Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Genetic Technology (Precision Breeding) Bill (Second sitting).
14:44 Jo Churchill
Professor Napier: Nigel and I are veterans of the GM of the ’90s, the problems that emerged from that and the hiatus of seeing none of our research translated for a decade. Then, at Rothamsted, we restarted GM field trials in 2012, just because we realised that there was this urgent need to translate the research. The UK has a fantastic reputation for doing basic plant sciences, making lots of fantastic discoveries in labs, but that is no good to feed people or to solve the challenges of climate change and food security. You cannot eat promise; you really need a product.
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14:55 Daniel Zeichner (Labour)
Professor Napier : I think it was mentioned earlier that with innovation, it probably needs to be developed as a public-private partnership, which sort of implies that there needs to be a market pull. Using the term “market” can be slightly perturbing because, in reality, the drivers for what we want to see translated are much bigger than the economics. They are things like global climate change, food security and all the global pandemics associated with malnutrition and overconsumption. Those are the challenges enshrined in sustainable development goals and things like that. Those are the things that we should be occupying ourselves with. We need to use everything we can to try to fix those challenges. Rothamsted and other places like that—in fact, everybody—should be working towards those goals and overcoming those challenges.
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15:05 Clive Lewis (Labour)
I am interested in your views, as individuals who operate in the private-public sphere. When it comes to food security and the climate crisis, I would have thought that profit maximisation will probably not be the route map to solving those problems. What is going to be needed is a private-public partnership where we get the best of both, but some things may cost more. It is going to cost us to tackle the climate crisis; it is going to cost us to ensure that we can feed the world with a climate crisis in the 21st century, so it is even more important that we get the regulatory framework right and that it is robust. Freedom from regulations for businesses means freedoms against consumers, the public and those who do not have access to those sciences to be able to utilise them.
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15:24 Jo Churchill
We noted that the Regulatory Policy Committee has raised a red flag about the impact assessment—I am sure that it has been discussed before. We found that the impact assessment had overlooked three crucial areas: first, clearly, the freedom of choice for citizens; secondly, the needs and interests of organic agroecological farmers and growers, who have a key role to play in the Government’s ambitions for a sustainable farming transition; and, thirdly, the impact on the Government’s ability to achieve their own really important legal biodiversity and climate targets, and to address their professed concern about animal welfare and their desire to improve those welfare standards.
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15:55 Jo Churchill
Q Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome. I will go for a broad-brush question. What impact do you think the Bill could have in terms of the benefits from translating research and freeing up research and development? Given your experience in particular, Professor Oldroyd, how will it help to address challenges such as food security, climate change and so on?
I believe that gene editing is equivalent to what you can achieve from conventional natural processes, but the level of precision that it provides allows us to do things in a way that we could not—or found it difficult to do—when restricted to only what is available in the natural diversity of that crop. It really does allow us to move things from the lab to the field to the consumer in a manner that is much more straightforward, to apply the phenomenal knowledge that we have developed in plant research in the UK over the last 30 or 40 years, and really to drive what I believe is a crucial transformation in food production. We have phenomenal challenges facing us: we have to feed a growing population, drive sustainability and cope with climate change, all over the next 30 years. That is not easy and we cannot do it with our hands tied behind our backs.
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16:15 Clive Lewis (Labour)
I do not think that is a model that I would want to apply to food. Some of us would like to see something more robust that did not make the mistakes that we have made on pharmaceuticals, for example. Food supply is critical, especially as we move through the 21st century with the climate crisis and a growing population. When I was asking you questions as a BBC journalist a long time ago, I was always struck by your passion for the science and for communicating the science. As currently constructed, does the Bill provide the protections we need? Outside your laboratories, away from the pure science, there are free-market corporations for which the bottom line is the end game and the main driver. Do you feel that this science is beyond abuse and beyond being used in the same way that perhaps big pharma have cornered those markets?
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Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
Q You have said that you are funded by the Government for some of your work. To what extent is that related to potentially boosting economic growth by making these crops more profitable for farmers, or to what extent is it about achieving public policy objectives? I am thinking particularly about the drive towards net zero. Is that ever put to you? I am thinking about measures to improve soil quality and, in that way, carbon sequestration. Let us take a potato, which takes an awful lot out of the soil in nutrients and so on. Are you looking at that sort of thing in the broader sense?
Dr Harrison: I echo that. For the UKRI-funded research that NIAB delivers there are two key components. One is scientific discovery. When you are working in crops, that is about strategic discoveries of things that are important to the strategic objectives of the research councils. Of course, BBSRC is the primary funder of agricultural research in the UK. It is absolutely in that zone of looking at how crop science and net zero intersect and how we can generate more sustainable farming systems. Much of the research, even if it is discovery and frontier bioscience, always has a strategic element to it.
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Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
Q The Government have been criticised for not having a net zero strategy for agriculture but you would say that there is a clear direction coming to you that it should be there.
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Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
Professor Oldroyd: In the case of my research, we hope that what we are testing right now in the field are lines that will be productive at lower levels of treatment of phosphate as a component of fertiliser. By that it is absolutely measurable how much fertiliser you are putting on the field relative to your productivity. The landscape for subsidies for farming is changing rapidly, and I think within that there are great opportunities for incentives for farmers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and sequester more carbon in the soil. The challenge will be how you measure that, and it is probably going to be by encouraging farming practices that we know on average reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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