Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)

My Lords, I sincerely thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and the committee for forcing to the forefront an issue on which it has long been evident that action is urgently needed in the UK and around the world. I join the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, in saying that we have had a comprehensive introduction to a comprehensive report. But because I am a Green, I am going to go further and get into some broader systematic and international issues before coming back to some of the key points, which have already been raised but need to be stressed. I thank the Sustainable Nitrogen Alliance for its excellent briefing on this issue, which starts by describing the nitrogen paradox: something so essential to life and food production is also a major pollutant. It is a threat to the life and well-being of humans in the UK, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, just set out, and to the health and well-being of the ecosystems on which we are all ultimately dependent. Nitrogen makes a perfect case study for the current broken state of our food system—indeed, our current broken economic system. It shows the disastrous outcome of producing more, selling more and consequently dumping more into the environment. Noble Lords may be aware of the brilliant little video “The Story of Stuff”. You could make a similar, if perhaps for some tastes a little too excrement-filled, video about nitrogen. It goes right through to the adverts that noble Lords in the Committee have almost certainly seen today, plugging ultra-processed food-like substances sold wrapped in plastic and shouting in large letters “high protein” as though they were health foods. This is despite the fact that protein consumption in the UK is around 1.5 times our dietary needs, with the resultant nitrogen-rich waste flowing into the sewage system, into wastewater treatment plants and, all too often, directly into our rivers and seas. We know that these products and advertisements for them are damaging our public environmental health, yet away they blaze. As comprehensive and informed as the committee’s report is, that may be stretching beyond the direct topic of today, although it is essential to it. I will go back to what noble Lords might call “the other end”, and something that has already been raised several times: the Haber-Bosch process. The so-called miracle that enabled the “green revolution”—I am putting that in scare quotes as it used vast quantities of fossil fuels to produce nitrogen fertiliser that would further heat the planet, destroy soil ecosystems and enable the development of industrial food systems disastrous for human health—was anything but green. With the greatest respect, I have to respond directly to the contribution of the noble Earl, Lord Leicester. He said—of course, he is right—that, if you put the same crop in the same field in the same farming system and you put more or less nitrogen on it, you get differences in yield. Of course you do, because that is the primitive system of outdated 20th-century science behind our current arable farming systems. The noble Earl also spoke about crop rotations but we need far broader rotations. We are going to need many different crops in the climate change world that we are in now. We need agro-ecological systems that work with nature instead of trying to turn it into a factory. I point the Committee to a single book that sets this direction of travel out very clearly: Miraculous Abundance, whose subtitle is One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers, and Enough Food to Feed the World. It uses the fact that plants have evolved on land over some 500 million years to get their nitrogen and other essential nutrients by working co-operatively with fungi and bacteria in immensely complex systems. What we have done is throw nitrogen and other chemicals on those soils and destroyed those systems—then we have nutrient-deficient plants.