with the debates about consumption or production-based accounting of the UK's contribution to climate change. Often that debate is talked about in relation to, say, China producing industrial goods and consumer goods for the UK market, and: "Is that China's business or our business?" You get a slightly different angle on it when you are talking about horticulture and Sub-Saharan Africa. Almost, the two debates do not really meet. The high ground seems to belong in this room to the argument that ---- Q132 Chairman: On that point: we are buying toys made in China from electricity generated from coal-fired power stations and that is all right; we are flying in flowers and beans from East Africa, grow in the sun naturally, and that is all wrong. Dr MacMillan: Yes. In the conversation we were hearing earlier, the focus was on those countries' ecological space: it is theirs to use. In the debate about toys, however, the point is often to highlight the UK's responsibility for those emissions at a distance. Maybe the answer is to have different rules and different principles about allocation in relation to different countries, but you at least need a clear framework for how to do that which sort of puts that argument to bed, basically. On the specific area - and I am afraid I cannot pull out any figures, because I do not know them - my understanding is that through development projects the UK does contribute to development of airport infrastructure for export and horticultural projects that are basically promoting this kind of air-freighted fruit and veg as a long-term strategy for development. There again the answer is not to say that that is a really bad idea, stop doing it, but I would certainly want to be more reassured that those investments are, for want of a better way of putting it, future-proofed. Have they thought very carefully about what the risks are, the regulatory risks, the things that other parts of the UK Government might do, that Europe might do, that might come out of international climate change ---- Q133 Chairman: We have not been very good at predicting the future, have we? Dr MacMillan: Sure, but there is no harm in trying in relation to this particular issue. Likewise, on trade policy the UK is on higher ground than some of the countries here. To take an example of one influential document within Defra and the Treasury and so on in which DFID did not have a say, it was on the UK position on the Common Agricultural Policy. There the debate was not about liberalising other countries' agriculture but about liberalising Europe, which is, if you like, an easier but still not a very simple debate. There is one section where the Government and Treasury listed all the criteria that would need to be fulfilled for even European and US liberalisation to bring real benefits not just to middle income countries and some lower income countries, but to the very poorest, least developed countries. If you looked down that list, which is, in effect, criteria for the overall strategy, which is basically opening up markets to work in favour of the poorest people in the world, then you found that none of those criteria were in place and there was very little in place to make sure that we were even heading in the right direction on them. Q134 John Bercow: You are dealing in that context, incredibly frustratingly, with a number of different obstacles, one of which is that there is an unfailing tendency on the part both of the United States and of the European Union to take an attitude, which is either explicit or implicit: "We might if you will first." It is fundamentally a rather juvenile approach but it is in the nature of things: "We might consider doing it, but you've got to move first, and if you don't, we won't" et cetera, but there we are, that is one factor. The other factor, I suppose, from the vantage point of Britain's position within the European Union, is effectively - and I am not making this as some sort of Eurosceptic observation but simply as a statement of the reality - that we do not have an independent commercial policy. We are part of the Union and we have to sign up to a common position. We might argue - and I think we would under successive governments - that we are broadly speaking more open to the idea of change and doing the responsible thing, but that other members of the Union have fairly powerful domestic lobbies, more powerful even than the British agricultural sector and much less sympathetic. One has an ongoing debate, but it seems to me that making progress on this subject is rather analogous to the progress of the man who is en route to Kafka's Castle and discovers, every time he takes a step forward, that instead of being a step nearer to it, he is in fact a step further away. That is perhaps a bit pessimistic but that is very often the nub of it, is it not? Professor Lang: I think there is real potential for arguing a sustainable food system direction for Europe than the British Government is currently giving credibility to. I think there is a groundswell of opinion in the food industries of Europe, in the public of Europe, with considerable variations - not all countries are as intensely interested in sustainability as, say, Britain is - that there is an opportunity to get away from the debate about "Is the CAP good or bad or too fiscally regressive or not?" into saying, "Well, wherever we are in Europe, what do we want Europe's food system to be?" I think the discussion we were having earlier is a very important indicator for what all of Europe's food system has to do. Go and talk to big food companies and they intend to be around in 35, 40, 50 years. Not many governments think that far ahead but food companies do. There is much more room for manoeuvre than I think we have given credit. Q135 Chairman: I am going to have to stop you, because we are going to run out of a quorum if nothing else. Fascinating stuff. I appreciate your coming in. Obviously you have raised as many questions as you have answered, which is fair enough. Professor Lang: We are policy people: that is our job. You are the politicians. Q136 Chairman: Also we still have a practical issue to address, which is: what is the best advice to African governments and farmers or developing countries and farmers? Professor Lang: I think you are hearing from us that we would like African governments to join with our government and pressure from within it to try to clarify what a sustainable food system is. That is what we need. Q137 Chairman: That is helpful. That is exactly the evidence you have given us. Clearly when we visit Kenya and Tanzania it will be an opportunity for us to explore those things in a bit more depth. You have certainly helped us in that. Professor Lang: These debates are going on there between small-scale sustainable farming and big-scale sustainable farming and big, export-led intensive agriculture. Chairman: I am sure we will find that. Thank you both for your written evidence and also for your oral evidence. If there are other issues as we go along, we would appreciate it if you would give anything in to us. Thank you very much indeed. |