09:30 Mr Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)

There are four factors in the world today that will have enormous consequences for this country’s ability to feed ourselves: climate change, the global population, the global economy, and energy prices and our ability to supply energy to the world. I shall take them separately.

Energy production itself requires land usage. Erecting a wind turbine takes out land that could be used for agricultural food production. The erection of a refinery takes land out of agricultural food production and uses it for industrial purposes. More importantly, as we move towards sustainable energy sources, such as bioethanol and biodiesel produced from rape seed, we will be using agricultural crops to produce those biofuels, taking land out of food production and putting it into energy production. That might seem like a wonderful, modern technology and a wonderful, modern thing to do, but when my grandfather started farming in the 1930s, 30% of his land was used to produce oats, which were the energy source for the horses that he used to pull the ploughs. There is, therefore, nothing new in farmers using land for energy production. What has changed, however, is the number of people we have to feed and produce for. The changes will be quite dramatic, and we need to make sure that we have technologies available to assist us.

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10:17 Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)

However, we now need a step change if we are to produce higher crop yields, make better use of water and increase sustainable food production—without increasing our overall emissions of CO 2 or other greenhouse gases—such that we can meet the competing but necessary objectives of reducing and alleviating climate change, and achieving greater levels of food production.

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10:29 The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr James Paice)

I was going to refer to Professor Beddington’s comments about the perfect storm, but as the hon. Member for Glasgow North East has already done so, I will not repeat them. It is clear from this debate and many others that there is a growing recognition that many issues are coming together: climate change, population increase, population prosperity, and the consequent demand for more and better-quality food and the problem that due to climate change, some arable land may cease to be suitable for arable production. The coming together of those issues creates a huge challenge that affects many areas: the European situation, the single market, the competitiveness of our production and the interface between food science and our approach to innovation and technology, on which much of this debate has focused.

The long-term challenges that we have been discussing also offer great market and productivity opportunities for our agriculture. Achieving our food security objectives sustainably is also important to achieving the biodiversity outcomes that we all want to achieve, such as the convention on biological diversity to which we signed up in Nagoya a few weeks ago and, closer to home, our climate change objectives and millennium development goals.

I am afraid, Mr Streeter, that I am taking advantage of the fact that I have a little more time than is normally available, but I think that these are key issues. It is important to recognise that the traits that are the subject of GM are moving themselves. Critics saw the early tests as a way of simply putting more money into the hands of chemical companies or farmers, but we are now beginning to see traits in GM that are more relevant to the consumer and the wider community, such as the work on genes that encourage high omega fats in oilseed rape and other plants. Drought resistance and the ability of plants to grow with much less water have been referred to. That will be of huge benefit to the developing world in the short term, but because of climate change it could also become far more relevant in this country. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sherwood suggested, the holy grail in such research is to breed a grain that is leguminous. That brings us back to sustainability, which must be a cornerstone of agricultural development in coming years.

It is clear that many farmers see the advantages of using GM, and many experts such as those at the Royal Society believe that it could provide benefits if it is used safely and responsibly. However, it is not a panacea. We should not kid ourselves that GM will be the answer to all our problems—the answer to Professor Beddington’s perfect storm—but it could well be one of the tools that we need to address the longer-term challenges of global food security, climate change and making agriculture more sustainable.

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