Lord Carter of Coles
The EU Committee of the House of Lords has today published a report on “Innovation in EU Agriculture”. It is the result of an inquiry carried out over the last year by the EU Sub-Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment, which I chair.
We are calling on Europe to act quickly and coherently to transform EU agriculture, and to make it ready for a new era when global food security is a prime concern. The debate is underway about the future of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP): our report offers some clear pointers.
The trend of the last decade in the EU has been to limit farm production. In our report, we call for the EU to recognise that the prime focus of agricultural policy must now be to raise productivity, while supporting environmental sustainability and innovation.
The world’s population is expected to grow, from 7 billion at present to 9 billion by 2050. Agricultural production has to increase, not only to feed more people and to keep prices down, but also to respond to a world-wide demand for better nutrition.
Higher output has to be achieved using finite resources, and tackling the problems of climate change. Farmers must reduce their use of fossil fuels, and change practices that contribute to the emission of greenhouse gases.
That is the challenge – and we see innovation as essential to enabling agriculture to meet it.
Scientific research is at the heart of the response that is needed. Europe is an intellectual powerhouse, but individual Member States and the EU collectively must do much more to strengthen European research. It is unacceptable that agricultural research funding at the EU level is under €2 billion over seven years, while the agricultural policy budget is around €400 billion.
The European Commission must make a co-ordinated drive to raise agricultural research to a new level. The Commission has proposed a European Innovation Partnership on sustainable and productive agriculture. The proposal is a recognition of the need to do more: we support it, on the understanding that the Partnership moves ahead quickly and generates actions, not just words.
We think that funding for agriculture under the EU’s Research Programme should be boosted by reducing the proportion of the EU budget devoted to supporting the CAP. Within the remaining, still substantial, agricultural budget, funds should be partially re-allocated towards innovation.
It is equally important that innovative knowledge is put into practice. This is not happening systematically across the EU. Member States, including the UK, should improve advice to the agricultural sector. Financing of farm advice is a decision for Member States, but greater resources could be made available under Pillar 2 of the CAP to support the provision of advice.
A Farm Advisory System has been set up under the CAP, but so far its role has been limited to advising farmers on “cross-compliance” with a number of environmental requirements. We call for its role to be expanded, in order to stimulate innovative practice in agriculture.
The European Commission will receive a report next year from a working group on agricultural knowledge and innovation systems, and we look to Member States and the Commission to consider and act on that report. Such action is needed to improve mechanisms for getting innovation from the laboratory into the field, and in strengthening partnerships between government, scientists, farmers, other industry, retailers and consumers.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on these issues…
I will kick this off with first asking why the public are not being told the truth about GM products and the ramifications on health, as well as the silence over cloned food being sold to them without the right of the people to know ‘by label’ this is what it contains? It must be clear to us all what this food can do to our bodies in the long term and especially to our children.
The fact that these products are imported from the USA and Europe was ‘forced’ to accept the conditions of their sale this way. Why is that? And what else are you importing under this code of silence?
Blood being one of them.
Labeling is not a requirement and this ruling was passed in Europe over the last couple of months. And at the back of it, the Baroness Ashton.
I will have a lot more to say on these matters in the near future.
http://www.nwrage.org/content/why-gmo-foods-have-failed-producing-healthy-food-more-people
http://www.thiele-und-thiele-consult.de/press/genetically-modified-foods-and-seeds-unsafe-and-unhealthy_us.html
And the truth on cloned food.
http://www.ukprogressive.co.uk/eu-member-states-insist-on-no-labeling-or-banning-of-cloned-meat/article12403.html
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/mar2008/db2008033_119633.htm
I am delighted to read the noble Lord Coles’ opinions.
I am mindful of the desperate plight of the 1/2m people in a refugee city in Northern Kenya.
The flight to the cities, due to agrarian/industrial revolution in Somalia, took 100 years in the UK.
With the use of machine guns, and the prospect of wider use of farm harvesting machinery, in such a country, their revolutions may have taken only 18 months.
The famine is man made, whatever TV pictures may tell us.
Is it the city of Mombasa or Nairobi, which is already a Kenya shanty town of several million people, whilst rose farmers send extra cheap jack roses to all the country markets of UK? Where is the food?
It would be good to have minimum prices for European grain and then to dump it back in Africa! It is a globalist world.
Tell me more Noble Lord!
The European Commission is only effective when a common need can be identified. Its laws are premised on this notion. Given the power of the farming lobby in individual member states migrating know-how from one to another would work to disadvantage competiveness. Perhaps this is the reason why progress is slow?
Serious documentaries such as “How Many People Can Live On Planet Earth” and “Ecopolis” report that all possible agricultural land areas around the World are already taken up;
in short, there are no new agricultural land areas available.
Worse, the nutrient-quality and quantity of these agricultural and horticultural land-areas has already been very seriously depleted: millions of hectares have already been “clapped out”.
Today’s 7 billion population is planned to become 11 billion by 2050, and will require three(3) Earths-worth of lifesupports just to remain at today’s 2011 unsatisfactory standards.
Is this true ?
What size of world-population should be in-train ?
And how would such select or elite population be conserved and sufficiently developed to become capable of far-distant-future space-migration and colonisation ?
How could GM, or the “Ecopolis” high-rise vegetable-growing Towers help ?
1058F080711.JSDM.
@Miles:
What government wants to conceal from the public goes against all the talk of fighting against climate change and the pollution they tell us we must pay over the odds for. It is an American franchise that will fatten the pockets of the US stockbrokers as well as some of our own.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2o4bFi4k0fg
The human caused environmental damage is creating the situation we find ourselves in. GM is not the way out of this mess.
http://healthaccess-ywca.com/2011/06/16/genetically-modified-food-toxins-found-in-the-blood-of-93-of-unborn-babies/
http://www.anh-europe.org/campaigns/say-no-to-gm
Intensive farming and what it is doing to us all.
Animals filled with chemicals and given to us to eat are creating a health hazard we are not allowed to know about. The feeding of the world is not the reason for this horror. It is the making of higher profits and the growing of futures for investors to raise their profit margins.
The population of the world has to regulate itself naturally. Which is the only way forward.
http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/VIDEO/
The answer is not to eat animals since much of the rampant disease of human beings since the days of the hunter gatherer, has been caused by crossover diseases between species.
Even HIV/Aids is said to be from the baboon, though we do not eat them!
Again primitivism is the answer to that particular problem. Anti-consumerism, leading directly to growin’ yer own! Then you can choose wot to eat, and wot not!
The rarity value of meat diet would then become obvious.
@Twm O’r:
So if Aids wasn’t transferred via ‘eating’ baboon, what are you suggesting the cross over was via? Here they suggest Zoonosis.
http://www.avert.org/origin-aids-hiv.htm
I was glad to see the comments on my blog about our report into innovation in EU agriculture.
As far as GM crops are concerned, I agree that the picture about their benefits and drawbacks is not clear. With GM crops, and with any innovative technologies, it is right that consumers should be able to rely on balanced information. Provided this is done, I think it’s important that the door is kept open to advances that can help agriculture meet the challenges ahead.
As regards hunger in the developing world, of course there are many reasons for the problems. But climatic conditions are very important, and research being done in Europe can make a valuable contribution to solving some of these problems.
It clearly is the case that the expected increase in the world’s population will exacerbate the problems. Governments and policy-makers have to consider the implications of population increase in many areas, but, if we can devise and implement innovation that is environmentally sustainable, agriculture has a central role to play.
As to obstacles to the sharing of innovative knowledge, we do have to keep our eyes open to the impact of competitive behaviour. But we have seen powerful evidence that the research community across the EU is working together on agricultural innovation, and I am in no doubt that, with more financial and policy support from the EU, such co-operation could become even more effective.
I spoke about the report at a Westminster Forum seminar earlier this week. We’ve posted my speech on our website:
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/eu-sub-com-d/innovation/LordCarterWestminsterforum120711.pdf
What I find a huge eye opener is, Bill Gates is heavily invested in the GM producing company, Monsanto. So, akin to other billionaires, it would appear it is in his interests to promote the products Monsanto want to move off their shelves. This company uses XE mercenaries to help market their GM products in the third world.
Would you call this philanthropy or something else?
On top of that, Bill and Melinda Gates have been at talks with our Downing Street leaders regarding the tax payers funded and ring fenced Foreign Aid to the third world. Now does that bring up a feeling of vested interests at work here? What could be the reason for this visit?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1321671/Bill-Gates-dresses-meeting-David-Cameron.html
Why are unelected people from the USA being consulted on the Foreign Aid policy of the UK government? And why are those who have an interest in selling unhealthy and contaminated GM products globally being courted by Europe and the UK?
Is our government intending to spend our tax payers money on Monsanto products? And if so, why, where and what for?