§ 5.4 P.m.
§ VISCOUNT BLEDISLOE had the following notice on the Paper: To ask His Majesty's Government whether, in the best interests of commercial fruit-growing in Great Britain, they will consider the advisability of appointing a small Commission to visit the overseas Dominions and the United States, in order to investigate, and report upon, their methods of grading, packing and marketing the fruit crops.
§ The noble Viscount said: My Lords, I am conscious of something in the nature of an anti-climax, in asking your Lordships to pass from the consideration of international ethics to the economics of fruit-growing and missionary overseas investigation as a vital concomitant of profitable orchard husbandry. I am asking the Government whether, in the best interests of commercial fruit-growing in Great Britain, they will consider the advisability of appointing a small Commission to visit the overseas Dominions and the United States in order to investigate and report upon their methods of grading, packing and marketing the fruit crops. The justification for such a mission is strongest and most obvious in the case of the apple crop. Before the war, whatever was the size of the home apple crop, the importations of apples amounted to from 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 hundredweights. These apples were preferred by our home retailers to home-grown apples because they were of dessert varieties, well graded and carefully packed. The grading and packing stations throughout the United States and the Dominions cater for every district and 418 for all growers. There is no parallel system in this country. Only skilled graders and packers can possibly do this work efficiently and quickly. Small growers are, of course, unable to establish packing stations on their holdings, but in the United States of America and the Dominions all the fruit goes to the packing stations. I may say in passing, that, of course, this process is stimulated very much by the fact that there is a bottleneck organization for exporting to other countries.
§ All this was set out in most illuminating fashion by the present Horticultural Commissioner of the Ministry of Agriculture, a very able scientific horticulturist, Dr. H. V. Taylor, in the Ministry's Journal twenty years ago, between the years 1921 and 1926, in a succession of most convincing and well-informed articles. No action, so far as I know, has been taken to implement or to act upon the suggestions contained in those articles. The production of fruit in Great Britain has been practically stationary for the last quarter of a century, although the demand for fruit has steadily increased. The total acreage devoted to fruit growing in this country in 1925 was 275,000 acres. In the present year, 1944, it is only slightly larger—282,000 acres. While this appears, on the face of it, to be an increase of only 7,000 acres in the course of twenty years, I am bound to admit that that would be a wrong deduction. There has been, in fact, a considerable increase in hard fruits, such as apples, and a most serious decrease in soft fruits—what are known, I believe, officially, as bush and berry fruits—by no less than fifty per cent., there now being only about 31,000 acres of these smaller fruits compared with 60,000 acres in 1925. And this unfortunate state of affairs is due, preponderantly, to the extensive prevalence of virus diseases. This, of course, has important repercussions in the canning and jam-making industries and seriously limits the extent to which jam can be made from home-grown fruits.
§ In this same period the acreage under "top fruits," such as are grown on standard or half-standard trees, has increased by about 50,000 acres. It cannot be said that this trend in planting more "top fruits" and less and less soft or berry fruits, corresponds either with the nation's requirements or the nation's 419 physical welfare. The nation needs soft fruits, and but for the war would be getting them, predominantly from overseas; but even our hard fruits fall far short of our potential production, and a large percentage never reach the consumer at all, due to faulty storage, and give a poor return for the grower through lack of proper grading, packing and marketing.
§ I do not want to weary the House in putting my case—which I believe to be a very strong one—for the sending of a small Commission overseas to examine the much better methods which prevail in most of the fruit-growing countries for rendering their fruit marketable over here. The significant fact is, however, that whereas we have been growing the bulk of our culinary apples, our dessert apples have been supplied largely from oversea countries. Twenty years ago a survey made in Kent showed that of 2,469 acres under apples, on no less than 1,98o acres Bramley Seedlings (the most famous and widely distributed of all cooking apples) predominated. On over 8o per cent. of the area those cooking apples were most largely grown, as against 13 per cent. in the case of Worcester Pearmain and only 6 per cent. in the case of Cox's Orange Pippin, the two most marketable of all our dessert apples. A fruit census conducted this year indicates a considerable change in the character of the younger plantings. In the younger plantations the dessert varieties, and especially Cox's Orange, predominate, with the result that they probably more than balance the cooking varieties grown here, for the first time in our history.
§ Just to show the magnitude of our apple importations, in 1938 over £6,000,000 was spent on imported apples. The majority were dessert varieties such as Jonathan, Gravenstein and Newtown Pippins. The proportion of cooking varieties to dessert varieties is very small indeed. Dessert apples were in fact imported to balance the home supply, which consisted mainly of cooking kinds. We talk a good deal nowadays about the export trade as being something which we must stimulate for the purpose of obtaining essential imports, and particularly imports representing necessities of life which cannot be produced in this country. The chief justification for stimulating and developing our export trade is, 420 of course, to obtain imports; but why should we want such large imports of eating apples when we can grow them just as well in this country as they can be produced abroad, and thus add to the purchasing power of our rural population? We have many agricultural Commissions, some official and some unofficial, going overseas nowadays, but so far as I know none specifically concerned with any branch of intensive husbandry, of which our fruit production is the most important. If we are to grow more fruit ourselves we must learn far more about its preparation for the market, and this we can usefully do from those who have reduced the whole process to an exact science, to our own economic disadvantage. I beg to ask the question standing in my name.
§ 5.15 p.m.
THE JOINT PARLIAMENTARY SECRETARY OF THE MINISTRY OF AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES (THE DUKE OF NORFOLK)My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Viscount for bringing this matter before your Lordships to-day. His Majesty's Government are in entire agreement with the noble Viscount regarding the importance of keeping up-to-date the methods of grading, packing and marketing the fruit crops of Great Britain. The fruit-growing industry in this country has, I fear, suffered in the past through not fully appreciating the paramount need for an efficient packing and grading system. In recent years the buying public has become more discriminating in regard to quality standards, and the lesson which has been learnt is that quality goods will always find a market and attract a higher price. The old idea of marketing fruit, or for that matter other agricultural produce, as it comes off the trees or out of the ground, is obsolete. Nothing impairs the reputation of home-grown foods (and this applies particularly to fruit) more than an ill-assorted jumble consisting of a mixture of first class, mediocre, and poor quality stuff. It only needs a small proportion of misshapen or worm-eaten fruit to ruin the appearance of the whole sample.
My Department realized the need for education in this question after the last war, and sent out representatives to tour the United States and the Dominions, where the system of packing houses, as the noble Viscount has told us, had reached 421 an advanced stage of development. Valuable and comprehensive information on the position in those countries was thereby obtained and duly publicized both in the Ministry's Journal and through other means, and our most enterprising growers at home began to realize how behindhand we were in these matters. The need for standardization was reinforced by the appearance in the home market of large quantities of well-graded and well-packed fruit from overseas, in comparison with which our home-grown produce made a poor showing.
Acts of Parliament were passed in 1928 and 1931 empowering the Minister to prescribe grade designations and to define standards of quality for agricultural products, and then we had the National Mark scheme, which was introduced for graded home produce, and which resulted in great development in grading and packing methods. I think that the noble Viscount may be interested to know—though I shall not follow hint in all the figures which he gave—that in 1920 the proportion of the English apple crop of a standard of quality comparable with imports from Canada and the United States was very low; it was estimated at not more than 100,000 bushels. The work of the National Mark scheme and propaganda, however, effected an improvement, so that in 1938 no less than 2,000,000 bushel boxes of English apples were put on the market which were comparable in quality to the imports, and superior in some cases. The standards prescribed in these schemes, the first of which was launched early in 1932, were based on the most up-to-date commercial practice, and it was soon found that our own top quality produce had nothing to fear from imports from abroad.
It must not, however, be thought that the fruit-growing industry in this country has by any means as yet fully exploited all the possibilities of proper grading and packing. The subject is a complex one, and each product has its own peculiar problems. The distributor organizations and the retail trade must, of course, play their part. In the case of fruit, it is generally found that really good grading and packing require special establishments manned by expert staffs, who can do the job better than the growers themselves and at less cost. The Government would like to see an increase in the 422 number of large packing houses after the war, of which up to the present only about fifteen have been established, and a greater degree of co-operation between growers in the handling of their fruit. This applies particularly to the small grower.
During the war, of course, the National Mark schemes have had to be suspended. I am afraid that it is an unfortunate feature of war-time control of commodities in short supply that grading does not count for so much. It loses its importance in the eyes of the public who, when produce is in short supply, are rather too ready to pay the maximum controlled prices regardless of quality. We must see to it that all the good work which has been done in the past is not allowed to lapse when hostilities cease, and the Government look forward to the resumption of good grading and packing as soon as possible after the war-time controls have been released and the fruit growing industry has been restored to peace-time conditions.
The Minister has asked me to say that he agrees in principle with the noble Viscount's suggestion but at the present time he would prefer not to bind himself to any particular form of investigation. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that in the past the Government have taken a prominent part in investigating and bringing to light for the benefit of the home industry the systems practised abroad, and have expended not inconsiderable sums in sponsoring packing and grading methods in this country. The Government will he ready in the future to play their part in encouraging the further development of good packing and grading, but I would emphasize that it is up to the industry also to play its part, and we shall look forward to a better grading system after the suggestions brought forward this afternoon.