Remember, he's only been in the job since May, a press officer reminds journalists as she guides them through Nobel House to meet the new sustainable farming and food minister. "But he lives in Leicestershire and he goes to the pub with farmers quite a bit. I suspect that gets you up to speed with the issues pretty quickly," she observes. Formerly minister for defence procurement, Lord Bach of Lutterworth has now entered a very different battleground, and pulls no punches about the challenges he faces - chiefly, how to ensure that the UK retains a sustainable food and farming industry when it is often cheaper and more efficient to produce food somewhere else. If labour costs are 10 or 20 times cheaper in Warsaw than Slough, it's not surprising that our packaging, and in many cases our food, is increasingly made overseas, admits Bach. And there's not much that the government can do about it, he says.
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