01 FREE SPEECH
European Community (Research and Development), 3 December 1986 Alan Howarth (Stratford on Avon, Conservative): The history of agricul- ture alternates between feast and famine. We in Europe are sated in this generation, but it will not always be so. To condemn ourselves to ignorance in the future would be an extraordinary folly.
One justifiable area of agricultural research would be in import substitu- tion. We tend not to think about the need to ensure supplies until a crisis is upon us. Hon. members are now aware of a crisis. The navy bean crop in Canada and the United States has failed this year. Navy beans are what we import — no less than 80,000 tonnes of them each year — to turn into baked beans. Baked beans are an indispens- able part of the English way of life — indeed of House of Commons life. The fact is that they are going to be horribly expensive before long.
So far no variety of navy bean has been successfully developed which will grow in our climate. But the pre- eminent centre of research into beans in Europe is the National Vegetable Re- search Centre, now a part of the Insti- tute of Horticultural Research. In a fit of what I must charitably call absence of mind, public funding for research into beans in the United Kingdom has been cut.
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