Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I totally welcome the opportunity to speak in this important debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, for bringing it to the House.

When I was a DfID Minister I visited Zambia, and one day visited one of our projects where we had special practitioners talking to teenage girls about the challenges they faced, including lack of knowledge about their own bodies, contraception and sex—because their mothers never talked to them about such things—and violence against women. On leaving, I remarked to one of my private secretaries that I was rather surprised that such young children had been invited to the session—children aged six, seven and eight. She looked at me and said, “Minister, there was no one there under 12. Those girls are stunted.” That was my first experience of seeing the damage that nutritional deficit wreaks. Stunting affects brain development, making it difficult to learn or do well at school, which obviously has a knock-on effect on future life chances. In west and central Africa, the number of stunted children increased by 20% between 2000 and 2016.

The very first trip I made as a DfID Minister was to South Sudan, just after it had separated and things looked good—they have gone downhill ever since. I went to the refugee camps on the borders of Blue Nile and Kordofan, where I saw for the first time not just the sheer challenges of a refugee camp in the rainy season, but babies and toddlers being kept alive on Plumpy’nut. It was my introduction to a world where all the things we take for granted, such as food, clean water, shelter, health systems and successful agriculture just do not exist—and they do not exist in huge swathes of Africa and Asia.

DfID and governmental and NGO partners across the world were tackling—or trying to tackle—deprivation and poverty, in continents where disease, climate change, conflict, corruption and sheer poverty meant that none of these things was yet at a standard that could prevent child deaths. Lack of water, markets and a health system, and inaccessibility—there are so many factors to overcome. But the world can and must continue to fund this endeavour. International events such as the coming Tokyo Nutrition for Growth Summit are vital in so many ways: for funding, initiatives, pledges, and programmes to orientate all those involved in this endeavour to achieve the SDG targets.

Thank goodness, the UK is a world leader—an influencer. Quite frankly, the benefits to us in terms of status and soft power are immense, and we must remain so. The Nutrition for Growth commitment tracker shows that the UK has met all its commitments for 2013 to 2020. We have reached over 60 million children, girls and women. That is amazing, and we should be totally proud of our record. However, I worry when I hear rumblings from No. 10—aka Dominic Cummings—about collapsing DfID into the Foreign Office. It is already the case that, since the Lib Dems left the coalition, the DfID budget has become vulnerable to raids from other departments, which are now legitimised.

I worry even more when populist right-wing media means that the Government may try to take a wrecking ball to our aid commitments, because our international development programme is something we can and should be proud of. It sets a worldwide standard and ambition. We inspired a lead on FGM. We empower girls and women; and where women flourish, so do children and crops. We create routes to market. We support clean water provision. We empower local communities to know what to plant and how to irrigate.

In the most hostile climates and terrains, nutrition is possible. I have seen it. Cash transfers help the most vulnerable to survive the droughts and the floods that wipe away crops and livings. Our support for health systems is invaluable. How would local communities otherwise get the vaccinations they need, have safe births, treat those who need help and learn about breastfeeding, which many noble Lords have mentioned as the best start in life you can give?

I remember one particular visit to an agricultural market that we had set up to help smallholders to learn about agriculture, because bad sellers sold bad seeds that did not grow. This was an effort to educate people on how to do things. There were lessons on soil quality, how to keep water on the land, and which seeds were good and which would never flourish. Helping people to help themselves is the foundation on which a nation can survive and ultimately flourish.

One marketable product particularly sticks out in my memory. It was a product that meant you could get your cow to market in two and a half years instead of the normal seven, thus tripling the potential income of a family whose cow was its income. Lord knows what they put in the product, quite frankly, but imagine tripling your income. These are matters of life and death to the people living in these regions, so I very much hope that, at the Tokyo conference, we continue to commit to being one of the world’s leading contributors to development. As one of the wealthiest countries in the world, as we ourselves progress out of austerity, I trust we will continue to be generous, open-hearted and internationalist.