International Women’s Day

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Friday 10th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in today’s debate, back in its appropriate place in the Chamber, and such a wonderful debate it has been. I particularly note the contribution of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, stressing how women’s professional contributions in care have been consistently under-recognised and undervalued because of gender.

I particularly commend the powerful speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, who rightly highlighted the witch hunt, the demonisation of trans women, which has scarred our public discourse. I also associate myself with her remarks on the impact of the official development assistance cuts. It is very tempting to focus on that, talking about the damage done to education and reproductive rights, one of the worst decisions among many terrible decisions made by this Government in terms of its impact on vulnerable lives. These are matters of life and death.

Instead, I will pick up an issue raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, in her opening remarks about women in STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Also relevant are the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox of Newport, about—if I may summarise—education for life rather than just exams and paid work, and the need to free the social capital of women and girls that is too often constrained by patriarchal pressures.

I will focus on a particular kind of science education, about ecology and agriculture. When we talk about STEM, we often look at reports of a woman in a shiny laboratory, in a pristine white lab coat or hunched over a complicated computer graph. How often do we see women in STEM as a girl with her hands plunged into the soil or a woman crouched in a rainforest monitoring its insect life? But this group of sciences is, arguably, the most crucial of all—earth system science, ecology and agroecology, nutrition and medical understanding of organisms as complete entities, looking at the whole person rather than just the disease. Can the Minister in responding confirm that the Government understand STEM to include ecology and agroecology, soil science and earth system science, and that they want to encourage girls and women into those subjects?

It is a case of not just educating but learning. We need to unleash knowledge around the world, particularly from women in indigenous and traditional communities, so that we all benefit from it. In the climate emergency and nature crisis, with so many planetary boundaries exceeded, this knowledge is crucial to the well-being of us all.

Many noble Lords may have received a short briefing for today’s debate from CAFOD. It highlights that, for example, half Bangladesh’s population rely on agriculture for their sustenance, and 65% of them are women. It is not just in that nation; nearly 55% of the female labour force in Asia and the Pacific work in agriculture.

One of CAFOD’s partners is the Bangladesh Association for Sustainable Development, which works to spread knowledge of organic fertilisers and pesticides, the use of raised soil beds and hanging sacks for vegetables. This is the kind of innovation and science that we need so much more of—it needs to be recognised and supported—as well as social innovations, such as a universal basic income, that would unleash the possibility of every human being on this planet, but particularly girls and women, so they can develop to their full potential and deliver us the solutions that we need.

If we focus and think about the crucial place of girls and women in our broken, failed food system—despite us being told that the development efforts of recent decades have been a great success, when measured by the disastrous goal of GDP—we see 3 billion people around the world who still cannot afford a healthy diet. An article in the New York Times this morning talks about the risk that the gains in life expectancy in Africa will be erased by an explosion of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and hypertension—diseases closely linked to ultra-processed, western-style diets and the expansion of multinational food companies and industrial farming systems. In these societies there is now a double burden of malnutrition, particularly among the young not getting the nutrients they need, and obesity driven by the lack of choice of anything but calorie-rich, relatively cheap foods.

There is what I sometimes describe as a “green curse” in politics, a challenge that needs to be taken up by all sides in understanding the complexity and interrelated nature of the biological, economic and social systems on which we and this planet depend.

When we think about food systems and the health and economic well-being of women and girls, we also need to think about the way in which the financial sector plays against it. When the overwhelmingly male-dominated financial markets expand under current arrangements, the rest of the world suffers; it is known as the “curse of too much finance”. This is a threat to women and girls around the planet, to their chances of having a healthy diet and a liveable world. The financial sector is a parasite and we need strong medicine to stop it sucking the lifeblood out of this planet, particularly the well-being of women and girls. The financial sector funds big agriculture—the handful of companies in seeds, agrochemicals and industrial, giant-scale agriculture—which all too often robs the women and girls of this planet of their land, fresh water supplies and current food systems, and of their chance of a sustainable, secure life.