Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, poor nutrition is a killer. Some 2.5 million children die from it every year. If it was a newly discovered virus from China, the world would be in a state of complete panic about it—but, sadly, we are inured to such devastation among our fellow human beings. Also, as has been said by numerous speakers, stunting, wasting and even obesity limit education and economic productivity, and drive ill health and costly treatments. Annually, the global economy loses $3.5 trillion from malnutrition. So, in spite of relatively good progress in recent decades —although not so much in recent years—the world in 2020 needs to focus on this continuing blot on our landscape.

In the short time on such a broad subject, I will focus on only three points. The first can loosely be described as home-grown nutrition. A community that lives on the foods it can produce itself is a healthy community. One that lives on imports of packaged foods is a dependent community that needs either an alternative source of income to pay for that food or continuous food aid, which of course is unsustainable. So an aid agenda that stimulates improved agriculture is vital for both nutrition and the local economy.

When 80% of your population is dependent on agriculture for their living, as is the case in many African countries, transforming their output is the key to success. Although new roads, markets, finances, land tenure and water all matter to this agenda, the key is training: training in what to grow—such as, say, the highly nutritious and relatively new orange-fleshed sweet potato or other fortified or nutritious crops—and training in how best to grow and sell them to maximise yield and, above all, distribution.

My second point is that this training is also important in nutrition itself. I led a parliamentary group to Rwanda a few years back. The latest UN stats on stunting in Rwanda came out while we were there, showing an unnecessarily high figure for a country that is relatively productive in vegetables and good food. The President there immediately called a meeting of the leaders of the three key ministries—agriculture, education and health. The permanent secretary for agriculture told us that evening that the problem was that, although mothers were satisfactorily breastfeeding their babies, after weaning the tradition was to feed them maize milk, which is nothing more than ground-up maize and water and contained almost no nutrients at all. We asked what they were going to do about it, and he said that they would ask every village to choose their own most respected mother. They would put her on to a nutrition training course, and her role would then be to go back and teach her village about the importance of a mixed diet for young children, which in Rwanda with its varied agriculture should not be too difficult to achieve. This pyramid selling, or rather pyramid training, seemed to be a good idea and it would be interesting to return and see how it is working.

That scheme brings me to my third point: the benefits of partnership, both nationally and internationally. Bringing together the departments of agriculture, education and health, which we saw in Rwanda, is also the key to the very effective World Food Programme school feeding programmes that I have seen in many countries—Ghana and Ethiopia to name but two. It is also the key to the Anganwadi village feeding centres that I came across in India in the state of Bihar, run by the Integrated Child Development Services programme, the key word there being “integrated.” Where they exist, the Anganwadis are very effective, but there are just not enough of them.

Of course, all these initiatives, of which there are many, depend on being pushed from the very top, like my example in Rwanda, where the President stepped in and pulled everyone together, or in Bihar, where it was the chief minister who was driving the Anganwadi programme. Players have to be forced to get out of their silos, preferably by their own leaders. But also, foreign aid money can exert considerable leverage in terms of driving an agenda of partnership and co-operation. If the world is determined to stamp out malnutrition, this leverage has got to be exercised, and that is the very least we should expect from Tokyo.

International Sustainability: Natural Resources and Biodiversity

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I want to talk about the importance of improved smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa has a current population of 1 billion, which is due to grow to 2 billion by 2050. That is not sustainable. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, and support his plea for an open debate on family planning, which is hard in Africa when your nearest clinic may be 40, 50 or 60 miles away and you do not even have a bicycle to get there.

Africa is also where 70% of the population depend for their livelihoods—even their lives—on agriculture, where 70% of farmers are women and where every woman farmer you meet who has learned to make money from her holding will spend it on educating her children. That is sustainable development. I have mentioned this story before in the House, but I once met an old lady in Kenya who had a four-acre smallholding and was employing five families on it. I asked her, “What did you do with the money after you learned to make a profit?” I knew what the answer was going to be, but she replied, “I educated my children”. I come to the important question: “What are your children doing now?” “Well, my son is an airline pilot and my daughter is teaching IT skills in India prior to coming home”. I thought to myself, “Yes”, and that result is from just four acres. It is the way forward for Africa.

The World Bank has said that money invested in agriculture in Africa takes three or four times the number of people out of poverty than money invested in other businesses. African agriculture needs investment and could bring huge rewards in terms of kick-starting a much bigger economy, but there are problems. The first is infrastructure in the form of better mobile connectivity for weather reports, market reports and prices, and even technical advice. You send a picture of a plant and a message will come back saying what is wrong with it along with what action you might need to take. Farmers need better roads for getting seed and fertiliser in and the harvested crop out. Better power is required to process crops locally in order to avoid the huge post-harvest losses prevalent in Africa. However, most countries have no national grid, so as has already been mentioned, village solar power for batteries is the obvious answer. That also helps kids to do their homework and people to engage in other nocturnal activities which at the moment cannot take place.

Another need is security of tenure on the land. Many farmers have only loose tenancies from a local chief whose ownership of the land is probably not even registered. It is a mess, but I am pleased to say that DfID is now doing a lot of good work in this area. Without security of tenure, it is difficult to invest. Why would you spend four years’ worth of your farming income on drilling a borehole when you could easily then lose your land? Indeed, why would you borrow money if only 40% interest rates are available? It makes no sense at all. Donors like DfID should guarantee loans to farmers at interest rates of less than 15%. Various UN pilot schemes have been run in this area which have worked well.

One of the things a farmer might want to spend money on is water, because that could quadruple the output of the farm. However, African rains come all at once, so mini reservoirs make sense. Africa is also full of aquifers which are hardly tapped at all. The West needs to help by spending money on analysing the quantity and quality of these aquifers to ensure that the water is used sustainably, unlike what is happening in India and China. Africa uses only around 2% of its annual rainfall, which is a tiny proportion. Parts of Asia use 40%-plus, while obviously in the Middle East the proportion is much higher than that. By far the most urgent need in this area is to help farmers borrow money in order to put in communal irrigation schemes. I am talking about helping them and not necessarily paying for the schemes because they deliver a good financial reward if farmers can get hold of the money.

That brings me to the greatest need for African agriculture, which is knowledge. We must invest in agricultural training colleges which have to be open to women. We must ensure that women farmers can get training on their farms, and we must encourage the private sector to assist in training. I cite as an example of the latter a visit I made a few years ago to a Diageo brewery in Addis Ababa which had started training farmers to grow the barley needed to make its beer to the spec it wanted. The brewery started with a few hundred farmers, but when I visited, it had 3,000 farmers and intended to expand that number to 15,000 to 20,000. Those farmers were making money and educating their children.

Now, of all the natural resources that need sustaining in Africa it is the soil. The Malabo Montpellier Panel has calculated that the economic loss from soil degradation in sub-Saharan Africa is worth $68 billion per annum—I repeat: per annum—affecting 180 million people. Women farmers need to know how to manage the soil, how to rotate crops and how to plant without losing moisture. Soils are a long-term business, but it is hard to think about future food when you are desperate for food today and you have no understanding about crop rotations or organic matter. There is no doubt in my mind that min-till—or, better, nil-till—is the answer. The moment you turn the soil and have brown earth, you can see the organic matter turning to dust. I have seen this; it just floats away in the lightest of breezes.

The other problem is that the soils get too hot, 30 degrees or more. One solution is to use the debris from the previous crop—the leaves and stems of maize, for instance—to cover and shade the soil. You open the debris in lines to plant the seed but leave it elsewhere in the field to cool the soil, conserve moisture and, eventually, provide organic matter when it breaks down.

In west Africa, I have come across an even better system: nitrogen-fixing trees. There are two varieties. The trees shade the soil at the same time as enriching it with nitrogen. You plant the seed just before it rains—it is vital to have that incredibly useful weather information on your phone—and then, when it does rain, these trees miraculously drop all their leaves, leaving the fields basking in open sunlight to kick-start the growth of the crop, before regrowing their leaves after a few months to give the welcome shade.

In conclusion—moving from field back to politics—first, we have to get all Governments to wake up and recognise the opportunities and problems here. All African Governments must fulfil their Maputo commitments to put 10% of their GDP into agriculture; of the 57 African states, I think only seven or eight currently do so. Sound, profitable agriculture can transform lives—I have seen it in reality. Secondly, we must put more money into training in agriculture and the basics of running a business, including soil management. Thirdly, we must incentivise a long-term approach by granting legal security of tenure. It can be done by tenancies as well as land registration, and I am pleased to say that DfID is already doing wonders here. Fourthly and lastly, we must help build the research capacity in Africa itself and the means of getting that knowledge to the farmers. There is a lot to be done, but the rewards are huge.

Water: Developing Countries

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2018 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure the availability, and sustainable management, of water in developing countries.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, first, I thank all those noble Lords who are taking part, including the Minister, in a debate on what I consider to be a very important issue.

Water is the source of life. The value of water to the developing world is more than that of all its minerals put together—the gold, diamonds, uranium and copper, et cetera. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the world’s population live with water scarcity for at least one month of the year, and 1.8 billion people suffer from water scarcity for at least six months of the year. Probably the most terrifying fact is that 500 million people live in parts of the world where the water abstraction is more than twice the annual recharge rate.

Of the 7 billion-plus people in the world, nearly 6 billion have access to a mobile phone, while only 4.5 billion have access to a working toilet. Lack of access to clean and safe water kills a child every 20 seconds. Additionally, water availability is inextricably linked to food production and a healthy environment. Nothing grows without water. As the population increases, more food is needed, requiring yet more water for agriculture. The growing urban population also needs water for consumption. A complex trade-off is emerging in many countries and regions.

We now have problems, and they can only get worse. We have a demographic time-bomb already exploding. For instance, the population of the Sahel region of Africa has grown by more than 100 million in the last 10 years and is likely to continue to grow at that rate for the next three or four decades. There is less and less rainfall in the region, and already the soil is degrading faster than we can control. Meanwhile, the situation in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where more than 1 billion people live, is not much better. In India alone they are extracting from their aquifers 100 cubic kilometres of water more than the recharge rate. Some agricultural areas of China, and even of the USA, have similar problems. According to a UN study, 50 million people will be forced to leave their homes over the next 10 years because of drought and land degradation.

By 2050, 75% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, and we will have to supply them with enough water and provide suitable sanitation to prevent the spread of water-borne diseases. Again according to the UN, even today, half the world’s hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-borne diseases. In the developing world, more than 80% of waste water is discharged untreated into rivers or the sea, and life is becoming extinct in parts of rivers in many countries. Water of poor quality cannot be used as a resource for wildlife, humans or agriculture. Some rivers are also littered with floating plastic waste that will probably eventually find its way into our oceans or the human food chain.

Meanwhile, hydro power is failing due to water shortages in places as diverse as Venezuela, Italy and California. This can only lead to more coal-fired power stations, which not only damage our climate but—a little-known fact—account for 7% of global water consumption, lost mostly through cooling towers. In other words, coal-fired plants consume enough water to supply 1.2 billion people.

There are many other doom-laded statistics about water problems between now and 2050, and if only half or fewer prove correct, it is likely that humanity, our environment and our planet will face a challenge never seen before. We have 20 years to prevent this looming water crisis, and the World Bank and the World Water Council believe that it will need an investment of some $600 billion per annum.

The World Water Council is clear:

“There is a water crisis today. But the crisis is not about having too little water to satisfy our needs. It is a crisis of managing water so badly that billions of people—and the environment—badly suffer”.


So what can we in the UK do to make a difference? First, we have some of the best hydrological research institutions in the world: the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the British Geological Survey and several universities with world-calibre research facilities. I should at this point declare an interest as chair of the CEH advisory council. Our organisations can do more than most to inform the debate around the world over the best sustainable management of the rivers, lakes and aquifers of the developing world. While their expertise is desperately needed to deal with the already glaring problems throughout India and eastern Asia, I suggest that the greatest long-term gain will come from focusing on the sustainable management of water in sub-Saharan Africa—before the real problems arise.

The people of sub-Saharan Africa use some 3% of their rainfall, 2% being used by agriculture. This is a tiny percentage. In the Middle East and far eastern countries, figures of 40% to 50% are not unusual. Most of Africa’s rainfall washes off and disappears downstream and out to sea. So above all, the UK needs to help with community-based capture and storage—and I stress the community base. Large reservoirs have their place but, quite apart from the social and environmental problems associated with such schemes, the distances in Africa are so great that moving water to where it is needed becomes a problem and a drain on energy. It is worth noting, for instance, that the state of California uses 19% of its total energy budget to transport water over long distances to meet the needs of its people.

The UK also needs to help African agriculture with the practical introduction of drip irrigation, including underground pipes, to ensure minimum wastage. We must never forget that 40% of the world’s food comes from the 20% of its agricultural land that is irrigated. Efficient irrigation is vital to feeding the continent of Africa from its own resources.

We also need to help with the sustainable use of shallow aquifers. We should support village boreholes, where the water is shared by farmers and households alike— always providing that the extraction rate is less than the recharge rate; again, we can help with the facts. It is believed that Africa has an amazing number of underground aquifers that are currently untapped. But we can also now help to recharge these aquifers by pumping surplus clean water underground during the rainy season. As a storage facility, an aquifer is better than a reservoir because it has minimal evaporation.

Above all—and this is the trickiest area—we need to improve the long-term governance of water. Management of water resources needs to be rooted in shared data describing how much water is available in space and time. Again, the UK institutes lead the world in designing hydro-meteorological monitoring networks and the tools required to make full use of the information derived. What is the recharge rate of your local aquifer? On a river such as the Nile, with nine riparian states, what is the optimum sustainable abstraction rate for wildlife and humans in each country?

It is said that the great early civilisations of the world, such as Babylon and Egypt, developed because local tribes got together to discuss the annual management of water, and then went on from there. We need to encourage such long-term planning—and local planning as well—rather than imposing our own solutions, although our researchers should definitely be informing the debate. The Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom called it a “polycentric system of governance” where, from an international perspective, down through a national perspective, to a village perspective, everyone gets involved in the decision-making process to ensure that everyone’s grandchildren will have enough water to live and flourish. It creates just the sort of long-term thinking that Africa really needs.

I will end there. This is an issue of immense importance to the future of our planet and I believe that we in the UK have an important role in finding and promoting the best sustainable solutions.

International Development: Forestry

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I certainly pay regard to the noble Lord’s great experience and commitment to this area over many years. However, I would also say that, through DfID, we fund a number of programmes, such as the international forestry knowledge programme, which does a great deal around the world in terms of forest governance and partnerships in forests, and are part of the forest investment programme with the World Bank. A key part of those initiatives takes place in areas such as Indonesia, for example, where 80% of forestry was formerly illegal but now 90% is legally audited. We want to see more of that type of work and I assure the noble Lord that that will continue to happen.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

With DfID’s new and welcome emphasis on the promotion of agriculture as the bottom rung of our wider economic agenda, does the Minister agree that forestry and agri-forestry have a vital role to play in sustaining soils and encouraging the sustainable management of water and grazing, and that therefore forestry has a really important role to play in the wider economic agenda generally within sub-Saharan Africa in particular?

[Lord Bates]

Absolutely. That is why it is such a prominent part of the sustainable development goals. As the noble Lord says, it is about livelihoods and climate change. It is also about direct livelihoods, as about a billion people around the world depend on forests for their livelihoods. That is a very important part of our economic development strategy.

UN: Sustainable Development Goals

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for giving us the opportunity to discuss these draft development goals.

The objective of these new goals is, of course, to prioritise spending across all donors and recipients, with the notable difference from the MDGs in that this time around the recipient nations were actually given a say in what the priorities should be. However, to my way of thinking—I know I am not the only one who thinks this—having 17 goals and 169 targets is not really prioritising or focusing. To my mind, there is a risk that, in trying to do everything, we will achieve little or nothing.

I also hold to the view that the long-term aim of any aid programme should be to do itself out of a job. The long-term game must be to help the recipient people to stand on their own feet and help themselves with their own efforts and not have their countries constantly dependent on outside aid for their education, health or, worse still, food and nutrition, although clearly in emergencies we must all rally round and do what we can. So, taking a long-term view—and every country will be different—we, along with other donor countries, must try to analyse what is the best springboard or platform in that developing country which will in the long run best enable its people to help themselves.

At the risk of being repetitive on a theme I have mentioned in this House before, there is no doubt in my mind that, in sub-Saharan Africa at any rate, focusing on improved and profitable agriculture, mostly smallholder agriculture, is undoubtedly the best springboard to help the people help themselves. Nations such as China have already gone through their agricultural revolution, and in so doing helped more than 400 million people out of extreme poverty. However, most of Africa has yet to achieve that breakthrough, and they themselves recognise that. In the 2003 Maputo agreement, the African Union agreed to put 10% of its national budgets into agriculture. At least it understood its importance. This was reconfirmed in the Year of Agriculture 2014 and again in 2015 in the Year of Soils, which is not unrelated to agriculture. But of course, the gap between commitment and practice has always been an African problem, and so far only seven or eight countries have fulfilled their Maputo commitment. This is a great pity because, if they could, they would transform both the health and wealth of their people.

If we are looking to focus harder on what really matters, I maintain that improved agriculture could well be the best route to fulfilling a lot of the sustainable development goals. Running through them quickly, the first goal is to end poverty everywhere. Well, if 70% to 90% of your population are farmers, what is the best way of helping them put money in their pockets? Incidentally, what is the best way of preventing their children running off to add to the urban slums? The answer, of course, is to promote entrepreneurial agriculture.

The second goal is nutrition and sustainable agriculture. That speaks for itself, although I admit that the connection between agriculture and nutrition is not always as simple as it might first appear, but it can be made to work. The third goal is health and well-being. Again, if a variety of local food products can be maintained and supplied, particularly to kids, that is one of the best ways to achieve improved health and resistance to diseases. School feeding programmes, which are now becoming more common, based on local production, are an excellent way of achieving this not only for the kids but also for the surrounding community, which benefits from the new variety of crops being grown.

The fourth goal is education. If you ask any lady farmer what she is going to do now that she has learnt to make money from her farming, I can guarantee 100%, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, said, that the answer will be, “I am going to educate my children”—and she does. The noble Lord told a story about this and I will do the same. A couple of years ago, I met a granny who had educated her children from the proceeds of farming four acres in Kenya. I asked her, “Did it work? What are they doing now?”. She replied, “Yes, my son is an airline pilot and my daughter is teaching IT in India”. That was achieved from farming four acres but with assistance given in the form of training and a water pump. That is very important.

The fifth goal is empowering women. Some 70% of farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women and, if they can become the successful breadwinners, it is more likely that they will earn the respect of their families and their communities. Improved agriculture is the key. The sixth goal is all about water. Very often the economic justification of a good clean supply of water is that it enables the farmers to double the yield of their crops. Africa has the lowest percentage of irrigated crops in the world and the smallest amount of water-related infrastructure, although often there are very good supplies of water underground if they had the money and the tradition to tap into them. This is an important goal and, again, agriculture is inherently involved.

The eighth and ninth goals are all about promoting sustained and inclusive economic growth, which to me are in grave danger of meaning all things to all men and probably therefore likely to produce low amounts of focus and activity. But if they were focused on developing food production and food processing and entrepreneurial activity right down the food chain, that effort could reach out to over 80% of the population and actually achieve some sort of inclusive economic growth. Like in China, if you can kick-start the rural economy in that way, who knows where it will lead?

The 10th goal—and I will make this my last point because my message is probably getting a bit boring—is about reducing inequality. Many farmers in Africa are the poorest of the poor in their country. But if we teach them to thrive, with new seeds and simple agricultural and basic business knowledge, we could end the intergenerational poverty that has long been the blight of Africa.

I will stop there but I hope that your Lordships have got my drift. As to how we actually promote improved and profitable agriculture in Africa, that is a whole different subject, which I will have to leave to another day. But these SDGs are a very good start, albeit to my mind not quite focused enough.

Ebola

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 4th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

It is clear that there have been problems with other diseases in the affected areas, as people have not come forward for treatment, so the noble Lord is absolutely right. It is extremely important that in the future we take forward the strengthening of their health provision—that is clearly necessary. It is essential when the new SDGs are agreed that health is there, underpinning what happens in terms of human development.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, do the Government have any plans for a post-Ebola crisis in Africa? Owing to transport and communications breakdown and to movement restrictions, farmers have not been able to sell last year’s harvest and they therefore do not have the cash to buy the inputs for the following year’s harvest. Therefore, it is at the next harvest—that is, this year—when the real nutritional crises are going to start in all the countries of west Africa. I hope that the Government are making plans to deal with that inevitable crisis.

[Baroness Northover]

The international community is well aware of the challenge that the noble Lord has mentioned. The UNDP will complete its regional Ebola recovery assessments by the end of February. Those will be comprehensive and address those kinds of questions.

Bovine Tuberculosis

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

I can trust my noble friend to ask me a question like that. I read the report a month or so back with enormous interest. I took a great number of notes but I cannot remember the answer to that, I am afraid, and I shall have to write to him.

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, is there a possibility that the Government might reconsider their methodology of culling? Instead of having people running around firing guns at night, they might consider using gas, which is heavier than air in badger setts during the day. That seems to be much safer and much more efficient.

[Baroness Northover]

All areas are being looked at. There has been research into gassing but at the moment we are finding that this method has significant practical challenges. The noble Lord can be assured that further research is being taken forward in this area, although as yet it does not involve live badgers or active setts.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington]

My Lords, I am aware that these debates are often used by Members of this House to get some deadly serious issues off their chests, and I am no exception. However, I am also aware that an endless string of deadly serious chest-clearing issues is pretty deadly.

In my intervention, which is addressed to our Department for International Development, I would like to start with a poem—in fact the first and last verses of a poem. It is called “The Seed Shop”, by Muriel Stuart:

“Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,

Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,

Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry—

Meadows and gardens running through my hand …

Here in their safe and simple house of death,

Sealed in their shells a million roses leap;

Here I can blow a garden with my breath,

And in my hand a forest lies asleep”.

I hope noble Lords captured some of the poet’s wonder from that short snippet; I believe that no farmer is immune to it.

I have another quote, this time from Dr Joe DeVries of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. He wrote:

“I can still recall vividly the days of war in Mozambique when we were distributing ‘emergency seed’ to farmers affected by the fighting there. The farmers would line up for hours, often in the rains of the new planting season, some of them clothed in tatters … But the gleam in their eyes when they walked away with the seed packs we were distributing always betrayed them ... For the moment, there was hope. They had seed. They would plant. New hope for better life would sprout along with the green shoots”.

Today things are better, but, to paraphrase Dr DeVries, he still sees that sparkle in the eyes of African farmers when they buy the dramatically improved and high-yielding seed that genuinely can now change lives. Modern biotechnology has enabled the development of crop varieties that can withstand attacks of pests, viruses and even weeds, as well as being nutritionally enhanced with nutrients vital for women and for the proper development of their children.

We in the UK have helped to develop these seeds. The reputation of our research establishments such as Rothamsted, John Innes and James Hutton are second to none. Furthermore, the partnerships of many of our institutions with similar bodies in China, Brazil and throughout Africa are worth millions, not only in contracts gained and public/private partnerships, but also in aid and influence, and the UK being a recognisable part of the gleam, just mentioned, in the eyes of smallholder farmers.

I know that the Government are working hard at this agenda and I hope that their soon to be published agritech strategy will help to raise our game even higher in the eyes of the international community, not to mention of the African farmer. However, we must not stop there. The end game of DfID must be to help developing countries become self-sufficient and eventually not need our aid. To quote Justine Greening, we must help,

“create economies that stand on their own two feet”.

Taking that goal to its logical conclusion in Africa, this economic transformation has to start with agriculture. It accounts for 32% of Africa’s GDP and nearly 65% of its employment, and few people now believe that it will be possible to promote prosperity there without a significant focus on agricultural transformation.

This agricultural transformation is not only an economic agenda of huge importance but an agenda of women’s rights. More than two-thirds of all women in Africa are employed in agriculture and they produce nearly 90% of the food. To empower agriculture is to empower women and, with the right training, it enables them to provide for the nutritional needs of their families and earn money to provide education for their children. It is truly a transformational agenda.

However, it would seem that as yet the UK does not get it. President Obama gets it; his Feed the Future programme and last year’s USA-led New Alliance show that. Ireland seems to get it; I was in Dublin last month and heard more than one Cabinet Minister speak up for the transformational ability of agriculture. From my conversations in Brussels with Commissioner Piebalgs, I would say that he, too, seems to get it. However, when did we last hear a DfID Minister or senior official talk about the transformational importance of agriculture? The ONE organisation claims that DfID’s agricultural spend is only 2.18% of its overall ODA. At one point it was as high as 18%. Even if the figure is wrong—I admit that it is hard to trace what is agricultural and what is not—it is certainly one of the lowest percentages of all donor countries.

All that is going to change, is it not? I am an eternal optimist. With the Prime Minister welcoming the IF campaign, which launches on 8 Junes this year, with the Government’s focus on nutrition at this year’s G8—it would be a travesty if we were not to talk about locally grown nutrition—and with the African Union calling for 2014 to be the year of agriculture, this is surely an ideal moment for the UK to commit itself to greatly increased funding to help CAADP and even individual countries to develop and deliver their national agriculture investment plans.

To return to my starting point, this is not only a seed agenda. I wish it were that simple, but there is no such silver bullet. It is, as I said, about women’s rights, including their ability to own land and borrow money. It is about roads, crop storage and markets and market chains. Above all it is about knowledge: knowledge not only about how to plant, fertilise and protect modern seeds and how to enrich and improve the soil, but about the benefits of co-operation and how to buy, sell and promote entrepreneurial flair throughout the food chain. An agricultural reformation is not only about growing food; it runs from plough to plate and includes investment in inputs, machinery, storage, processing, transport and retailing, to name but a few. This is an exciting agenda, but above all it is a transformational agenda, and I would hate the UK to get left behind.