Speech by Rt Hon Hilary Benn MP to the Oxford Farming Conference 2008 – A climate of change: agriculture: the solution not the problem, Oxford – 3 January 2008
I am delighted to be here at Oxford today, not least I’ve heard a lot about this conference as the place to be – including, incidentally, in an episode of the Archers just after Christmas – a place to discuss the future for farming with the farmers of today and tomorrow.
I was thinking about this speech last week during a short break in Ludlow, a town full of shops declaring their support for local farm produce, in one case by displaying a prodigious array of English and Welsh cheeses.
My wife had a conversation in the village of Clun, about 15 miles away, with the local hairdresser who told her how he had moved there from London a decade ago and how friendly he found the people and the way of life – and I couldn’t help reflect on the sharp contrast between his way of living and the newspaper pictures of people crushed in the frenzy of the Oxford Street sales. What a contrast of two ways of living.
And then, the next day, as we came down Long Mynd - after a very blustery winter walk – we marvelled at the patchwork of fields that lay beneath us as far as the eye could see. A glory fashioned by the farmers there – as farmers everywhere - both providers to the nation and stewards of the landscape.
It is really about the potential of our land, and of you who are this industry, and of the culture and way of life both represent that I wish to talk today. And I want to do so in the context of the changing world that David Miliband spoke about here 12 months ago.
A world of changes which will come whether any of us like it or not.
Changes which represent both a challenge and an opportunity for farming.
Changes which will demand innovation, forward thinking and optimism, but which will also value the stored knowledge of how to live in harmony with the earth that is agriculture’s greatest treasure.
After all, you and your forebears have been doing just that since the dawn of time. And we will need your understanding more than ever as we all have to learn to face a world home to 6 billion of us now and a further 3 and a half billion of us in fifty years’ time.
And my central argument today is that it will be – indeed it must be – for farming itself to decide whether it will stand transfixed and awed by these challenges or whether it will seize the moment and these opportunities with confidence. Now the question for farming in an increasingly complex world is a simple one; which of these is it to be as this new century unfolds?
Now, as you mentioned, one particular reason to welcome the arrival of this New Year is that it brings 2007 to an end. The last six months have been a nightmare for the livestock sector. None of us can have anticipated – I certainly didn’t – the apparently constant succession of emergencies that have been such a trial and a strain for the industry and all involved, and I recognise that their effects will be felt for some time to come.
One thing we can do to help is making SPS payments accurately and on time, after all the problems there have been, which you rightly referred to. So I am glad to be able to report that the Rural Payments Agency paid out £497 million last month to some 50,000 farmers under the 2007 scheme, and in so doing demonstrated its continuing determination to recover and to provide a better service; one that farmers have the right to expect and which the RPA has a duty to deliver.
But the other story of 2007 – one largely untold to the wider public – is of the rest of farming on the rise. After 25 years in which food prices on world markets fell by three-quarters in real terms, the huge increase in wheat and other product prices since last spring has been remarkable.
These, and other changes, are the results of a number of trends that represent the new world that we will have to deal with. They include:
- the impact of both drought and floods;
- the rise in meat and dairy consumption in China, India and other fast developing countries. Global demand for meat and milk is projected to more than double over the next 40 years;
- the growing thirst for biofuels, driven both by global warming and high price of oil – now $100 a barrel;
- the decline in producer support as a percentage of farm receipts in both Europe and the USA, but rising in China and Brazil;
- population growth - how will we feed the 9.5 billion human beings with who we are likely to be sharing this planet with in 2050?;
- water scarcity - what are we going to do when people start to fight about water rather than ideology? What impact will this have on what is grown, and where, and what it is used for?
- land scarcity – how will we manage the competing demands on our land and our seas and the resources that both hold?
- farming’s role on the front-line of the battle to improve our natural environment and to combat climate change in a world where the price of carbon is bound to rise; and
- a better informed and more aware society, with rising interest in where food comes from and how it is produced, and growing demand from all of us for higher environmental standards.
What I think this all of this demonstrates is that far from being insulated from global trends and pressures – and we could not even if anyone wanted it to be so - farmers are increasingly affected by them. In short, the industry faces unparalleled global challenges but also uncharted opportunities, and, I believe, it is an industry that is up for both.
So, as we enter this New Year, I believe we should be optimistic and positive about farming’s potential, and the real question is what kind of industry should we want to have in a generation’s time?
That’s what we discussed at the Farming for the Future Conference last November and I must say I felt there was a large measure of consensus about what we want for farming and from farming which I would sum up as an industry that:
- is profitable and competitive in the market, both domestically and internationally;
- is known for the quality, safety, and environmental and animal welfare standards of the food and other products it makes;
- embraces its environmental responsibilities – tackling climate change, managing carbon, water and the soil, and encouraging biodiversity – and sees all of those things as essential to its long term economic success, rather than a threat to it;
- works together in partnership to meet the challenges it faces, in which responsibility for decisions affecting it and the costs of managing those risks are fairly shared (nobody would argue with the principle – it’s just that different people have very different views of what constitutes a fair share!); and I will return to that later on.
- an industry that is, above all, innovative, self-reliant, successful, and confident about its future and which expresses that confidence outwardly.
So let me take each of these aims – which I believe we share – in turn and reflect on some of the tasks we face in tying to achieve them.
First, a thriving industry that earns it own way.
Above all, of course, this will be about the industry producing things that consumers want to buy. Rising prices will certainly help, and will ease the further transition away from the old system of subsidised production. And just as the forces pushing prices higher are international so will changes internationally affect the industry.
That’s certainly true of the CAP. Experience in 2003 showed how effective our joint lobbying can be if we work together to influence others, and I hope very much that we can be equally effective in 2008 in influencing the European Commission, MEPs, and other Member States so that the CAP health check brings real benefits for British farmers by freeing them to respond to demand, and rewarding them for creating important public benefits that the market will not pay for.
The health check, and the EU budget review that will follow it, will be an opportunity to take reform further by extending decoupling; reducing intervention and export subsidies; reforming quotas, in particular a firm commitment to abolish milk quotas; simplifying rules and regulations; and further transferring money from direct payments to rural development.
Part of the pressure for these reforms comes, of course, from our own societies, they don’t come from nowhere. And that pressure will not go away – here or internationally. In fact, it is likely to intensify as we can see from third countries through the WTO. Making progress on the Doha Development Round is of crucial importance and I am keen to see a successful and ambitious conclusion to the Doha round as soon as possible.
The fact that the EU is being asked to cut its trade distorting subsidies in agriculture, significantly reduce its import tariffs and end its export subsidies is right and proper. I have seen first hand the damage they do to poor farmers in developing countries, and like farmers everywhere they just want the same chance to grow and to sell in a fair market. Distorting trade in a global market is not fair, it’s not right and we must all deal with it – and soon.
Defra will consult formally when the health check legislative proposals are published this May, but we are already talking to the industry and using your advice and expertise in the development of our negotiating position, and I hope you will feel that this is one example of our commitment to working in partnership, which Stefan Tangermann of the OECD, acknowledged at the November Farming Conference as showing how we are looking ahead together to embrace change, accept our responsibilities, and jointly find ways of dealing with what lies ahead. We must keep this up!
Part of the debate about what we produce concerns food security and self-sufficiency. Will we be able to produce enough or get our hands on enough food as the world’s population increases by 50% and the climate changes? There are real issues here – I acknowledge that – but we need to disentangle them. Today’s excellent Strategy Unit report on Food – I urge you to read it for its facts and insights – shows that the biggest cause of food insecurity in the UK today is poverty. 5% of those on low incomes report skipping meals for a whole day. This reminds us that being poor means having less choice than others about what you do or have. Billions of human beings have no choice at all because they are so poor.
The report also points out that while UK national self-sufficiency in food has been falling in recent years, it is still high by historical standards and higher than it was in either the 1930s or 1950s.
And as we saw in Gloucestershire in the summer floods, supply chains – in that case water – can be all too easily disrupted. In fact it was the supermarkets and the food industry, together with local government and the emergency services helping the water companies, who came to the rescue by providing distribution points for bottled water and tankers to top up the bowsers. But imagine if the supermarkets supply chains were to be disrupted? And what about the impact of high temperatures on crop yields? During the hot summer of 2003, in France maize yields and fruit harvests both fell by 25%. That’s one reason why all of us should be very worried about dangerous climate change.
The second aim is an industry known for quality, safety, and animal welfare standards.
Quality matters, and we have outstanding examples in the UK. There is increasing public demand for good quality, locally-sourced food. Sales of ethical foods – organic, fair-trade, free range and freedom foods – rose from £1 billion to £5.4 billion between 1999 and 2005, but it is still only a small proportion of total sales of food and drink which top £162 billion a year. And demand for healthier foods is not universal, as today’s Strategy Unit report on Food also shows. We could improve health overall - resulting in fewer premature deaths and less obesity - if we ate better; more fruit and vegetables and less salt, saturated fats and sugar. Part of the way to do that is to provide better information about what our food contains and where it comes from.
In addition to the health of the food that we eat; what about the health of the animals we eat? The RSPCA yesterday launched a campaign about intensive chicken production aimed at the supermarkets. Some have urged me to support a postponement of the 2012 date for the introduction of an EU-wide ban on battery cages, but I will not.
It’s a long overdue step, and I think that we will see an increase in demand for chickens – and other animals - that have been raised in better conditions.
I note, by the way, that Kelly’s Turkeys - winner of the Farmers’ Weekly Poultry Farmer of the Year award - produces traditionally reared, free range turkeys which are much sought after. And one in three eggs consumed in the UK is now free range.
Thirdly, and this will become hugely important, is an industry that takes its environmental responsibilities seriously.
Nowhere is this needed more than in tackling climate change. We are already seeing its effects, and all farmers need to be aware of the risks and to take action now to manage them and to “climate-proof” their businesses.
The Climate Change Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, will set ambitious and legally binding targets for reducing CO2 emissions by 2050, and the Committee on Climate Change will look at whether the current 60% target should be tougher – possibly up to 80% - and whether it should include other greenhouse gases.
The truth is every country, every business, must take its responsibilities seriously if we’re to meet these targets, agriculture included.
There is perhaps a tendency to think that farmers will deal with and adapt to these impacts and risks, because farming has always coped with unpredictable weather patterns. But, in the kind of world of unprecedented and dangerous climate change which the IPPC warns us we are now entering, that will only take us so far.
Agriculture needs to be at the heart of our efforts to adapt to a changing climate – for example by supporting flood, and sustainable water management, or providing habitats to help wildlife to adapt.
These ”ecosystem services” that agriculture provides need to be better recognised and rewarded. We should look at all the ways of doing so, including market-based trading, as well as through agri-environment schemes.
And we are already looking at the extent to which Environmental Stewardship can help contribute to mitigation and adaptation as part of the current review of progress, which is due to report in the next few weeks.
We also need to better recognise the role of farmers in managing and protecting stores of carbon in soils and woodland, and farming’s potential to help reduce society’s carbon footprint including by providing crops for energy or biogas from manure. A new project this year will see Defra working with its agencies and Scotland and Wales to seek good management of peat soils which store such substantial quantities of carbon.
But while agriculture is an important part of the solution, we must not forget the contribution it makes to climate change. It is responsible for 7% of our greenhouse gas emissions. That may not sound like much to some, but it makes agriculture the second largest contributor to UK GHG emissions, after the energy sector. So farming has its responsibility too.
The industry is already making progress. I welcome the commitment to action in the recent report from the NFU/CLA/AIC Task Force; the achievements of the Farming Futures project and the Rural Climate Change Forum in giving farmers advice on tackling climate change; the efforts of the CLA to raise awareness through the CALM calculator, that I will be helping to launch later today, to enable farmers to measure and reduce their carbon footprint; and the positive response from the industry to the funding David Miliband offered at this conference last January which has seen several projects start during the year including low energy refrigeration for the food industry and adapting wheat to global warming.
Research is one of the biggest investments we make as Defra and remains so. We spend half our R&D budget on the food and farming sector, with an increasing focus on climate change, the availability and protection of natural resources, and on new and emerging diseases. Good science will be of enormous value, as Bob Watson will talk about tomorrow.
We also need to grasp the business opportunities of climate change; longer growing seasons and the opportunity to grow new crops. The chance for forward-thinking producers to differentiate their products by showing how they have measured and reduced their carbon footprint, and how they are using fewer resources. And the opportunity to generate renewable energy from manure, and other organic wastes. Now here’s a thought. On the one hand we have the nitrates directive – what to do with all that slurry at times of the year when it can’t be put on the land - and on the other hand we have the need to recycle more food waste and reduce landfill. Why can’t anaerobic digestion be the answer to both?
Well, farmers and communities are already showing the way. Andrew Needham in Bedfordshire and Owen Yeatman in Dorset have been among the first to set up anaerobic digestors taking on-farm waste to produce renewable power. And Ludlow, as it turns out, is home to one of the Defra-funded municipal waste management demonstration plants.
John Baarda Ltd of East Yorkshire has 42 acres of glasshouses growing tomatoes for Sainsbury’s and Somerfield. Since 2004, the firm has joined forces with Terra Nitrogen and now produces CO2 and steam as by-products of fertiliser production; these are “recycled” to heat and grow their tomato crop.
And Strawson Energy - a large grower and supplier of willow short rotation coppice - has developed a processing machine capable of producing uniform wood fuel which has delivered over 80% of the energy crop used in UK power stations and heat boilers, including supplying smaller heating projects such as the local school. It is a very energy efficient source of renewable energy; for every one unit of energy used to grow the crop, there are 50 units energy produced.
Three examples of cutting edge technology in British farming. If they can do it, so can others. After all, some 3,000 farmers in Germany are already using anaerobic digestion to produce biogas and bio-fertiliser.
But whatever we do at home, it’s what we do globally that will really determine our success. Agriculture accounts for around 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions; a further 18% of emissions are due to deforestation, largely driven by the conversion of forests to agricultural land.
A report in 2006 from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation highlighted that livestock alone could be responsible for around 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases, if emissions across the whole chain are included. It will be no good if we simply focus on simply reducing emissions from UK agriculture when the consequence is to switch to greater imports, thereby “exporting” the problem.
That’s why we are working with China for example on sustainable agriculture. This will include sharing experience and policies on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from farming. The challenge for China is how to meet increasing demand for food, and especially livestock products, while maintaining environmental and social sustainability.
We are also looking at what we can learn from how other developed countries are managing these challenges. For example, through the Agriculture Committee of the international Methane to Markets Partnership, we are able to draw on the expertise and experience of countries which are far more advanced than us when it comes to biogas.
And we will all be looking with great interest at New Zealand, where the government has announced that it will be developing a greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme to cover all GHGs and all sectors of the economy.
This is very ambitious - the government has a plan for achieving it, although there are technical challenges – and that includes bringing agriculture into the scheme by 2013, and asking the sector to begin monitoring emissions before that date. Their agriculture of course is differently structured and managed to the UK’s, but we should all be keen to understand better what we can learn from the approach New Zealand is taking.
The other side of the environmental challenge is looking after our landscape and our biodiversity, and 80% of our land is, of course in the care of farmers. Before Christmas I was able to announce that we have got agreement from the EU to the new Rural Development Programme for England which will make just under £4 billion available to spend on farming and rural areas over the life of the Programme. A huge public investment in a public good – our countryside.
It will have social, economic and environmental benefits not just for rural communities but for all of us because it will support environment-friendly farming and improvements to the land that are good for wildlife and water quality, and which contribute to tackling climate change.
Around £3.3 billion will be allocated to agri-environment and land management schemes, including Environmental Stewardship. I know we’ve had to make some changes to the scheme, including the removal of the management plan options, to get EU agreement - the alternative was to jeopardise approval of the whole RDPE budget - we can celebrate that the scheme is largely unchanged. The Curry principles of a simple scheme open to all farmers in England have been safeguarded, with the remaining 58 scheme options meaning that all those who want to join should still be able to do so.
And I must say, the response from farmers has been magnificent, with over 30,000 now signed up covering nearly 5 million hectares in England - over half the available agricultural land. That’s what I call progress.
The Regional Development Agencies will give £600 million of support to farming, forestry and rural businesses.
All of this throws up the debate about land use. Land is a scarce resource like many others. The rise in our population – in the UK as well as worldwide – will intensify this pressure, and we will have as a society to adjudicate between competing claims. Land for food. Land for energy. Land for housing. Land for public enjoyment. Enabling all of these to co-exist will really test us!
Our fourth aim, and I’ll be brief about this, is an industry that works together in partnership and shares responsibility and costs.
This is not just rhetoric, even if some wish it was! Over the last few months I have seen first hand how effective we can be when we come together to deal with animal diseases. We have had people working with us who know all about the practicalities as they affect the livestock sector. People who helped prioritise what should be done on the ground and who could offer first class practical advice about licence conditions that enabled movements to take place wherever the level of risk allowed.
In the case of the Bluetongue Industry core group we developed a partnership plan for dealing with the disease in advance, so when we detected the first signs that it had arrived we were well prepared to take decisions together.
The three disease outbreaks we’ve experienced, in my view strengthens the need for, and illustrates the benefits of, the industry being much more deeply involved in the main policy and operational decisions and in contributing to the costs of those decisions in a fair way.
Now, I appreciate that many in the industry think this is a difficult - no, let’s be frank, a really bad - time to discuss this subject! But I would challenge any of you to point to a time in recent years which would have been a good time! And that’s why I am determined to work with you to move to a better system where the industry takes responsibility for managing disease. This is both right and needed, but suffice it to say that I mean it when I talk about this being the opportunity for everyone to contribute to the design of that new system at an important stage in its development.
Fifth, and finally, we all want an industry that is, above all, innovative, self-reliant, and successful.
The more I reflect on this, the more I think it’s a question of attitude of mind. I am struck forcibly by the dynamism and optimism of many in the industry, and we should hear more about farming’s successes and about its potential.
I continue to be impressed by the growth of the Fresh Start Academies across the country, and by what the Year of Food and Farming is achieving. The Long Clawson Dairy co-operative is now the largest independent producer of Stilton, making around a third of the UK’s production. John Geldard of Plumgarths, overall winner of the Farmers’ Weekly Farmer of the Year 2007, established his Hub 6 years ago as a way of marketing his own and other local farmers’ beef, sheep and free range eggs. Now it has a turnover of £5 million, supports 25 local producers, employs 21 staff, supplies over 250 branded products to Asda and more than 100 hotels and restaurants.
This story shows how to combine the skill of small farmers to deal with the big customers, including supermarkets. You could tell me stories too, and I want you to do so.
It’s pretty clear that farmers who understand their markets, who move up the value chain, who diversify, who connect better with their customers, who meet the growing demand for organic, local or seasonal food, and who find a way of getting their product to people – including using the internet- will prosper best. It is ironic perhaps that the decline of one home delivery system – the milkman – has coincided with the growth of other delivery networks from organic vegetable boxes to supermarket home delivery of the weekly shop which is great for customers and better for the planet.
But alongside all this vitality, I am also struck by the feeling of some in farming that it is somehow a victim of circumstances.
Peter Kendall’s New Year message asked me to give “a clear, unequivocal acknowledgement of the value of productive farming”. I gladly do so, Peter; it’s what this speech is all about, as was my speech at the Farming for the Future conference in November. David Miliband did so when he was at Defra. Indeed, I suspect every single holder of this office has done.
What I think Peter was articulating – rightly - is a feeling held by many that farming is undervalued, unappreciated and put upon. And of course there is an element of truth in all that. People in the industry work incredibly hard. The vagaries of the weather and the uncertainties of the market breed a wary toughness, and every difficulty can seem like a blow, especially those we cannot control. It also reflects a frustration at the loss of contact with the land of our increasingly urban society, which means that a majority of people have much less understanding of farming that their ancestors did.
But there is another way of seeing things. As society becomes more and more aware of the need for balance in life; as people take a greater interest in their food and where and how it is produced - you only have to see the growing success of the 550 farmers markets and the 4,000 or so farm shops – and as we see that living in harmony with the natural world is the only way for the future, farming has a wonderful opportunity here. Nine billion people, one planet and one chance to get it right.
An opportunity to remind us all that we literally depend on farmers for our lives - food doesn’t grow in supermarkets, it grows in the countryside of the world – and we could not survive without it. An opportunity to demonstrate that the industry has the capacity and the ideas to increase production to meet the challenge of a rising world population. An opportunity to encourage the next generation of farmers to come forth and take forward what this generation has built with the skills required for tomorrow’s agriculture.
Will everything look the same in fifty years time as it does now? No, of course it won’t; any more than a farmer from 500 years ago would recognise the way in which we farm today even if the basic principles haven’t changed. Farming, like humankind, has to adapt to prosper. But its history shows that farmers have the capacity and the skill and the knowledge and the understanding to do so.
And what of those of us who are not farmers ? Well our job is to support them. That’s what my job is about. That’s what I am committed to do. A partnership between government, people, and every part of the food and farming industry as it makes the transition to a different, and potentially even more thriving, future.
The future is either a threat or an opportunity, depending on how you see it. It’s true for all of us. It’s true for farming as well. And the sooner we face up to and shape that future in our own image, the better it will be.
Page last modified: 3 January 2008
Page published: 3 January 2008