UN Sustainable Development Goals

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 16th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

The noble Lord is quite right that if you look at the SDGs and poverty more generally, half of the poorest people in the world are now in fragile states. If we cannot help to fix fragile and conflict-affected states, we will not meet the SDGs. If you look across the Sahel, there have been a number of coups and wars and a lot of instability, so I do not think there is a single answer to this, but one of the issues, when we look at aid and development and how we help these countries, is how making sure that they have adequate security is essential. Often in this House, or in the other place, we say that defence is the first duty of a Government, but when it comes to aid, we set up a whole series of different things that we think countries ought to achieve. We must help them with their fundamental and basic security, and that is something we are committed to doing.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

Some 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa are smallholder farmers, and most of them are women. Food from domestic resources is crucial for reaching many of these SDG goals: poverty; hunger; health; management of water; even education, because these lady farmers put nearly every penny they make from their food production into educating their children. Will the noble Lord please undertake—and I ask as one Lord Cameron to another—to boost the currently small team in his department that is involved in agriculture to enable them to help these lady farmers to feed their families and their nations and resolve many of these sustainable development goals?

[Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton (Con)]

I will certainly take away what the noble Lord said and look at it carefully. In history, it is true that a green revolution of productivity in agriculture has almost always been necessary to see more of an industrial revolution and an increase in prosperity. But the noble Lord made a good point about small farmers—as we should keep it in the family, I had better go and have a careful look at it.