Republic of Cameroon: Economic Partnership Agreement

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 29th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, although I disagree with him entirely about the impact of trade historically and in the present day. I quote Professor Patrick Greiner from Vanderbilt University:

“Since … the 1400s, problems of resource scarcity have been managed through colonial conquest and economic integration. These approaches impoverished Global South nations, robbing them of their natural wealth … The result has been development in the Global North, destabilization and impoverishment in much of the Global South and climate change for all.”


I thank both noble Lords for securing this debate and offer the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, the Green group’s support for his regret Motion, which addresses human rights abuses specifically. I would say that the political structures that have arisen and allowed this to be are long-term colonial and post-colonial relationships.

The world has agreed to the sustainable development goals, which imagine a different kind of future and interrelationship. I do not think that these two agreements meet or follow that SDG approach. The Government’s own assessment in both these reports refers very narrowly to a different 2015 rapid evidence assessment of the impact of trade between developed and developing nations. The conclusion is that it did

“not provide conclusive guidance on the overall impact … due to a few significant gaps in coverage, particularly regarding the revenue, distributional and social/environmental effects of FTAs.”

To take a quick glance at what trade has done in Ghana and Cameroon, I turn to a World Health Organization report that talks about a tsunami of electronic waste being imported into Ghana and notes:

“A child who eats just one chicken egg from Agbogbloshie, a waste site in Ghana, will absorb 220 times the European Food Safety Authority daily limit for intake of chlorinated dioxins.”


The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, referred to the environmental riches of Cameroon. The east and south were once heavily forested, with ebony, sapele and African cherry, among others. A lot of that has gone to musical instruments. Both Cameroon and Ghana have huge deforestation, relating particularly to what is known in Ghana as “galamsey”—craft informal mining, particularly for gold. Among tropical countries, Ghana has suffered among the highest levels of deforestation. There are now 1.6 million hectares of forest in Ghana, down from 8.2 million hectares in 1900.

We are talking about doing more trade on the old kind of terms. We have seen the impacts. Let us stop doing the same things and getting the same results.

[The Deputy Speaker (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

The noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, has withdrawn, so I now call the noble Lord, Lord Hannay of Chiswick.