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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O'Brien)
I want to start by congratulating the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing this debate on a very important subject, and on the powerful and passionate way in which she presented her argument. She also presented the context for any debate on food security, recognising the enormous range of challenges, of which food security is one. The question is how we achieve the critical balance between determining what will be most effective, and what will have most impact in assisting Britain to partner countries to help them graduate away from aid over time, simultaneously meeting the needs of the very poorest people in those countries.
I was delighted that both the hon. Lady and my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) had an opportunity to travel to Kenya with the all-party group on agriculture and food for development—there is no substitute for seeing things for oneself in order to bring these issues to life. To some degree, I have seen these things for myself, as I was born in Tanzania and partly raised and educated in Kenya. The scale of this issue is immense. More than 200 million people in Africa—more than one in four of the continent’s population—suffer chronic hunger. Although Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda and Ethiopia have all made significant progress in reducing hunger, many countries have made little or no progress and, frankly, some are going backwards. Levels of hunger in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have nearly trebled since 1990, and the levels in Burundi, Botswana, Swaziland, Zambia and Gambia have also increased due to conflict, rapid population growth, economic stagnation or HIV/AIDS. In the years to come, climate change and the scarcity of natural resources will add to the challenge.
The Government are determined to make faster progress in helping to reduce hunger. That is why, at the millennium development goals summit in September, we reaffirmed our determination to tackle malnutrition and to focus our efforts on “the first 1,000 days”—the period from conception until a child’s second birthday—after which intellectual and physical damage from chronic under-nutrition is irreversible.
In doing so, we agreed to work with six major donors to co-ordinate and accelerate our work in countries with high levels of malnutrition. Ghana, Malawi and Uganda are among the first countries to request assistance to reduce under-nutrition rates, which will please the hon. Lady as she referred to a very good example of this type of work in Malawi. It is also why, soon after taking office, the Government reaffirmed our commitment to the L’Aquila food security initiative, which was agreed at the G8 summit in 2009. The agreement aims to increase food production in developing countries, make food more affordable for the poorest and most vulnerable, create wealth and lift the poor out of poverty.
The hon. Lady asked how much of the £1.1 billion in L’Aquila commitments have been spent so far. Although that figure is not yet available, we will certainly write to her as soon as it is. However, I can tell her with confidence that the UK will have met its commitments, which I hope reassures her. Within the G20, we have committed to improving food security by making agricultural trade and markets function more effectively and reducing food price volatility in order to protect those most vulnerable to food price increases.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing this debate. Does the Minister agree that one of the most important things that can be done for food security is to improve food storage facilities? On the ground, I have seen food go to waste many times simply because appropriate food storage was lacking.
Mr O'Brien
I defer to my hon. Friend’s experience and expertise in such matters, as he has shown great commitment to them over the years. He is right. No supply chain can be managed without the ability to store foodstuffs and distribution points that make it accessible, particularly to the hardest to reach. He is right to emphasise that we should consider a well-designed, holistic approach to solving the big challenge.
Heidi Alexander
I would like to bring to the Minister’s attention a fantastic resource in this country, the Natural Resources Institute, which I was lucky enough to visit during the past couple of weeks. Its researchers are working on technical solutions to some of those storage problems. I urge him to look into the work the institute is doing, as it holds some good potential solutions.
Mr O'Brien
The hon. Lady is right to highlight that. There is nothing more important than an evidence base and designing in what works to ensure that the programmes and resources being supplied in partnership to other countries have the greatest impact.
The point is well made. It also ties in with the hon. Lady’s question as to whether Department for International Development personnel could include more agricultural technicians and professionals. I can confirm that we currently have more than one, which will come as some relief. A newly appointed senior economist in Tanzania used to be the head of the agriculture team in the policy division, and we are in the process of recruiting senior agricultural advisers for Rwanda and Mozambique. I am due to visit Mozambique before long and have been to Rwanda and Tanzania.
Early next year, the Government will publish a major new foresight review of the future of farming and food that will consider how the world can continue to feed itself sustainably and equitably over the next 40 years. I hope that the foresight review will have the opportunity to learn from the research and support that the hon. Lady mentioned. We expect its recommendations to influence a wide range of practitioners and policy makers.
I assure the hon. Lady that we are making a difference. In Rwanda, our work on land tenure reform is helping to underpin wealth creation and food security, particularly for women and girls, who drive it. In Malawi, our support for the Government’s agriculture programme has helped farmers produce a maize surplus in each of the last four years. In Ethiopia, our support for the productive safety nets programme has benefited nearly 8 million people previously dependent on emergency aid. In South Africa, we are funding work on zero tillage technology that conserves soil, reduces water losses and improves yields. This year, our immediate assistance in response to severe food shortages in the eastern Sahel—she will have read about them—helped avert a major humanitarian crisis.
Increasingly, African Governments are giving agriculture higher priority, with support from the comprehensive African agriculture development programme, which we strongly support. The CAADP is leading to increased budget provision in the sector. Above all—I think this is the point the hon. Lady was hoping to elicit from me—it is an Africa-owned and Africa-led initiative. It aims to increase productivity by 6% a year.
As the hon. Lady knows, however, farmers do not work for this or any Government. Agriculture is a private sector activity, whether it involves subsistence farmers, smallholders—as my hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley mentioned—or large-scale commercial farming. The bulk of the investment needed to ramp up productivity will come from the private sector: from farmers’ own pockets, from banks and micro-credit agencies and from local and national investors.
That is why the Government are seeking to increase our engagement with the private sector. A new private sector department is being created within the Department for International Development, and we are working to encourage increased levels of responsible investment in all aspects of agriculture, including production, processing, transportation and retail. That will be recognised as the results of the bilateral aid review emerge. The results on food and agriculture are much more positive than was suggested, although the hon. Lady will not be aware of that, inevitably, as we have not yet been able to aggregate and publish them. We shall do so in due course.
Food security in Africa is high among my priorities. Since taking office, I have visited Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone, and I am off to Nigeria this evening. During my visits, I have seen what a contribution agriculture makes to combating poverty and hunger. It is also hugely important for empowering women, who provide much of the agricultural labour but control just a tiny fraction of the productive assets they need to support themselves and their families. That is why we have made it such a priority.
I am pleased that the hon. Lady was able to visit Kenya as a member of the all-party parliamentary group and to see for herself something of how food security works and should work. I hope she was able to see some of the projects that DFID, under the coalition Government, supports. Much of our work aims to ensure that new agricultural technology, which she was keen to highlight, is taken up swiftly by smallholder farmers, who make a substantial contribution to food production in Africa. Our cash transfer programme for Kenyan pastoralists has reduced the poverty of 376,000 people and had a clear impact on nutrition. That relates to the point about agriculture versus nutrition, which is often a false dichotomy but must be addressed. Increasing private sector investment is clearly important, but the ultimate prize is reducing hunger and malnutrition.
Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) on securing a debate on an issue that would have justified an hour and a half of debate, had we been given more notice. The Minister has highlighted the role that science will play in many such programmes; I am pleased that the Government safeguarded the science budget in the comprehensive spending review. How will the Department for International Development, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and other Departments co-operate on science and consider how it can be delivered in Africa?
Mr O'Brien
The hon. Gentleman makes an extremely powerful point. The commitment to science can lead to an evidence base that gives us the confidence and sustainability to design the programmes that will have the greatest impact over time. That is precisely why holding on to our precious science budget in the comprehensive spending review was so important. He makes an equally important point: this is not just about a single Department’s efforts, but must involve cross-Department working. We have a number of the inevitable committees and other initiatives. Importantly, I was talking yesterday to my counterpart at DEFRA about precisely such issues of food safety and how the expertise within DEFRA can be harnessed to ensure that the design of our programmes is even more likely to secure the impact and benefits of spending our money well, transparently and in areas of greatest need.
The hon. Lady asked for us to allocate a certain percentage to the issue. It is always more complex than calling for a simple amount within a budget to be allocated; clearly, trade-offs would have to be considered. I hope she will recognise that, as we go through the bilateral and multilateral aid review and, indeed, the humanitarian and emergency response review—coupled with the regional reviews, where there is a real opportunity to look at some regional sharing—she can look forward to seeing how we will aggregate the call for a greater emphasis on food, farming and agriculture with the nutrition elements.
I noted that the noble Lord Cameron—the leader of the all-party group on agriculture and food for development, of which the hon. Lady is a member—highlighted a particularly interesting point about Shujaaz FM radio, which I think all the team must have seen. Important evidence from such trips comes back to DFID, which we can incorporate into our thinking as we move forward, particularly as the foresight group will be reporting early next year.
I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for introducing the debate and raising the subject. I look forward to working with her and other hon. Members as we find the best way to support those concerned, particularly smallholder farmers, in playing a role in tackling hunger where it is most necessary to do so. We need to ensure that we do so on the basis of evidence and knowledge.