Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use

Lord Purvis of Tweed Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, women are disproportionately represented in the production of agricultural businesses, but they are massively underrepresented in their ownership. This is largely due to there being too many restrictive legal frameworks that reduce the ability of women to secure investment for ownership and for their own entrepreneurial liberties and freedoms. Will the Minister put forward the case for gender-lens investment through the City of London, British International Investment, and any UK support, because the most transformative thing that we could do for agriculture in developing countries would be to empower women for ownership?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord for making an important point. The main focus, when it comes to supporting a shift towards sustainable land use, at least from the point of view of the UK and ODA, is on supporting smallholders, who are disproportionately responsible by default for much of the deforestation that we see, for example, in the Congo Basin, Indonesia and elsewhere. Almost all the work that we are doing—whether it is the global agriculture and food security programme, or the agricultural breakthrough, which we launched at COP 26, to which 13 countries signed up—is about helping smallholders achieve climate-resilient, sustainable agriculture and ensuring that that model is the most attractive and widely adopted option for farmers everywhere. That, in turn, has a disproportionate impact on women, who tend to make up a disproportionate number of those who actually engage in smallholder farming.