14:57 Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)

Food security affects us all. We all want enough food to feed ourselves and our families. I declare a particular interest in this area as a food producer myself, having held responsibility for my family farm for over 30 years. Our reports are, we hope, in the broadest sense complementary, in that each Committee recognises threats to the country’s food security and makes recommendations to Government on how to mitigate those threats. It may be hard to imagine the UK not having access to enough food to feed our population, but the truth is that British people have already felt the effects of climate change on our plates. Cold snaps and floods in Spain and Morocco were partly to blame for empty salad shelves in our supermarkets last year. We know that extreme weather events both at home and abroad are likely to become more frequent. Cost of living pressures mean that there are households in this country for which insecure access to food is already a daily reality. I commend colleagues on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee for their work on household food security.

In the Environmental Audit Committee’s inquiry, we looked at how to keep Britons fed in the face of environmental change. What we found is that food production and environmental change are—not to put too fine a point on it—mutually destructive. Climate change and biodiversity loss threaten to undermine not just food production itself, but the whole food system. Colleagues on the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee have drawn attention to a particular aspect of this relationship in their recent report on insect decline and UK food security.

Our global food system is itself one of the biggest drivers of environmental change, contributing to those very factors that undermine food security. In our inquiry, we heard that British farming is responsible for only 0.5% of the UK’s gross domestic product, but 12% of our greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the food system is responsible for 30% of carbon emissions, but 50% of biodiversity loss.

We framed our findings around three pillars. First, we need to adapt our food and farming system to become more resilient to the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. Secondly, we must mitigate the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss on our food system. Thirdly, we must mitigate the damage to the environment that some aspects of our food system may cause.

When food insecurity is exacerbated by environmental change it can lead to conflict, with devastating consequences. Incidentally, that is why our Committee has just this week launched a new inquiry into the effects of climate change and wider security issues, and I encourage anybody who is interested, including those interested in the impact on food security, to submit evidence by the end of April.

One of the key ingredients for food security is healthy soils, which face degradation from increasing droughts, flooding and more intense rainfall brought about by climate change. I welcome the new Government commitment to publish a progress report on the development of a soil health indicator by June. Ensuring that farmers have access to clear information to help to measure the health of their soils, which is a fascinatingly complex subject, is incredibly important, so I am pleased that the Government accepted our recommendation to publish guidance for farmers on soil monitoring. I believe that today the EFRA Committee is publishing the Government response to its report on soil health, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Scarborough and Whitby might refer to in his remarks.

One landmark piece of work that we are still waiting for is the Government’s land use framework. Time and again, we heard in our inquiry that optimising the way English land is used for all the many demands required of it is the central issue to maintaining food security in a changing environment. When he gave evidence last July, the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries promised us that the land use framework, already delayed, would be published by the end of 2023. Sadly, the Government are now telling my Committee that it will be published in 2024. Will the Minister update the House on when in 2024 we can expect the land use framework to be published? Will he undertake, as my Committee recommended, to publish the Government’s methodologies alongside the land use framework when it eventually appears, to give confidence that the framework will contribute both to maintaining food security and to the Government’s net zero and biodiversity targets?

I did not come here today to be all doom and gloom. The environmental challenges facing our food system are worrying, but they are also an opportunity for the best of technological innovation. Our Committee has been keen to examine over this Parliament how technology can help us to address to environmental and climate changes that we face. Modern technology—be it the use of artificial intelligence and drones to pinpoint the use of fertiliser, the use or methane-suppressing food additives, or alternative proteins such as insects, now mostly grown in labs—opens up new ways of producing food while minimising the environmental impact. I am sure that we will hear a lot about that from my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells.

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15:12 Sir Robert Goodwill (Scarborough and Whitby) (Con)

We face a whole new challenge today: not only recognising the need for domestically produced food, but striking the right balance between food production and the environmental goals we need to achieve. In many cases, those goals can be delivered together, such as through the sustainable farming incentive, but in others, they are mutually exclusive. Surely, for example, it makes no sense to cover our most productive agricultural land with solar energy arrays. We can, of course, also produce biofuels on our land: wheat is used to make the ethanol in E10 petrol, and vegetable oil is used for diesel engines. However, if that means indirect land use changes in other parts of the world where forest is being cleared to create agricultural land, are we really delivering on our overall greenhouse gas obligations?

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15:34 Jo Gideon (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Con)

Our food system now produces an unbelievable array of foods, and we produce almost twice as many calories per person on this planet as we did back in the 1940s, but the food system that we have created has completely dominated planetary ecosystems. If we look at the food system’s impact, we see that it is by far the biggest cause of biodiversity loss, deforestation, water stress, freshwater pollution and destruction of aquatic life—and, together with the energy system, one of the two big causes of climate change.

Food security depends on global peace and stability, and a healthy planet and population. We have been facing a threat to all three of those. We see disruptions to the supply chain caused by the pandemic and risks triggered by the climate emergency and conflicts such as Putin’s war in Ukraine. We know that food shortages lead to political unrest, that famine triggers mass migration, and that climate change and biodiversity loss have led to the depletion of our ecosystem. We need to look again at how we rebuild a strong food system to ensure that everyone has access to nutritious and affordable food; how we can safeguard our countryside and restore the environment; how we can offer jobs to our communities; and how we can reduce the health problems caused by bad diets.

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16:10 Theresa Villiers (Chipping Barnet) (Con)

Thirdly, we have to reduce carbon emissions from agriculture if we are to meet our net zero commitments and ensure that we transition to farming methods that give more space for nature. That includes tackling the serious problems we have with insects, which were highlighted by my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee. Much depends on ELMS, which are replacing the common agricultural policy. We need to achieve the crucial balance of ensuring that they keep our farms viable and profitable, while securing public goods on nature and climate.

Our farmers here in the UK operate to some of the highest environmental and animal welfare standards in the world. We should be proud of them and we should back them. If we are to meet our goals on climate and nature, we must work closely with them to deliver a successful transition to net zero, while ensuring that everyone continues to have access to the safe, high-quality, affordable food that they need.

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16:19 Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)

I have held this brief for only a short time, but I am already well aware of the endless varying definitions of food security, as was noted by the Environmental Audit Committee in its report. I have also noted the EFRA Committee’s scrutiny of the chosen definition of food security by the Minister of State for Food, Farming and Fisheries, and I join fellow members of that Committee in expressing concern that that Minister is not taking households’ ability to access food into account when considering this vital topic. For us in the SNP, there are some definitions and some areas that take priority. I shall focus on those, because food security, or more appropriately food insecurity, sits at the heart of two defining crises facing the people of Scotland today: the climate crisis, with its impacts of extreme weather on our planet’s ability to provide for growing populations; and the cost of living crisis, which has been turbocharged by this Tory Government’s reckless relationship with the economy.

The Tory approach to problem-solving also summarises the UK’s position on the climate crisis. Both at home and overseas, climate change is already causing chaos for our food supply. Our farmers in Scotland need our support to provide vital resources for our communities. We in the SNP have made repeated calls for such support, as have farmers’ unions and family farmers, but, repeatedly and rather unsurprisingly, those calls and concerns have fallen on the deaf ears of this Government.

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16:38 Robbie Moore (Conservative)

Many Members asked about the land use framework. It will be published this year, but I want to reiterate that the reason why it has not been published to date is that the Secretary of State and his ministerial team have been very keen to make sure that it relates to enhancing our food production and making sure that food security is at its very core. When we are balancing the use of land as a finite resource that is being pulled in all different directions—for energy security, biodiversity offsetting, net zero targets, housing, infrastructure—we need to make sure that food security is considered at the heart of it.

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