Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-12
Topic: Environment
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I have two amendments in this group: Amendments 263 and 265. I thoroughly welcome the Government’s approach in this area. We have a responsibility as the consumers of forest products to make sure that they are sourced in a way we are comfortable with. To keep blindly consuming, say, palm oil without regard to the consequences is to take less than our responsibility for what is happening. It is our demand that is driving the production, and it is therefore our responsibility. We need to find ways in which we can exercise that responsibility without encroaching on the national rights of the people doing the producing. For instance, in the case of palm oil, I think it is entirely reasonable to ask that it is produced without further encroachment on virgin forest. My Amendment 263 suggests that we should also include peatlands and wetlands within that definition of "forest". Both of these are environments that palm oil plantations can encroach on. They are both environments of great ecological significance, and we should therefore have as much interest in them as we do in a forest In order to know what is going on in response to our demand for palm oil, we need some information. The obvious information we have access to is satellite records, but they are not much use unless you can tie them to what is happening on the ground. We will need some form of baseline—I hope very much that COP 26 may provide that—or a map of where things are so that change can be measured from that. We need to be conscious of the fact that it is not necessarily the big boys doing the encroaching. It can be small farmers, subsistence farmers or people working out a small living who make the first cut, and then the big boys come in behind them, reward them and move them on to the next patch of virgin forest. What we need to watch is not some small detail but the overall effect, so that we know that palm oil sourced from a particular area or country has been done so ethically Amendment 265 deals with how we might make that work. I am suggesting that we should be able to give our approval to an organisation such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil so that we can use it as an internationally recognised collaborative method of telling us which sources of palm oil are ethical. Then we should build some reward into that system. I am sure we would come up against the WTO again, but, as we have discussed before this evening, we need the WTO to become responsive to environmental imperatives. If a country is producing ethically farmed palm oil, we should be able to reward it with a premium, which should then go back into the process of making sure that palm oil is ethical and supporting the people producing it on those terms, so that we get a virtuous circle Those are my two suggestions for how we might make things more effective than they appear to be in the Bill. It is important that we look for a system that does not just deal with the import of the primary product but enables us to get at imports that contain substantial amounts of the product; otherwise, we just disadvantage our own producers. Working through something like a round table or an import tariff scheme would allow us to do that.