Global Hunger

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 21st January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

Again, the noble Earl is right to concentrate on this area. It has been a diminishing problem, but it is still there on a massive scale. That is what we have to tackle. We have to welcome the fact that in many parts of the world now undernutrition has now reduced, but he is quite right: it is still a major problem, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. We are very supportive of smallholders. We are helping in 13 countries. Some 500 million farmers are smallholders, with less than two hectares of land, and they are at the margin in their ability to feed their families.

[Lord Judd]

Does not the noble Baroness agree that, as the noble Lord, Lord Bates, put it so well the last time this was before us, it is obscene that almost half the food available to us in the West and the north is thrown away, while desperate people utterly dependent on food production are seeing their land bought up by multinational companies to service that greed? Must that not be a priority at the G8, and is it not intimately related to the whole question of security, not only in food security sense but in building stable societies less prone to abuse by extremists?

[Baroness Northover]

I think we see how we are all interlinked when we look at the situation in Mali right now. The Foreign Secretary is quite right to emphasise that it is important that we are supporting those in Mali through aid programmes. The noble Lord is right to emphasise the problem of waste of food, but there is also a lot of wastage among those smallholders simply because they do not have the right storage for their crops, and so on. It has to be a very high priority to ensure that, wherever it is in the world, food, which is so important to relieve this problem, is not wasted.