Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Agriculture Bill (Fourth sitting).
14:02 The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (George Eustice)
We have talked about having some sort of way in which governance can be defined at local or even regional level, so that you are both covering landscape or catchment-scale outcomes where possible, and making sure that you are truly covering the environmental outcomes that we need to see, including on climate change. That means covering not just edge-of-field features that might be very visible, but also making sure to cover in-field farming systems. We would like to see an outcome that supports agro-ecological systems, such as organic and whole-farm systems that truly look in the field to tackle some of the worst pollution and environmental problems.
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14:12 Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)
These are things that we know need to happen: we know we need to tackle climate change, soil erosion, animal health and welfare, antibiotic use and obesity. They are all big crises that we need to deliver on, but there is no obligation in the Bill to tackle those things. Ministers want to, but it could all fall apart. It would be adding duties and the responsibility to do those things and the ability to draw down a budget against assessment of needs from all those things, so that the Bill delivers the truly sustainable, healthy, nature-friendly farming that we know we can deliver—a lot of farmers are doing it. The Bill could be truly great if it had those duties, rather than lots of enabling.
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14:24 Dr Drew
In my view, all of this is leading to more place-based systems of integrated management of land and the biosphere. One way or another, with bottom-up partnerships or with some level of regional sensitivity, we have to manage regional diversity in the land base of the UK. That means the landholders and stakeholders being fostered to come together in different ways, not necessarily through a top-down, dirigiste infrastructure, but to develop whole tracts of land—not just a farm, but whole regions—such that we have catchments and regions that are much more sustainable and that are delivering the big goals on climate change as well as individual farm landscape. There is a big institutional challenge here to get local diversity and regional diversity at the heart of these sorts of policies.
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15:36 Martin Whitfield
Jonnie Hall: Certainly from NFU Scotland’s point of view, we would echo the views that you probably heard from the National Farmers Union of England and Wales, on Tuesday of this week and in other submissions: that the Bill does not really spell out the need for an agricultural policy that underpins food production of the highest standards—animal welfare and health, as well as environmental—and how we bring those things together. Food production and the environment do go hand in hand, and our thinking about post-CAP agricultural policy is about how we drive productivity improvements. At the same time, such improvements contribute to environmental challenges around such things as climate change, water quality, biodiversity, habitats and so on.
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