Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Agriculture Bill (Third sitting).
11:35 Daniel Zeichner (Labour)
“In addition, nothing in any agreement will undermine the Government’s commitment to tackling climate change.” —[ Official Report , 6 February 2020; Vol. 671, c. 15WS.]
We lead the world with our commitment to net zero by 2040, so we look to that being honoured. That is an absolutely key statement to us going forward.
Dr Fenwick: In clause 36, which relates to organic products, subsection (5) makes it clear that it is possible to restrict or prohibit the import of organic products. That will be legislated for once the Bill becomes an Act. We would have expected an equivalent paragraph or provision relating to other production standards to have been incorporated in the Bill. It is there for organic, yet it is not there for all these other issues and in particular the key issue that John raised—our environmental and climate change obligations.
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12:24 Daniel Zeichner (Labour)
Q Since the earlier iteration of the Agriculture Bill, there has been wide acknowledgment that we face a climate crisis. As part of that, although clearly different in different parts of the country, there is a crisis around our soil, is there not? Could you say a little about how intense that is?
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12:25 Daniel Zeichner (Labour)
Gareth Morgan: I absolutely agree with the latter point. We may come on to the issue of trade equality later in the discussion, I imagine. There is simply no point in us exporting our production by forcing up standards here when we are importing products that are produced to low environmental and climate-change standards from other places. We urgently need to find a way to address that, because the tsunami of change that is about to hit farming in this country will not be able to withstand that, so we have to find a way of addressing that issue.
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12:31 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
Q Meeting net zero is a public good, looking at climate mitigation and adaptation. Do you feel the Bill could be stronger on that? My concern is that while in a sector like transport it is quite easy to make big policy moves that shift us, say, to electric vehicles, because there is only a small number of car companies, in agriculture there are lots of different types of farmers with a large geographical spread. How do you get them all working towards that net zero goal, and could the Bill be a mechanism to do that more effectively? I have not heard much from the National Farmers Union about the road map for getting there.
Gareth Morgan: It is fantastic that the NFU has taken the position of committing to an early net zero target for the agriculture and land use sector. That has shifted the debate enormously. Establishing the route map by which you do that is quite difficult. I am not entirely sure that a net zero clause in the Bill is the right way to go about it.
In several sectors—such as transport and energy generation—we have a clear idea about what that route map needs to be. Land use will be much more complicated. We do not know all the answers yet—for example, in the current argument about red meat, we are veering a different way each month. Setting a clear trajectory in farming to net zero in law could be counter-productive. The easiest way for us to go net zero in terms of land use in the UK is to stop farming and plant trees everywhere and import food off our balance sheet. That would be madness, but it could be an inadvertent consequence if we get the wrong sort of legal fix into law. I think the Bill could be more explicit about net zero and the need to achieve it, but we need to be careful about the way in which we phrase that.
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