Agriculture Bill — House of Lords, 2020-07-21
Topic: Agriculture
Natalie Bennett (Green Party, Left): My Lords, I begin by referring to Amendment 168, which appears under my name on the Marshalled List, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support for it. I have already referred to the many environmental and health advantages of plant-based foods, but this amendment refers specifically to the issue of food security I refer noble Lords to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2019 report, The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture. It points out that nine species are responsible for two-thirds of the world’s crops, and 40 types of livestock produce nearly all the meat, milk and eggs. We suffer from a similar lack of diversity in the UK. A handful of crops dominate our land, as you see when you travel around the country. Not having crop diversity also means that you do not have the variety of insects and microbes—the suite of ecosystems that would accompany different crops. There is also the huge risk of one disease or bad season for a particular crop having a huge impact. But moving more into plant-based foods—perennial crops, tree crops, nuts and fruits—creates a more diverse and secure system, in terms of the first sort of food security identified by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. Moving towards plant-based foods gives you a more diverse and secure food supply I refer also to Amendment 169, which appears under the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and which I was pleased to sign. It refers to the issue of food waste, which many noble Lords have already referred to, and demands a report from the Government on food waste and surplus. It would be a crucial step forward that I hope the Government will be prepared to accept. We have a situation where many sides of the House and many parts of the country agree that food waste is a problem, but action has chiefly come from independent charities and community groups. FareShare, for example, rescues huge quantities—but still a tiny percentage—of the food from supermarkets that is largely going to waste, and reaches 11,000 charities and community groups around the country That brings me to the crucial way in which waste interrelates with food security in the second sense referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, which is people being able to afford the food. A shocking figure from FareShare is that half of the people accessing its food have recently gone a day without food before being able to access that food that has been rescued. I will also mention the Real Junk Food Project, which started just up the road from me in Leeds and has spread to 120 projects in seven countries. We cannot keep relying on such groups to act on food waste; this needs to happen at a government level I also refer to Amendment 171 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, signed by my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. There is a crucial point to be made about this: it says that the Government must have targets for food security. We have addressed, in many different contexts, the fact that the Government cannot just have powers; they need to have duties. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, said, this is possibly one of the most important areas of the Bill. This has to be a duty, not just a power to act This brings me to Amendment 162 on annual reports. I shall refer noble Lords to what is now an old report, from 2008, but still worth looking at: Nine Meals from Anarchy from the New Economics Foundation. Noble Lords may recall the fuel blockade, another occasion on which our shelves suddenly emptied. We have no idea when challenges, risks and sudden changes in the world situation will occur. Many noble Lords have talked about the climate emergency, but they could be natural, political or economic, and all of those things are risks that arise very quickly, so I think annual reports are the way to go.