16:21 The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Wales (Fay Jones)

Food security is a vital part of our national security. The primary role of farmers is to produce the nation’s food, and they deserve our gratitude for that—a point echoed to me on many occasions by the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill), who is away on a Select Committee visit and unable to join today’s debate. Recent years have brought home the truth of that, particularly in an age of climate change, instability and increasingly volatile global food production.

Uncertain times require us to double down on the certainty of our food system. In the Government’s food strategy, we set a clear commitment to maintaining domestic food production at the current level at least, which is around 60% of what we consume. The importance of food security is why we brought in the three-times-a-year food security report through the Agriculture Act 2020. Going further, the Prime Minister announced a fortnight ago that, given the context of the last three years, we will significantly strengthen this work through a new annual food security index. Climate change is increasingly likely to impact on the sector, with more extreme weather events, so it is only right that we step up our monitoring of food security to ensure that we can act swiftly and decisively against any in-year shocks. We expect the work to be UK-wide and will work to achieve that, strengthening accountability across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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17:23 Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)

Nobody needs reminding of the impacts of the pandemic in revealing weaknesses in our over-reliance on long supply chains and those that rely on the international trade, or of the importance of local food supply systems and meeting our domestic needs. The need for shorter supply chains is only compounded by the climate crisis, and importing food from other countries—especially those as far away as Australia—will serve only to increase greenhouse gas emissions. That contradicts any UK Government claim that they are tackling the climate challenge head on.

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17:57 Ben Lake (Plaid Cymru)

It is also important to bear in mind that a changing climate will also have an impact on those markets abroad from which the UK imports so much of its food. Especially relevant here is the fact that, as the right hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth outlined, different sectors will be more exposed to those foreign import markets than others. Let us take the fruit and vegetable sector as a case in point, as we depend quite a bit on foreign markets for our fruit and veg. The UK produces over 50% of the vegetables consumed domestically but only 16% of our fruit, and 93% of domestic consumption of fresh vegetables is fulfilled by domestic and European production, while fruit supply is more widely spread across the EU, Africa, the Americas and the UK. Some of those foreign markets are in areas of the world that we know will suffer from climate change, and their ability to produce much of the food that we import will be impacted by that.

Food security is a challenge with which we will soon need to grapple. By not only maintaining but increasing domestic production, so that we gain greater self-sufficiency, we will in turn gain greater resilience to climate change and to shocks in a very uncertain world.

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18:30 Alex Sobel (Labour)

Properly supporting our nation’s farmers is essential to meeting our nature and climate targets. The Government must do more to support our farmers to deliver more sustainable food production and implement environmental land management strategies. DEFRA’s agricultural transition plan is a step in the right direction towards a more resilient and prosperous agriculture sector that is capable of delivering sustainable food production while meeting nature and climate targets.

The Conservatives’ Environment Act 2021 target on species abundance, which they were forced to concede because of Opposition amendments, promised only to “halt the decline” in species by 2030. Just halting the decline, or getting a net zero for nature, is not good enough. Our ambition is to be nature positive.

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19:00 Paul Howell (Sedgefield) (Con)

I do applaud the government for their recent efforts, but using farming to meet their net zero targets is not the answer if they want food and at a price everyone can afford.

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19:26 Tim Farron (Liberal Democrat)

Perhaps the most obvious thing that reducing the number of farmers will do is reduce our ability to feed ourselves. This is an absolute nonsense: we have a range of public goods and none of them seems to include providing food for the people of Britain. At a time when we have war in eastern Europe, trade routes disrupted in the Red sea, and climate change rendering land around the world unfarmable, it is utter madness to be taking land out of active food production and reducing our ability to feed ourselves.

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19:55 George Freeman (Conservative)

I make the point about the environment because we all know that, traditionally, agriculture has been a very high emitting industry. We need to show the world how to move to a low-emission agricultural sector. We are well positioned to do that, not least in agricultural genetics and breeding science at the Norwich Research Park, where we are pioneering drought-resistant crops that do not need highly carbon-intensive chemicals, and disease-resistant and drought-resistant crops for the rest of the world. In our chase for net zero, the left hand and the right hand need to be co-ordinated. We are not doing anything for net zero if we are disrupting farming in East Anglia with endless solar farms, cables and pylons.

I agree. If we are to lead the world in net zero agriculture, it is all about metrics and data. It is about picking up a pint of milk, a potato or a loaf of bread and knowing its environmental footprint. With that, we can start to give the sector incentives and rewards for driving down the environmental footprint. Without it, we are condemned to follow environmental policies that are emotional and not connected to proper science and research. If we get that right, the UK could be a leader in setting those environmental metrics.

I applaud the Government’s work on production standards. We have a great opportunity in free trade deals to set the higher standards and to show the world how the UK produces more with less. I would offer a zero tariff only to those who are using the world’s very best technologies for zero-emission agriculture, and create a market for the exporting of our net zero technologies. Sustainable intensification—delivering more with less—is not just a strapline. The world desperately needs us to help deliver that. In our sector we have huge strength: the John Innes Centre at the Norwich Research Park, the Sainsbury Laboratory in Aberystwyth, and at Roslin and Wellesbourne. We are a global powerhouse in science research. We spend about half a billion a year on it, but it does not yet feel like the agricultural sector is underpinned by a half a billion of research. I know that the Secretary of State is thinking hard about how that science and research is better pulled through.

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20:44 Daniel Zeichner (Labour)

As Members have said, we still have a supply chain contract system that we all know does not work for too many farmers. Stakeholders tell me that things are actually getting worse. I was in Hexham at the northern farming conference last year, where a point was strongly made that Labour’s Joe Morris recently reinforced to me: we have too many buyers taking too long to consider cost price increase requests, taking too long to pay invoices, failing to honour their original order and rejecting perfectly good produce because it does not quite fit some aesthetic criteria. That leads to appalling waste; one producer told me that he had to throw away 50% of the lettuces he grows. That is terrible for the environment, an insult to farmers, and deeply problematic when working people all over the country are struggling in a cost of living crisis to get a meal on the table. More than a quarter of all the food grown in the UK is never eaten, and this wasted harvest accounts for between 6% and 7% of total UK greenhouse gas emissions. That waste has been made worse by severe and persistent labour shortages, which the Government have been too slow to address.

We are committed to making the environmental land management schemes work. Frankly, the Government simply do not have a strategic approach to ELMS, or to the crucial challenge of balancing producing nutritious food, protecting nature, mitigating climate change and upholding animal welfare standards. They are failing on all these important fronts. The Government’s failure to deliver on their environmental targets means that their promise to protect at least 30% of our land, waters and ocean by 2030 is in serious doubt. The Climate Change Committee’s latest report makes grim reading for the Government. Emissions from agriculture are going in completely the wrong direction; they actually rose last year.

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20:52 Robbie Moore (Conservative)

The Government are committed to continuing to produce at least 60% of the food that we eat in the UK, and have ambitions to produce more food domestically. We will continue action where it matters, to support farming businesses, so that they grow and thrive. Farming contributes a staggering £127 billion to the economy, and we want to enhance and secure nature while ensuring food production. We have a key focus on driving productivity in the sector, as food security must always be at the forefront of our mind. As has been mentioned, we recognise that it is vital to balance the priorities of protecting food security, restoring biodiversity and tackling climate change, while, of course, ensuring that farming is profitable and productive, so that farming businesses can thrive, and so that farming continues to attract the very best and the brightest.

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