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Financial Services and Markets Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support Amendment 97A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, and Amendments 55, 65 and 91 in the group. As others have said, we are grateful for the Government’s support. What the noble Baroness, Lady Young, just said will put a spring in everybody’s step. This is very overdue; as many people have said, this has been going on for five years. Why we have not done it is a puzzle, but it sounds as if some doors are opening.

Sometimes, people get a bit confused about what forest risk commodities are: they are beef, palm oil, soy, cocoa and rubber. On the whole, they are ingredients that run right through the ultra-processed food system, which is already, I am pleased to say, on behalf of the Government, getting a lot of action in terms of trying to slow it down.

The facts are nonsensical. For instance, beef is the largest driver of tropical deforestation. Beef production is responsible for 25% of global land use emissions, but it is estimated that 60% of agricultural land is used for beef production. That includes all the food that is grown for it: soy, palm oil and so on. However, it constitutes only 2% of global calorie consumption. That is just one example of why this is not only terrible for forests, nature and the infrastructure of life, on which we depend and which at the moment is in a very fragile condition, but nonsensical on many other levels.

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I therefore feel very encouraged that the Government will set out legislation as well as ways to enforce it, because it is extremely difficult to enforce this. There are many companies that put proudly on their products

that they contain “legal soy”. That was something, for instance, that Unilever always used to trumpet. I am not entirely sure how you do this, and I am very much in favour of what the Europeans are now looking at, which is to say that legal and illegal deforestation should count. We cannot afford to cut down any more forests. There are many things we cannot afford to keep doing, but this is one of them, and the El Niño that is brewing up in the Pacific will come bursting across the Amazon rainforest, producing heaven knows what in terms of damage to that incredibly precious environmental resource that affects the weather of the entire world. So this legislation cannot come too soon and I welcome the Government’s progress.