Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Agriculture Bill (Fifth sitting).
Dr Drew
The Opposition will move amendments to bring into the Bill the areas that are not covered. Later today, for example, we will move an amendment on climate change, which is not formally mentioned in the Bill, just as it was not mentioned in the Budget speech yesterday. Given the role that emissions play in agriculture, we think that it is essential that climate change is addressed in the Bill.
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10:16 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
I think there is a consensus, at least on the Conservative Front Bench, that soil health is incredibly important and under threat. It should be specifically added to the list of public goods because it is critical to biodiversity, productivity, and mitigating and adapting to climate change—we have not mentioned that yet. The carbon sequestration function of soil is incredibly important. The hon. Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy) said in the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee:
The “Ten years for agroecology” project in Europe, which was led by top scientific experts, shows that agro-ecology can address the apparent dilemma of producing adequate quantities of food while protecting biodiversity and natural resources and mitigating climate change. Although it is seen as a bit niche, France has become one of the first industrialised nations to make agro-ecology a central plank of its agriculture policy. In 2014, a law was passed to promote agro-ecological approaches actively. It set a target of implementing such approaches on 200,000 French farms by 2025.
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10:36 Dr Drew
It is important that we have this debate. I support the important agro-ecological points of my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East, because we are giving the Bill some substance. We disagree with the Government: we need examples of how such agricultural improvement will work and how to deliver it. Many others support the amendments, as my hon. Friend said, such as the Soil Association. In its written evidence, which we have all looked at, the Landworkers’ Alliance very much encouraged this direction of travel, to see how agriculture can be improved, made sustainable and meet our sustainable development goals. We will talk in detail later about climate change, which is central to this debate.
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10:53 Dr Drew
“limiting greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture or horticulture or encouraging activities that reduce such emissions or remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, or”.
This amendment would add to the purposes for which financial assistance can be given that of limiting greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture or horticulture or encouraging activities that reduce such emissions or remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere .
I shall endeavour to speed up a little, but again this is an important part of the legislation because it refers to climate change. To be fair to the Minister, climate change appears in subsection (1)(d), which refers to
“mitigating or adapting to climate change”.
Again, this is important. If we are serious about a new Agriculture Act, we ought to be serious about how it impinges on climate change. Those are not my words but the words of Lord Deben, that well-known socialist former MP, now in the Lords, John Gummer. Some in the Committee heard, as I did, what he said in the Attlee Room when he introduced the report of the Committee on Climate Change. He was rather scathing about the way in which agriculture has failed to meet its targets for reducing emissions. He was overall pretty sceptical about the Government’s performance—as he can afford to be, given how deep-seated he is in this place—and was particularly critical of agricultural emissions having flatlined, which is not good enough.
The Opposition make no apology for tabling the amendment. We have done so to give some bite to the Bill and make climate change the fulcrum of how agriculture performs so that we see those improvements. Not only have agricultural emissions in general flatlined, but net carbon sequestration from forestry has flatlined. The United Nations has produced a report through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying, “Forget 2 degrees. We should be worried about even approaching 1.5 degrees.” We can play our part by being serious about this issue and passing this simple amendment to ensure that we can do what clause 1(1)(d) says:
“mitigating or adapting to climate change”.
I hope the Minister will take note of what we are saying. The amendment is a minor change in wording but makes the important statement that agriculture has to play its part in dealing with climate change. As Gilles Deprez said when giving evidence to this Committee, he strongly believes that farmers are already paying the price for climate change, and dealing with it is not just something that they should do for the wider community. They are already suffering the effects of climate change, as we have seen this year with the drought. I am not saying that droughts are anything other than climatic occurrences that have happened through the ages, but those climatic events—whether floods, drought, or very cold winters that mean that farmers are unable to plant when they want to, let alone harvest when it is very wet—come around far too regularly for them to be anything other than an aspect of climate change.
I hope we can reach some agreement on this issue. Given who sits in the House of Lords, those Lords will spend an awful lot of time talking about this aspect of agriculture, so the Minister might as well be prepared. He cannot influence proceedings in the Lords, but whoever takes this through—presumably Lord Gardiner—will be spending a lot of time trying to deal with various people, whom we could name, who will be saying, “Come on—sort this out. We need to have some words in the Bill that show how agriculture is prepared to play its part in dealing with climate change.”
We know that farmers do not necessarily have the resources, expertise or access to investment that they need, so again, let us hope that that is where the money will go. It is crucial to deliver the budget in a way that allows farmers to make those changes. We heard in a previous debate about agro-ecology that this issue is linked to soil quality, water management and the way in which farming systems need to change to take account of emissions. Not including this amendment in the Bill would be a missed opportunity, and again I make no apology for introducing it. Climate change has to be taken seriously, including in the Bill.
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10:59 George Eustice
“mitigating or adapting to climate change”.
“limiting greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture or horticulture or encouraging activities that reduce such emissions or remove greenhouse gas from the atmosphere”—
can be summarised as “mitigating climate change”, and we already have that term in subsection (1)(d).
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11:02 Jenny Chapman
I am not completely convinced by the Minister’s response. Mitigating is about lessening the impact of climate change. It is not about preventing it. We are trying to reduce emissions and the impact on climate change of agriculture and horticulture. They are different things. It is not true that the only difference is the length of the sentence.
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11:03 George Eustice
On the terminology, we are not talking about mitigating the consequences of climate change. The subsection is very clearly about mitigating climate change itself. Any action that is taken to reduce carbon emissions and the emission of other greenhouse gases—ammonia is a very important one in agriculture—would be mitigating climate change. The subsection also includes the phrase “adapting to climate change” in recognition of the fact that, as Gilles Deprez pointed out in the evidence session, we are already living with the consequences. For instance, we recognise that we tend to have more floods, so we may need schemes to manage the implications of that. “Mitigating climate change” means what it says. It can include any actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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11:04 George Eustice
I do not agree. We recognise that climate change is happening, and everything we are doing to tackle it is about mitigating an event that we recognise is happening. Our efforts to change the mix of our energy, reduce carbon emissions, encourage the uptake of electric vehicles and so on, are all about mitigating the problem of climate change. Subsection (1)(d) has a very clear purpose, and it enables us to do all the things that the amendment seeks to achieve. I hope we can use this debate to clarify that. I have given a long list of the types of interventions that we intend to explore, pursue and pilot under subsection (1)(d).
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11:05 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
I am slightly disturbed by something the Minister said almost in passing. He seemed to be saying that the only problematic issue relating to the importing of soya is the shipping miles. I hope he has read the evidence, including the UN report “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, work by Chatham House and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report last week, that shows that the carbon footprint of the industry goes way beyond shipping miles.
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11:06 Dr Drew
What the Minister says is laudable, but it takes us back to the problem of powers and duties. The Secretary of State does not have to do any of this. The simple fact is that, according to the Committee on Climate Change, agricultural emissions are not on track to deliver the carbon budget savings required by 2022. Amendment 50 may be wordy, it may be an addition and—as my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington says—it may lead us to argue about what “mitigation” means, but we tabled it because at the moment there is no guarantee that agriculture will play its part in dealing with climate change.
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