Global Poverty

Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford Excerpts

Thursday 1st July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)]

It is a real privilege to have the opportunity to speak in today’s debate, and I congratulate all the new Members who have made their maiden speeches today. They put mine to shame. This is only the second time that I have spoken in the Chamber, and I was very excited at the prospect. However, I was a little disappointed to hear the tone that the shadow Secretary of State chose to take and, especially, the fact that he cast doubt on our Secretary of State’s attitude to development, because we only have to look at his leadership of Project Umubano, in which he has taken hundreds of Conservative activists and Members to Rwanda and Sierra Leone, to see exactly what commitment he has. It is a practical commitment and an effective commitment, and the shadow Secretary of State might like to take some advice on how to behave in opposition.

In Oxford we have a proud tradition of playing our part in international aid. After all, Oxfam takes its name from the city, and in the midst of this discussion about the value that the public place on aid we should give our electors more credit for their compassion and personal commitment to the issue, not to mention their understanding of the basic fact that global poverty promotes global instability. I have seen the evidence of that compassion and understanding in my constituents again and again, and it is in exactly no one’s interests to let the poorest countries get poorer.

Just last week, I was so proud to attend the sixth anniversary of Helping Hands, a local charity that works to improve child health in Uganda. The celebration was at Cumnor primary school, which has long been linked with a school in Uganda. The children whom I met were so excited to tell me about how they fundraised to buy equipment, wrote letters to their friends in Uganda and, if they are able to raise the money, will visit that school in October. Not one person there—child, teacher or governor—expressed doubt about the value of that investment.

However, speaking to those girls and boys, whose enthusiasm and resourcefulness would be a lesson to all Members, I was struck by the fact that, were I speaking to a similar class in parts of Afghanistan or sub-Saharan Africa, I might well find similar levels of ingenuity, but I would not find similar numbers of female pupils or staff. As the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) said, the statistics on gender inequalities are still shocking. Women and girls are affected disproportionately by poverty, and they are more likely to become victims of the main causes of poverty. That means that women still make up a staggering 70% of those living in extreme poverty. They perform 66% of the world’s work and produce 50% of the food, but earn only 10% of the income and own only 1% of the property. Of an estimated 93 million children who are out of school, the majority are girls, meaning that women make up two thirds of the world’s 1 billion people who can neither read nor write. An estimated half a million women die every year as a result of pregnancy complications in childbirth, with 99% of those deaths occurring in developing countries.

These statistics, shocking as they are, do not convey the humiliation and suffering that they are intended to represent, and they do not show the ripple effect that poverty, lack of education and poor access to health care have on entire communities. Fatima’s story does, though. It clearly shows the dire consequences that a mother’s death can have for her entire family and community. Fatima and her husband Ahmed already had nine children and were barely surviving on his salary as a security guard when she became pregnant again. He nearly lost his job taking care of the family during her difficult pregnancy. Then Fatima died giving birth to twin boys in a Kabul hospital. Because of Afghanistan’s shattered health care system, one in every six Afghan women will die from complications of pregnancy and childbirth.

Fatima’s hospital expenses put Ahmed into even deeper debt, so he took their 13-year-old son out of school to work. The twins had to be fed on expensive formula, and they were often ill with diarrhoea or acute respiratory infections, the most common killers of infants worldwide. The family’s 11-year-old daughter was then taken out of school to care for them. At seven months, the smaller twin died. Ahmed remarried, increasing his debt and poverty, so he married off his oldest daughter when she turned 13. She became pregnant at 15, before her body was ready, and suffered an agonising obstructed labour. Her baby was born brain-damaged and she was left with an obstetric fistula that made her incontinent. As a result, her husband abandoned her, and she had to return to her family to live in increasing poverty.

Stories like that are all too common, and they are the reason millennium development goal 5 calls for massive reductions in maternal mortality. International failure to stay on track with this MDG undermines progress in achieving all the other MDGs on education, gender equality, child health, and poverty—for everyone, not just for the women who die unnecessarily. I am pleased that the Secretary of State has recognised that improving performance on MDG 5 needs to be a DFID priority, and I am sure that the UK’s representations at the September summit will include strenuous calls for other countries which are not living up to their international commitments to do the same. I hope, too, that those discussions will include in-depth considerations of the impressive impact that abolishing user fees for maternal health has had in Sierra Leone—despite the fact that I do not want to agree with the shadow Secretary of State. Finding a workable way to deliver this policy alone may go a significant way towards meeting MDG 5 by 2015.

This is not exactly breaking news: it has long been recognised that women face greater obstacles to escaping poverty than men, and there have been many campaigns to try to improve the situation; the MDGs are evidence enough of that. However, while this campaigning has been superbly effective in catalysing Governments and multilaterals into developing strategies to address these obstacles, there has been an unintentional and unfortunate side effect. All too often, women are seen as helpless victims—the passive recipients of aid programmes that can never quite manage to stem the tide of violence and disease that preys on them. This is complete nonsense, and it is dangerous nonsense, because by consigning half the population to victim status, we dismiss 50% of a developing country’s human resources—a 50% who are already active and engaged.

This trend is particularly noticeable in the area of food production, security and climate change. Despite traditional stereotypes, women are engaged in agricultural production in increasingly large numbers. Data offered by the UN hunger taskforce suggests that of the 4 billion poor and hungry, 50%—2 billion—are smallholder farmers, and the majority of those are women. The Food and Agriculture Organisation further suggests that women account for 70 to 80% of household food production in sub-Saharan Africa, 65% in Asia, and 45% in Latin America and the Caribbean. That so-called feminisation of agriculture means that women are becoming increasingly important to agricultural production systems. The reasons for the trend are wide-ranging but include rural-to-urban migration of men, war and its demographic impacts and mortality linked to HIV/AIDS. In many instances, it actually means that the role of men in agricultural production is becoming less significant than that of women.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly in the context of food security, the production of crops and produce is frequently divided along gender lines. Men are often involved in non-food produce such as tobacco or higher-value food crops for export. Women, on the other hand, are much more likely to be involved in the production of staple food crops for sale in the local market or for household subsistence. In that respect, they are the ones who ensure that the food security needs of families and communities are met.

Climate change is only increasing the challenges that they face. Where it has acute effects on land productivity, women run a higher risk than men of losing their means of livelihood. There is already evidence of that in areas with prolonged drought or heavy flooding, where men have left the rural areas in search of employment leaving women and children on farmland with dwindling resources.

Because women continue to be regarded as home producers or farming assistants and not as economic agents in their own right, they continue to be left out of policy support for mitigating and adapting to climate change. Climate risk insurance, for instance, is unlikely to reach women farmers if farming policy continues to ignore small-scale food growers. In fact, women in forestry, fishing and agriculture receive just 7% of total aid, and in Africa women receive just 10% of the credit for small-scale farmers. When women do obtain credit, the average value is 42% of what is granted to male farmers, and they often require a much higher percentage of collateral. That is clearly unsustainable. As the realities of climate change and food insecurity are beginning to bite—I am thinking particularly of the Sahel food crisis—it is becoming increasingly clear that one hope of effectively increasing the resilience of communities at risk is to engage, resource and train women who are already doing more than their fair share to clothe and feed some of the poorest communities in the poorest countries.

I hope that I have gone some way to showing what effective agents for development women in agriculture already are. As developing effective strategies to tackle food insecurity and climate change becomes ever more urgent, I hope that investing in women in agriculture will be seriously considered as a cost-effective and sustainable way of creating more sustainable communities in the areas in question.