Report of Scientists for Labour Joint Meeting with Socialist Environment and Resources Association

Can a scientific approach make agriculture more sustainable?

Held on 16 May 2002 in the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House, Westminster

Dr Joe Perry (Rothamsted and SfL) Chaired the first session.

Introduction Joe described sustainability of agriculture as difficult to define. The recent Curry Report failed to provide its own definition, but the usual quote is a variant of the Brundlandt Report definition that requires us to “meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.A preferable variant is Chris Patten’s Reith Lecture definition: “Farming as though we were intending to stay for good, not just visiting for the weekend”. Alastair Leake will tell us about Integrated Farm Management, a real opportunity to merge the best of two worlds: the ethos of environmentally-sensitive methods enshrined in the organic zero-chemical approach, with the proven production and efficiency of intensive agriculture – all combined in a sustainable, evidence-based, low-input system. Alastair has the best qualifications to inform us – he is himself a farmer with green credentials, and the organisation for whom he works, the Game Conservancy, has provided priceless data on biodiversity in arable ecosystems for 30 years, and punches far above its weight in its research into farming and conservation through wise use.

But our first speaker is Professor Chris Pollock. Chris is Director of the Institute for Grassland and Environmental Research, based in Wales. Their research covers the full range of agriculture, from their work with organic dairy herds and the Organic Centre Wales, through their Biodiversity group, to applying cytogenetic techniques to develop new crop varieties. Chris is on the Government Committee ACRE and is Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee that is overseeing the GM Farm Scale Evaluations. From his perspective that the entire landscape of Britain is now a managed ecosystem, Chris believes that any conservation has therefore to act in concert with the agriculture of the region”.

Chris Pollock, Director of IGER "From Iron Age Forest Clearance to the Farm Scale Trials; Assessing How Agriculture has affected Biodiversity"

All agriculture involves habitat destruction and disturbance, with a landscape from Cardiganshire which contains no climax vegetation. Chris contrasted arable ecosystems in which products are removed with climax ecosystems in which material is recycled. He looked at historical trends in species diversity, moving from the Bronze Age and deforestation up to the much larger changes since 1900, caused by habitat loss and intensification of agriculture. He illustrated the continuum from habitat loss to habitat degradation with joint studies between the British Trust for Ornithology, CEH and IGER. These studies had shown the relationship between the intensity of production and the number of seed-eating birds in grassland. He summarised by saying that the biodiversity changes had occurred not because farmers had used too many inputs, but that they had just become too good at farming and too efficient with their land use. The answer is to reduce efficiency in a planned way, to cut back production, and to manage for habitat restoration. Among the novel practices that could aid this are integrated pest management and herbicide-tolerant crops. Chris finished with an overview of the farm-scale evaluations, describing them as a ‘win-win’ experiment providing a valuable large data-set which would be freely available, and allow a modelling framework to examine the impact of altered agricultural practices.

Alistair Leake (Game Conservancy) "Integrated Farm Management"

Alistair Leake began by describing his experiences with organic farming. He mentioned the Food Standards Agency report which claimed no evidence that organic foods were any healthier than conventional, and detailed the use of heavy metals such as copper sulfate that organic farmers use to control potato blight. He mentioned organic weed control and noted that mechanical methods could harm nesting birds, and that flame control may destroy beneficial species. Alistair is closely associated with the organisation LEAF.  He has not used a full strength chemical input for eight years because he and other LEAF farmers use integrated crop management (sometimes called integrated pest management). This uses less inputs than conventional farming but is cheaper and the yields, while somewhat lower, are still good. He then showed a sequence of studies from Allerton Farm which illustrated the great benefits to biodiversity. The system involves a very heterogeneous mix of crops with set-aside in strips. Hedges are conserved with few cuts. Field margins are widened with grass swards or conservation headlands. Beetle banks are built up to encourage beneficial insects and there is habitat for harvest mice and arable weed flowers. Gamekeepers who manage the land for shoots ensure that wild life is retained in margins, while the yield in the centre of the fields is virtually identical to those in intensive systems. Bird abundance has recovered very quickly and song thrushes are at the carrying capacity of the farm. Brown hare numbers have also improved. Alistair’s view of the future included the possibility of reduced tillage by direct drilling, management of crop architecture for skylarks and conservation strategies for rare arable plants.

Anne Campbell MP Chaired the second session.

Professor Tony Trewavas FRS (Edinburgh University) "Looking into the future with GM and the environment"

Gave a personal view of the future, including the possibilities for GM. He began by recalling that the green revolution had fed ca. one billion people in third world countries through advances in plant breeding for dwarf rices and wheats. These had been developed in publicly-funded CGIAR Institutes. Importantly, these high yielding crops had avoided environmental degradation because without them, half the world’s forests would have been needed to be removed to achieve equivalent yield increases. Norman Borlaug, the Nobel prize winner, and Jim Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, had both supported the protection of nature through high-yield farming. Admittedly, the advantages of GM technology were now more associated with big business, partly because agricultural research now received less public funding than in 1970’s. However, he pointed to China as a country where public funding of GM crop research was forging ahead. China has 2000 scientists devoted to producing new GM crops and there are seventeen types currently under development. These include rice which is resistant to major insect pests and insect-resistant cotton. Tony reported that one million hectares of GM crops are farmed by subsistence farmers in China on fields of one hectare or less. Further initiatives includes GM rice that fixes CO₂ which is good for efficiency, forests and biodiversity, and GM vaccines in food such as cholera vaccine expressing bananas. Other non-GM technologies will do much for the Third World in the future. These will include the use of chloroplast for transformation and seed that contains ovidin. These will allow very high protein expression, improved storage and improved safety characteristics. Tony mentioned the importance of resilience in society produced by growth in scientific knowledge and communication. He ended with a plea to re-affirm our belief in the creative intellect, and a reversal of the commercial entanglements which have deformed the public value of scientific advice.

Vicki Hird (Sustain)

Vicki outlined Sustain's role, an alliance of 105 organisations concerned with agriculture and food. Vicki explained how Sustain provides a non-confrontational framework to discuss research. In the light of BSE, obesity and intensive farming, there is a need for a new science strategy, and called for more funding for organic farming which DEFRA only give £2 million per annum in support. She also called for LINK proposals (those with agriculture/industry involvement) to be based more on sustainable production, care for the environment and increased shelf life of products. Vicki criticised current research funding strategies that focussed on GM crops, and called for increases in the genetic diversity of food.

Sue Mayer (Gene Watch)

Sue called for a debate on the conditions in which GM foods could be acceptable. She criticised the FSA for not measuring yields, and noted the small number of varieties of herbicide-tolerant crops now grown in the USA and Canada, and the dependence of their farmers on a few multi-national corporations. This, she claimed, had led to gene stacking in Canola. She noted that after laboratory studies had shown toxic effects of GM crops on Monarch butterfly larvae, there had been an enormous effort in ecological research that had led to a downplaying of the importance of this issue. It turned out that ecologically there was less of a real problem than the laboratory studies had implied there would be. This demonstrated a lack of care in the original risk assessment, and in turn cast doubt on the efficacy of the original registration process. She finished with a discussion of the implications of monopolies, and the dangers of gene patenting.

Rt. Hon. Margaret Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)

The Minister stressed the DEFRA theme of sustainable development to balance environmental, social and economic concerns. She put this more prosaically as ‘live as if you are going to die tomorrow; farm as if you are going to live for ever’. She emphasised how large an issue science was within DEFRA and that the DEFRA Chief Scientist – Professor Howard Dalton FRS - is a full member of the DEFRA Board. Several specific areas were highlighted, including animal health and climate change. The DEFRA approach is to use scientific input and integrate well into policy. Mrs Beckett affirmed that evidence-based policy was the way forward in which scientific advice based on real data was crucial. Other DEFRA initiatives involve horizon-scanning and the Curry report. The Minister wanted to ensure that farmers become reconnected with their consumers, link which had been broken by agricultural subsidies. Mrs Beckett stressed that the CAP must be reformed as it damages the environment, and that it would be reformed because the EU was set for wide-expansion, and because of World Trade Organisation rules. She finished by mentioning the importance by which DEFRA attaches to whole-farm systems research.

There followed a series of questions from the floor in which the Minister affirmed her support for the evidence-based approach, and her appreciation of the difficulties that scientists had in communicating their results to policy makers and the public. In this, she gave a clear preview for Prime Minister Blair’s speech on science the following week.