Food for Thought

This Conference will provide a great opportunity to look back at our achievements in the last century; but, even more importantly, to look forward to our future.

I honestly believe that there can have been very few moments in our history when an NFU President could have stood up to survey an outlook that was more promising. That is not to say that everything in the garden is rosy.

Very far from it.

The recent government farm income figures show a dangerously divided industry. Some sectors are starting to see an upturn, for others there are signs of hope on the horizon; others are still in the depths of despair.

The urgent need is for all sectors to share in the improvement.

The reasons for the upturn in some commodity markets, and my optimism for the future, is now a familiar story, and is receiving prominent coverage in all media. On the demand side, increasing population and wealth and new markets for renewable energy; on the supply side threats from global warming and water availability.

All this will be told in greater detail tomorrow by Professor Robert Thompson. Without wishing to steal his thunder, he predicts that we will need to double, or even treble, world production by 2050 and the great majority of this will have to come by vastly increasing productivity on sustainable, non-erodable soils.

The phrase that springs to mind is food security, and I know this is a phrase that makes our government nervous and can cause misunderstanding.

But let me try to put things into a context which everyone, including the Government, can understand.

At a global level, there surely can be no room for any doubt. It is of absolutely primal importance that the world has the ability to feed itself. Indeed, I can think of no greater challenge, as current global dynamics unfold.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every country in the world should produce all the food it needs to feed itself. So, I agree with our government that trade, and an open world trading system, has to be a part of world food security.

So far, no disagreement, no controversy.

But I do part company violently with those who move from this common ground to the conclusion that significant mainstream, food production in our country simply doesn’t matter.

Let’s review the facts.

We need to double, maybe treble, food production in the next 40 years. The scope to bring more of the world’s land into production is limited and we are rightly concerned about deforestation.

Climate change is a real factor and a serious menace. The recent Cabinet Office report on Food points to the potential loss of half the world’s arable land by 2050. Similar projections show that Northern Europe, and the UK in particular, will become a more favoured area for agricultural production.

We all know that water availability is a huge and growing constraint world-wide and that a combination of the depletion of aquifers and climate-change induced drought is very serious.

70% of the world’s available fresh water is used in agriculture.

In the UK- and this isn’t to deny that we have issues too- the figure is less than 2%.

All this tells me that production in this country is going to be very valuable- not only for us, but for the world as a whole.

And when I read Goldman Sachs saying recently “vulnerable regions of the world face the risk of famine in the next 3 years”

it seems to me that developing the agricultural potential of this country to its fullest, is actually a moral issue.

I read in government papers that the UK is a rich country- even if domestic production falls our food security wouldn’t be threatened because we could trade ourselves out of trouble. Yes we could. But that would only pass the problem on to poorer, and as I have already said, the more vulnerable countries in terms of climate change.

How moral is that?

We have an economic duty to the citizens of Britain to optimise our production of food and bio-energy, so as to secure their supplies and act as a check on food price volatility.

But over and above that, as a relatively favoured country, we have a moral duty to the citizens of the world, to make our optimum contribution to global supplies of food and bio-energy, but also, as I will outline later, to the science of that sustainable future.

Food security is a worldwide concern. Our part in it needs to be seen in a worldwide context.

I know that the government tends to see food security as a code for more government intervention, production targets and subsidy. It is emphatically not.

It is a plea for everyone to wake up to the fact that farming matters; that production farming matters; and to start acting accordingly.

I have got five challenges for us all.

First, the key to success is science. It is acutely painful to me to see how we have allowed our science base to run down.

Part of the problem is the aversion to new technology and risk that has been fostered by a section of our society.

No wonder that scientists and commercial companies do not see this country as a safe place to work or invest. The NFU has called for a new and intelligent debate about new technology. We must start that debate now.

Another part of the story is public investment. Earlier this year I, and a large group of interested NFU members, went to the Institute of Animal Health in Compton to hear a truly impressive and inspiring day of presentations on Blue Tongue virus, and what to do about it. The quality of the science was in stark contrast to the run-down nature of the site.

What I saw was world class scientists operating in third world facilities.

Seeing this made me understand how a few thousand pounds worth of skimped investment on drains at the Institute’s other facility at Pirbright led to last year’s Foot & Mouth disaster costing the taxpayer £47 million and my farming members over £100 million.

And let’s not forget that these are facilities of global importance. The Institute of Animal Health is the world reference laboratory for FMD & BTV.

We have a moral duty to the world not to allow our excellence in animal disease science to be run down, and the same goes for our expertise in soil science and plant breeding.

I cannot refer to animal health and science without a word about bovine tuberculosis.

The NFU is now 100 years old. The first ever resolution passed by the NFU called on the government to eradicate TB. At our 50th anniversary Conference, attended by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, it was announced that bovine TB had been eradicated. Here in our 100th year in large parts of our country the disease is rampant and out of control.

Science does seem to offer part of the solution in the form of a badger vaccine, possibly available in the next 5 years. But unless we take steps in the meantime to attack all sources of this horrible disease- as advocated by our former Chief Scientist- either there will be no cattle industry in large parts of the country or the disease will be so widespread that we will never control it, by any means.

Secretary of State, I took my family for a short break last October to a dairy farm at Hope Cove, near Kingsbridge in South Devon. The website talked of the 120 pedigree Holsteins the kids could watch being milked.

It was eerily quiet. 80 of the cows had been taken as TB reactors and been slaughtered, and the derisory compensation left the family unable to restock!

We met with you last week, with other industry partners (the CLA and NBA) to highlight how the industry is prepared to work with DEFRA to provide a solution.

Some people in the media have been talking about the political risks of taking action to stem the flow of disease from the badger population.

Secretary of State, I have to say that the risks of not taking action are infinitely greater. Further prevarication can only mean yet more disease outbreaks, yet more Government expenditure, yet more risk to other wildlife, yet more human and animal suffering and misery and yet more damage to this country’s reputation over the prevention of animal disease.

We must break the constant cycle of re-infection from the badger population, which we now know - thanks to last week’s Royal Society report - is responsible for three quarters of all outbreaks of bovine TB in cattle.

We stand ready to play our part in that – to share responsibility as farmers are already, thanks to the grossly inequitable compensation arrangements, sharing the cost.

Secretary of State, I am only too aware that we live in an increasingly urban society, and that decisions of this nature are difficult, but you must come to the right decision, and quickly.

We all know the phenomenon of the NIMBY. I feel that through successive Ministers, and successive governments, this issue has fallen victim to NIMTOO.

Not in my term of office.

Please, and this is a big please, show that you are different.

My second big challenge has to be investment. If we are to meet demands for food, fibre and energy production and reduce our environmental footprint at the same time, we don’t only need the smart solutions, we need to be able to invest in putting them in place.

I was very struck by a statement made at a recent Seminar on Food Security held by the Royal Society of Chemistry: “The world is not short of agricultural land- it is short of agricultural investment.”

Which makes me despair of the government’s intention to end the Agricultural Building’s Allowance, which will make badly-needed investment in better environmental performance and in higher welfare standards more expensive and put us at a disadvantage to most of our competitors. For the sake of a few million pounds the potential damage is immense.

Secretary of State, you are our voice in Cabinet. Please argue with the Treasury on this one.

My third challenge is for the food chain. The global dynamics I have talked about are bound to lead to higher food prices. We can manage this badly or we can manage it well. The right way to ensure long-term sustainable food supplies is to ensure those increases get back to the producer and allow profit and investment.

We have heard rumours of supermarkets reacting to higher prices by freezing the price they pay to their suppliers. I hope these are just rumours, because that would be the worst strategy; one bound to lead in the end to shortage of supply and really painful price hikes in the longer term.

Terry Leahy will be with us this afternoon. I salute what Tesco has done in recognising and responding to the vulnerability of its dairy supply chain in a way that helped address the crisis in the milk sector. That is a model that urgently needs to be followed in all of the other livestock sectors if we are to be able to provide our consumers with the top quality, value for money, farm assured products that they rightly expect to be able to find on supermarket shelves.

On a light-hearted note, I also congratulate him for stocking the NFU Centenary Ale- Farmer’s Harvest- which by the way is available at the bar throughout this conference.

But I must yet again condemn the £1.99 chicken – which sends completely the wrong message about the cost of producing a standard traceable farm assured British chicken.

My fourth challenge concerns Regulation. We all know we will never escape Regulation. But, by God, we do need better and more consistent regulation.

Of particular concern is the authorities’ tendency to work in silos, and, by trying to address one problem, make a much bigger problem somewhere else. The NVZ proposals provide a classic example.

By requiring – on the flimsiest of scientific justifications - farmers to provide up to six months of slurry storage, banning winter spreading on even the most free-draining soils, and making winter cover crops compulsory, they will:

- increase emissions of nitrous oxide, methane and ammonia
- risk damaging bathing water quality
- and deny winter stubbles to the ground-nesting birds that rely on them

These examples could be multiplied. Defra is currently developing what they call an “eco-systems approach” which is designed to take a holistic approach to the consequences of particular actions on all ecological resources and is supposed to avoid such contradictions in future. We need this urgently.

The other contradiction at the heart of Regulation is what I call the domestic production fallacy. Methane emissions from livestock have been well publicised and to some the answer is obvious- regulate to drive out domestic production. Without noticing that so long as consumers want livestock products we will just import more- from countries where the problem is worse. This really would be a double whammy because what we should be doing is using our intellectual resources to find smart answers to these problems and giving them to the world.

In other words, we should be exporting solutions, not importing pollutions.

My fifth and final challenge is about policy, strategy and vision.

This year we will have further adjustments to the CAP in the Health Check. Without going into details, our approach is clear cut. We want to make the policy simpler and more common- more evenly applied across the European Union. There is an important breakout session this afternoon with a representative from the European Commission and I hope members will make those points there.

One issue I simply cannot ignore is set aside. We expect the Commission to propose its abolition. It has no place in a decoupled system and it is complicated to administer and comply with. Of course there are some environmental advantages to some set aside, but the evidence is that putting set aside at zero this year - at a time of unprecedentedly high forward prices - only resulted in a 50% reduction in uncropped land and only a minute portion of that land had any environmental merit.

And yet some people would re-introduce set aside as a new cross-compliance obligation. Not only would that violate our principles of simplicity (because it would be even more complicated than the set aside regime we had) but also of commonality (because I can see this happening only in England).

Secretary of State, I can assure you that the farming community fully recognises its obligation to protect the environment as well as producing the nation’s food. We in the NFU will continue to give the strongest possible lead in this context. We do not need to be regulated into being good countryside custodians.

Throughout its history, the NFU has always looked forward and tried to be constructive and open-minded, and that is precisely how we are looking at the longer-term future of the CAP post 2013.

But the Government must also look forward, and I think it is time for a new strategy and a new vision.

The existing Sustainable Food & Farming Strategy has its roots in the Policy Commission in 2001, which was heavily influenced by the devastating FMD outbreak of that year, and the deep agricultural recession at the time.

The joint Defra/Treasury Vision on the CAP dates back to 2005 and all its arguments were based on the policy as it was before decoupling.

The world has changed fundamentally. The strategy must evolve to keep pace. The government needs a new approach to farming, one that recognises the importance of production and, I hope, takes account of the challenges I have made today. I have already mentioned the Cabinet Office study on food. Why not make this the starting point for a new strategy?

I would also like Government, jointly with us, to draw up a new vision for agriculture. One that looks forward and not backwards. One which sees agriculture and horticulture as the high-tech, science based industries that they are. Not, as I suspect many people think, an old fashioned, backward sector that we would be better off without. I want to see agriculture with a flourishing science base; an integral part of the knowledge economy. I want to turn on the Today Programme after the budget and hear the PM & the Chancellor praising agricultural science and domestic production and its contribution to our economy in the same way they speak about the economic benefit of the City of London.

There is always a risk in a speech like this of leaving the impression that all our problems come from somewhere else and it is someone else’s job to sort them out.

That is most certainly not my intention. If the 100 year history of the NFU teaches us anything – not least in the two world wars - it is that the farmers and growers of this country, led by the NFU, will deliver the goods.

The challenges we face now are global and they are serious. We are up for them, but if we are to make the most of our potential – as morally, I believe we must – then we need a Government that encourages and enables, not one that hampers or frustrates. And we need that commitment in actions, not just words.