Climate Change: Impact on Developing Nations

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, who made a very powerful point about externalised costs. Currently, the few in many sectors—the few giant multi-national companies—are making a financial killing, while the rest of the human and non-human world pay.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for securing this debate and introducing it so clearly. Like many, I am tempted to talk about the inadequate, non-manifesto compliant level of UK official development assistance. The fact is that we would all be more secure in a more stable world if we were spending more on ODA. The Green Party says double the Government’s current level, and that should be applied to real development assistance, not housing refugees in the UK—as much as we should be doing that as well.

After the year we have just had, the warmest in probably 100,000 years, I was tempted, like the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, to focus on the extreme urgency of climate mitigation. That is roughly half the time our species has been on this planet, and this is the warmest year. It is certainly, by a substantial margin, the hottest since records began. I was also tempted, as Debt Justice has been doing, to focus on the way the global debt crisis is preventing climate action, particularly in the 54 hardest-hit global south nations. Global south countries are currently spending 12.5 times more on debt repayment than they are on climate adaptation.

The Minister might be surprised to hear that in the short time available to me, I am going to focus instead on some money that the Government could stop spending on official development assistance, money that might instead be redirected towards supporting women and girls’ grassroots organisations as a foundation of a feminist foreign policy, for example. This area is of particular interest to the Minister: agriculture. I am relying in part on a briefing from Compassion in World Farming and on some excellent research for which I credit the House of Lords Library, which conducted it for me at speed. Compassion in World Farming, as the name suggests, is focused on the well-being and welfare of non-human animals. It points to an independent review for the FCDO that suggests that the department should

“work through its programmes, with the Governments in programmes’ countries of operation, to establish agreed levels of animal welfare”.

My direct question to the Minister is: will the Government be doing that?

However, we are focused today on the climate emergency, and with that in mind I want to look in particular at the activities of the International Finance Corporation, which is a member of the World Bank Group. Andrew Mitchell MP, in his role as Minister of State for Development, is a member of the IFC board of governors. The IFC has in recent years funded private sector projects including: a multi-storey pig farm in China; industrial pig production in Vietnam; industrial broiler chicken production in Uganda; and industrial pig and chicken production in Ecuador. Will the UK use its influence to stop that damaging funding of factory farming? As I often reflect in your Lordships’ House, it is a huge threat in terms of antimicrobial resistance and is wasting food that could be fed to people, instead feeding it to animals which convert cereals and plant proteins very inefficiently into meat and milk. Globally, 40% of crop calories are used to feed animals when they could be feeding people.

Of course, these factory-farming installations also contribute to massive deforestation and other environmental damage, creating manure as a major pollutant, even though, if we had small-scale agricultural agro-ecological regenerative approaches, it could be a fertiliser on arable crops. Many studies have shown that will not be possible to meet the Paris targets without a reduction in global livestock production. Therefore, will the Government do something—take action to seek to persuade the IFC to stop this damaging funding—and, furthermore, commit to ensuring that no direct UK aid goes to factory farming?

On agriculture more broadly, I am sure the noble Lord is aware of the Independent Commission for Aid Impact paper, UK Aid to Agriculture in a Time of Climate Change, from June 2023. The Government then, in responding to that, committed to

“ensure all new UK bilateral aid spending does no harm to nature”

by ensuring that it is all “nature positive”. That was a commitment in the international development strategy of May 2022. Can the Minister tell me whether that is true of everything that was funded in 2023?

Finally, we have to tie all this together: the welfare of our natural world, of our climate and of people. Food security is one of the crushingly important issues of the coming age. The Government themselves, at least sometimes, acknowledge that small-scale agro-ecological production is crucial both to improving nutritional standards and to ensuring that we live within the Paris Agreement. Are the Government ensuring that they stop funding both industrial agriculture of all forms, and that they are funding the agro-ecological small-scale production the world needs?