Orders of the Day — Emergency Food Reserves

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 15 March 1951.

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Photo of Sir Archer Baldwin Sir Archer Baldwin , Leominster 12:00, 15 March 1951

I support what has just been said by my hon. Friend the Member for Angus, North, and Mearns (Mr. Thornton-Kemsley) about dehydrated vegetables, and the shortage of tinplate. It might be out of order, but it is important in stockpiling. The Minister of Agriculture was asked what he proposed to do to encourage the acreage of horticulture. The one thing to encourage production in horticulture is to make more tinplate available, so that when we get surplus cabbages, fruit, and what not they can be canned and put on the shelf, ready for the day when fresh supplies are not available. Unless something is done to protect horticulture and use the surplus on the year's production, that class of goods will decrease.

I want to take up the question of the stockpiling of food, not in silos at the ports nor in cold storage. I want to reinforce the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Angus, North, and Mearns, who called attention to the fact that the best place to stockpile food is on the farm. I want to call attention to the vulnerability of this country. If war comes, it will not be by the old-fashioned way of giving warning and withdrawing ambassadors. We may be faced with another Pearl Harbour, but before that Pearl Harbour our potential enemy, who is reputed to have a thousand long-range fast-moving submarines, will have submarines planted all over the world in the most likely spots on our lifelines. In other words, when the balloon goes up, those submarines will be in such a position that they can sweep our ships off the seas.

If that happens, what food reserves shall we have in this country? It would be interesting to know whether the Parliamentary Secretary can give us any idea of how long we can feed our people on the food that we have in the country at the present moment. I believe it would be rather startling if an accurate figure could be given. In three years we are to spend something like £4,700 million upon armaments and the training of soldiers. That is not the slightest good unless we have the food to feed the people, and I suggest that a little diversion of some of that vast sum of money towards the reclamation of our waste land would be of immense value. Not only would it be valuable for defence purposes in war-time but it would not be wasted as some or our armaments may be wasted if war does not come. We should reclaim that land whether we go to war or not. If we bring that land back into cultivation and produce more from it, it will be of lasting benefit to us.

To say that it is impossible is just nonsense. In many cases that land was producing hardy stock 80 years ago. Something like 11 million acres of land is designated as rough grazing in Britain today and it is admitted that at least five million acres can be brought back into production. Responsible people say that one million acres of land brought back into production would be capable of producing 250,000 store cattle, and that would mean an immense amount of meat for us. Some of that land could be made to grow corn.

It may not be appreciated that in Great Britain today we have only half the acreage under wheat that we had 80 years ago. Eighty years ago we had to rely on hand labour and forced ploughing, and in these days of machinery we ought to aim at a much bigger arable acreage than we have. Farmers generally will fight against that, but we ought to do it. I see hundreds of thousands of acres about the country which were not even used for arable purposes during the war. When I make a journey through the Cotswolds, I see field after field which has never been ploughed up. That land ought to be tackled and we ought to grow more food here not only for defence purposes in the event of war but to save us from starvation.

In regard to the suggestion that we should grow more corn in this country, I would add that we should stockpile it on the farm. One or two hon. Members have made that point. The hon. Member for Norfolk, South-West (Mr. Dye), did so. The hon. Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot) also did so, and he gave us some interesting comparisons. He spoke of the position in 1939 compared with that in 1951 and said what a great job the Socialist Party had done. He should do a little more research, and go back to 1929–31, when 750,000 acres of land went out of cultivation and 55,000 agricultural labourers left the land. Some figures can be made to prove anything, but those are the facts of what happened during the time of the Socialist Government between 1929–31.

The way to keep the grain and the meat of this country distributed is to have differential prices. The hon. Member for Norfolk, South-West, made that point, and I made it in the defence debate last autumn. To an overwhelming extent today we are threshing out our grain on the field with the combine harvester. If farmers can sell the grain they do so, because it is then out of the way and free from pests. The Minister of Food and the Minister of Agriculture should get together and so arrange their prices that it will pay farmers to store their grain, when they have threshed it, on their own farms. That would do away with the expensive building of silos. Many farm buildings are not fully occupied. If attention were paid to them and the walls were reinforced, some of the old-fashioned buildings could be converted into silos for the storage of grain at very little expense and it would be possible to keep the grain free from interference by pests, which is one of our biggest troubles.

The same argument applies to our livestock. We cannot build sufficient cold storage accommodation for all the food necessary to feed this country in time of emergency, but we could cultivate our land and have that stock in every quarter of Great Britain. It would be safe from the enemy and it would be a reserve to be called upon when we wanted it. Sooner or later the country will have to face this. I beg the Government to look at the matter and give it very serious attention. Instead of building new towns when we already have more towns than we can possibly support in the future, let the Government build decent cottages in the countryside, where the hardy men and women who have made this country a great nation——